When you see a horn trio that requires a conductor, you know that the players or the audience are in for it, possibly both. Yet Ken Ueno’s Disjecta turned out to be the most compelling work of the evening.
The title comes from a collection of essays by Samuel Beckett. specifically an analysis of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, which Ueno says greatly impacted his ideas about form in music. Disjecta is Ueno’s attempt to come to terms with his own musical development and “reinvestigate diverse elements of my personal compositional vocabulary.”
While it is scored for the same forces as Brahms’ Horn Trio (horn, violin, and piano), there the resemblance ends. Disjecta is more abstract, interested in utilizing the instruments in nontraditional ways and exploring wide extremes of timbral and dynamic contrasts in “four tectonic regions.”
Disjecta opens (“Heavy and Industrial”) with a growling chromatic piano figure that builds in volume and intensity yielding to a thread of extremely high violin tone. The second section (“Stillness”) paints a post-apocalyptic landscape with the horn player making wind sounds by blowing through his mouthpiece and the violinist playing the tailpiece of her instrument. There is a spare hypnotic quality in this music, yet the desolate fragments slowly expand, and the music becomes more tonal, urgent and expressive. The horn is finally allowed to voice its full rich tone in a rising lyrical melody and cadenza that could have descended from Richard Strauss.
Horn player Gregory Flint was challenged at times by the more stratospheric passages, but otherwise he, violinist Rika Seko and pianist Kuang-Hao Huang brought great versatility and concentration to this extremely demanding score under Stephen Burns’ alert direction.
The new work in Alarm Will Sound’s set was Ken Ueno’s
“(X)igagai,” a gripping, visceral soundscape inspired by the Pirahã people of the Amazon basin, a fascinating tribe whose language apparently has no words for colors or numbers. (The title refers to spirits that only the Pirahã people are able to see.)
The charm and power of Mr. Ueno’s score are in its unpredictability. The players vocalize and make amplified, whooshing wind noises. Sudden bursts of percussion explode within calmer textures. Instruments in unconventional tuning systems (microtonal, even temperament) play alongside others in conventional tunings, creating unusually rich, unconventional harmonic textures, and sounds continually morph: a series of piano and percussion exchanges, for example, ends with a brass crescendo that sounds as if it has emerged from the keyboard.
The pentatonic consonance and intensity of Lee’s work was matched by the dissonance, experimentalism, and sheer bravado of Ken Ueno’s piece for Alarm Will Sound, (X)igágáí. Ueno’s piece explored different kinds of white noise and wind-like timbres, utilizing a full array of human- and instrument-generated white noise. Shushing, hissing, heavily breathed vocables, a vibrating alarm clock on a snare drum, the slow ripping of paper, and the sound of air breathed through wind instruments all displayed Ueno’s virtuosic control of sounds and timbres, demonstrating that static can be quite variegated. Punctuating all this white noise were a series of loud dissonant chords, shimmering in colors reminiscent of Kaija Saariaho’s music, with long, eerie string glissandi that sounded like the moment before LOST cuts to commercial.
(X)igágáí wasn’t just wind and loud chords, though, as the group played frenetic, chaotic scales leading up to those crashing percussion moments, and a more mellow polyphony of metal pipes that sounded like wind chimes. Both Ueno and Lee were able to harness the sound of air moving, whether recorded or created live, but also to incorporate reminiscences of ancient music, in Ueno’s metal pipes or in the primal plucked strings and hollow bells of Lee’s sound world. Although coming from two very different aesthetic places, both composers were able to articulate something of the San Francisco worldview, in their marriage of Western and exotic sounds, in their experimentalism with timbres and electronics, and in the directness that each used to convey their musical idea to the audience.
Ken Ueno’s portrait event, presented by the American Academy in Berlin, exemplified the typical new music concert: a glacial piano piece (Disabitato, given an exacting performance by Heather O’Donnell); a world music piece (the tranquil, slowly unfurling Kizu for Japanese koto and Kyoto Kawamura’s dipping, intimate voice); a crazed, extended technique-laden woodwind piece (the tactile I screamed at the sea until nodes swelled up, then my voice became the resonant noise of the sea for clarinet, played grippingly by Greg Oakes); a radical improvisation (a duet of sustained, expanding growls sung by Ueno himself with Robin Hayword, a specialist in microtonal tuba); a timbral large ensemble work (the eerie, spectral Talus, a concerto for violist Wendy Richman and string ensemble).
The typical new music concert, though, acquires its variety from featuring works by a number of composers. Ueno, as he explained in an on-stage interview, sees his compositional process as a kind of channel surfing between styles, in which each piece embodies its own set of distinct rules. Rather than building towards perfecting a certain style, with individual pieces acting as stepping stones, Ueno captures a certain artistic spirit in each work and moves on. The result is eclectic but also unified, a multiplicity of rhetorics which somehow always feel like Ueno’s own. The best piece of the bunch was Two Hands, a placid work for violist Kim Kashkashian and percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky, a success as much for its compositional rigor as for its luminous performance—Kashkashian, the dean of American viola, gave each individual gesture a sense of inevitability, the kind of radiant deliberateness one hears in a great reading of Mozart or Bach.
From the sublime to the -- what's a trendy, early 21st century word for funky? Anyway, after Monday night's exquisite experience with David Lang's "Little Match Girl Passion," presented by the Evolution Contemporary Music Series at An die Musik, Tuesday night's encounter with composer/vocalist Ken Ueno, presented by Mobtown Modern at Metro Gallery, proved ever so slightly different.
Winner of the Rome Prize and Berlin Prize, Ueno is an intriguing talent, capable of humor as well as depth. And Mobtown Modern's program, a salute to Ueno in his 40th year, provided an illuminating sample of his work.
There was the composer's cheeky side -- "Yellow 632," a piece from 1998 for three humans and six mechanical toys. In this case, the sound of Big Bird exclaiming "This is funny" and doing some weird electronic laugh became the basis of a bit of theater, with the "voices" overlapping in increasingly off-kilter ways and the performers ultimately "liberating" the internal mechanisms from the toy bodies. The presentation was assured, the end result mildly interesting.
Ueno's solo vocalizing -- he commands an almost frightening arsenal of unusual and difficult techniques -- left me cold. "Watt," which suggests a jazz improv on severe steroids, gave sax man Brian Sacawa and percussionist Doug Perkins a taut, often explosive workout.
Ueno's "Sabinium," with video animation by Harvey Goldman, turns soap bubbles into massive, threatening creatures and extracts from their movements a strange sonic symphony.
The finale showed the composer at his most persuasive. "Talus" was written for violist Wendy Richman, who broke her ankle in a fall in 2006 -- during a rehearsal for a David Lang opera. Ueno essentially dramatizes that accident -- the piece starts with a scream from the soloist -- but he avoids gimmicky. It's quite a deep and involving work of exceptional lyrical power with long-sustained notes and the spaces in between. Richman was the impressive player. She had the tense harmonic language communicating vividly.
For those of you who missed the concert, here's a taste of Ueno's music, an a cappella work titled Shiroi Ishi: [ stream video MOV ]
The first time I saw Ken Ueno was at the 2004 performance of Philip Glass’s Music in 12 Parts at Alice Tully Hall; he seemed excited and intense, and also strangely disarming. His music is like that, too. We’ve corresponded a few times and I’m always interested in what he’s doing. (He recently joined the music department at UC Berkeley and has already amassed a number of impressive awards and accomplishments.) These three concertos, he explains in the liner notes, are very intimately conceived not only for their soloists, but for the members of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project itself. (Ueno lived in the area while completing his doctoral work at Harvard.)
Given the complexity and depth of Ueno’s music, I’m surprised how well I apprehend the ideas he communicates. A case in point: I stopped reading Ueno’s notes after a remark that the three works on the disc concern mortality and “the multifaceted ways survivorship requires heroism.” Talus, a concerto for viola, begins with a scream; soon afterward, however, Ueno begins a detailed and magnificent exploration of all kinds of sounds and textures, so that in retrospect the scream seems less of a dramatic gesture than another sound that fits perfectly with the rest. (After listening, I was astonished to read much the same thing in Ueno’s own description of the work.)
For On a Sufficient Condition for the Existence of Most Specific Hypothesis, Ueno performs the solo overtone singer part himself. This work includes brass, percussion, and winds along with strings for the orchestra part. And once again the orchestra seems to take up and emphasize aspects of the overtone singing. Here and there I hear a gesture that reminds me a little of early Penderecki, but the treatment of timbre is much more engaging than most of what the Polish composer has even done and reaffirms that Ueno is a composer of his time but speaks with his own voice.
The final work, Kaze-no-Oka, is a memorial for Takemitsu with important solo parts for biwa and shakuhachi. Ueno writes strongly against the grain of standard expectations for the concerto by reserving the second half of the piece for the two soloists alone. And what sounds like a simple, almost banal gesture becomes incredibly moving—a daring decision that perfectly matches the poetry of the work. It is completely in keeping with Ken Ueno, who I believe is going to be an extremely important American composer.
There was a different kind of radioactivity in Ken Ueno's rather severe "Sabinium," for electronic tape with a video realization by animator Harvey Goldman. Ueno recorded the sounds of bursting bath bubbles, convolved them with battle noises and built the results into a sometimes-fragile, sometimes-brutal but always poetic piece of noise music. Goldman's animation -- primordial cell-like structures interacting in a sort of cosmic soup -- elegantly interpreted the score and referenced the underlying story of the Sabine women, and in spite of its mercilessly monochromatic and minimalist materials, "Sabinium" was fascinating throughout.
The second offering was a video set to a sound design created by Ken Ueno (animation by Harvey Goldman), a mesmerizing sort of essay on the violent properties of bubbles - the unsettling sounds Ueno creates evoke violent, fundamental processes replicated across natural, mechanical, and human experiences.
Contemporary music is a top priority at the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, where the annual resident composers have been some of the most distinguished names in the field, including this year's entry, Stephen Hartke.
But the festival has also increasingly been making room for younger composers with rising reputations, and that trend paid big dividends Thursday with the world premiere of "Two Hands" for viola and percussion by Ken Ueno, a 39-year-old Japanese-American.
A riveting exploration of the thin border between sound and silence, the piece takes inspiration from Anne Sexton's poem "Two Hands," whose eloquent, Genesis imagery is less confessional than much of her work. There are five movements, each a response to a Sexton fragment. Ueno relies on fiercely concentrated, pointillistic gestures and unusual effects to evoke a state of suspended meditation: gentle scrapes, quick slashes, erotic shivers, cold stares, fleeting melodies that shimmer like apparitions.
This is territory staked out by modernists like György Kurtág, Toru Takemitsu and Morton Feldman, but Ueno's voice is individual and robust. The exotic means -- bowed metal, amplified salt vibrating on timpani, tuned cowbells, Thai gongs, sliding pitches, harmonics and curious bowings that create notes that sound cushioned by wind -- make you lean forward with anticipation: What's coming next?
Thursday's performers were Detroit-born violist Kim Kashkashian, for whom "Two Hands" was written, and Gwendolyn Burgett Thrasher. Kashkashian was a marvel, producing a remarkable range of color and delivering every unconventional idea with elegant, vocal expression. Thrasher played with sensitivity, and a solo movement -- the only spot that articulates a steady groove -- was a highlight.
The rest of the evening found festival artists addressing traditional repertoire by Schubert, Chopin and Mendelssohn with varying degrees of success; this was a night to celebrate the new.
It's a concerto that engrossingly reinvents the discourse.
And then there was a blood-curdling scream. Ken Ueno’s Talus, featuring violist Wendy Richman, received a few laughs after its over-the-top, horror-flick beginning but quickly demanded complete silence and deliberation from the audience as the piece slowly unfolded from pitch-less textures to rich atmospheres of complex and beautiful sounds. The piece demanded extraordinary control over extended techniques of the soloist as well as the supporting string orchestra. While the vocalizations - both jarring in the beginning and, more subtly, within the textures later in the piece - may have come off as extremist, even gimmicky, one cannot deny that Talus was the most memorable piece of the evening.
The composer Ken Ueno amplifies traditional instruments to uncover new worlds of sound, and his "Contemplation on Little Big Muff" gave Christophe Roy's amplified cello a strange and unsettling intensity, probing into sustained tones and building drama from the timbral textures that were revealed. There were few concessions to loveliness, but the piece had a fascinating, elemental power that resonated long after it ended.
Ueno was absolutely fearless, growling for long stretches while the orchestra played glissandi and repeating figures.
After intermission, the amazingly creative ”On a Sufficient Condition for the Existence of Most Specific Hypothesis” by Ken Ueno was captivating. A natural blend of dissonance and glissandi, along with rough and sudden entrances of instruments, made a perfect parallel to Ueno’s singing...Most impressive was a cadenza-like throat singing passage, including a brilliant range of dynamics and wide intervals. I’ll listen for more Ueno in the future.
Ken Ueno's absorbing On a Sufficient Condition for the Existence of Most Specific Hypothesis is a concerto for himself, singing, screeching, growling, throat singing - manipulating the growl's acoustic overtones. The opening - a recording of Ueno at the age of 6, babbling - foreshadowed serious play, the complex resonances of Ueno's vocal excursions transformed into bright orchestral fanfares. The work's single-mindedness proved disarmingly generous. It was the evening's far-out highlight.
Intermission came and went and the second half started with the music Ken Ueno with yet another world premier. This one called "On a Sufficient Condition for the Existence of Most Specific Hypothesis."
DANG!
Ken is an overtone singer. and I was BLOWN away. He generated these powerful deep growls from within his throat that would occasionally be coupled with really high squeals. Behind his intense singing was some really wild string work which had the musicians sliding their hands up and down the strings creating a sensation of the music slowing and speeding. The other members of my group were not as thrilled with the vocals - they thought it seemed too painful or sounded too much like something you d hear out of a horror movie. For me? I couldn t be more awestruck. It was brilliant.
Ken Ueno also drew a loud reaction, and the greatest variety of reactions, with his first classical throat-singing work.
Composer and vocal soloist Ken Ueno offered the audience a rare treat of vocal technique and compositional innovation. On a Sufficient Condition for the Existence of Most Specific Hypothesis (2008) is Ueno's third work for BMOP, and what he calls one of his most personal works, reconciling his own identity as classical composer and experimental improvisator. The piece opened with a recording of Ueno singing as a child, over which Ueno began to hum in unison with solo viola. Out of this was born an exploration of Ueno's many vocal textures, including throat singing, overtone singing, multiphonics and extreme high register, matched to gorgeous orchestral color that grounded the unique vocal techniques in an atmospheric wash. At the risk of sounding simplistic, one could liken Ueno's many vocal sounds to a sound spectrum including swarming locusts, a sports car switching gears, fluctuating radio static, the extreme bass of monk chants, wind gusting through a small space, and the soft scream of fluorescent lights. At times, it felt as though live sound existed in his body's chamber but he was stifling it from release. The tones he produced filled Jordan Hall with unfamiliar vibrations and resonances so that his voice attained an other-worldliness that disassociated the sound from its human element, all the while contrasting it with the sweet sonorities of the orchestra. Met by the audience's enthusiasm, the performance was a rare treat indeed.
Rarely can someone so trained in the "right" way to do things take music down to its basic elements.
Ken Ueno's vocals are incredible. He goes from deep, booming growls to high pitched squeals, the kind that I would normally associate with a boiling kettle or Blixa Bargeld. Using circular breathing techniques Ueno keeps his vocals going continuously for large stretches of time (growling on the exhalation, squealing on the inhalation). As well as being physically impressive, it goes well with Whitney and Worster's rhythms and noise. Ueno is ever present but sometimes gets overwhelmed by the other two. It's not like he's just lost in the mix, he still colors the sound at these moments. On "Delillo" he is particularly remarkable, his rumbling snarls sound like something from Lovecraft calling from the abyss.
The concert opener, the world premiere of Ueno's ''Kaze-no-Oka (Hill of the Winds)" (2005), featured Japanese masters Kifu Mitsuhashi on shakuhachi (bamboo flute) and Yukio Tanaka on biwa (Japanese lute).
The piece began with the orchestra alone. Dense, slowly shifting microtonal sound-masses -- earthy rumblings against ethereal chord-clouds -- painted a vast, brooding aural landscape.
The shakuhachi and biwa kept quiet until the orchestra faded. Then, like a cinematic far-shot cutting to an intimate close-up, Mitsuhashi and Tanaka began a hushed, urgent colloquy, their nuanced brush strokes stark against silence.
In Kaze-No-Oka Ueno drew upon the Japanese aesthetic principle of "shawari" - important to Takemitsu, and now to Ueno himself. To put this many-sided concept into a nutshell, "shawari" can translate as "beautiful noise," "to touch," or "obstacle," and for the artist can mean the use of a deliberate "inconvenience," desired for its creative potential. A relevant example can be heard in the metallic sounds, above the pitches themselves, which emanate from the biwa. Ueno applied this principle to his orchestral writing by combining the instruments in close, sometimes buzzing, microtonal sonorities, and using other instrumental noises - even white noise from the mouths of the players - creating very sensual "artifacts of sound," as he calls them, with a structural rather than ornamental function. The biwa and shakuhachi duo itself was set against the Western orchestra in a dramatic manner. Unlike November Steps, in which the writing for the two instruments is temporally interspersed with the orchestral writing, in Kaze-No-Oka they appeared only after the orchestral section of the piece had fully concluded, in a cadenza which seemed to last as long as the first part of the piece. This was Ueno's response to BMOP's request that the shakuhachi and biwa part be usable as an independent composition, for another concert event. Many composers might shy away from separating these elements so completely, for fear of incongruity. But the tension at the moment of the duo's entry, the sustained intensity and relatedness of the music despite the sudden drop in density, the surprising length of the cadenza - these things resulted in a piece with its own strong sense of balance and "meaning."
The evening was redeemed by the last work, ". . . Blood Blossoms. . .," composed last year by Boston-based Ken Ueno, who was in the audience. Funky and asymmetrical, the score is thick with scary tremolos, punctuated by blasts of percussion or piano. It lopes along all crazylike. It was a nifty piece by a young composer worth following and showed the value of BF's mission: bringing to Atlanta vital contemporary music you can't find anywhere else.
Who ever said that practice makes perfect? UMass-Dartmouth professors Jorrit Dijkstra and Ken Ueno didn't even bother to rehearse for their debut as an improvised duo last Friday at the NAO Gallery in SoWa. With Andy Zimmerman's arresting "Light from Two Sides" art exhibit providing the visual backdrop, Dijkstra played an alto saxophone and a lyricon - an analog electronic wind synthesizer - and then processed, sampled, and looped himself using a myriad of electronic gadgets. Ueno manipulated the sound across four channels (through four speakers in each corner of the small room) by using a PowerBook and light-sensitive photocells that reacted to the movements of two mini flashlights. The effect was hypnotizing;
"Ueno knows his way around instrumentation.,..
Music on the Edge is the University of Pittsburgh contemporary music concert series co-directed by composers Matthew Rosenblum and Eric Moe. The series presents a great mix of newer and older contemporary classical compositions. Recent concerts have included a two-day Morton Feldman symposium, the ever-exciting Alarm Will Sound, and NEWBAND, the microtonal ensemble that performs with Harry Partch's Instrument Collection and many new creations. Recent seasons have seen a partnership with the Andy Warhol Museum and their theater. The next concert in the series comes from a newer ensemble called LotUS, short forLeague of the Unsound Sound. The performing ensemble is well-rounded, including a wealth of esteemed composers, performers, and improvisors. Performing in Pittsburgh will be Tim Feeney (percussion), Michael Harley (bassoon), Wendy Richman (viola), David Smooke (composer/toy piano), Ken Ueno (extended vocals), and Shirley Yoo (piano). Michael Formanek, who released a beautiful record on ECM last year, is also a core member. LotUS departs from a lot of other ensembles with their mix of composed and improvised pieces, both backed by a dedication to pursuing new sounds.
I had the opportunity to conduct an e-mail interview with co-curators David Smooke and Ken Ueno. Thanks to David and Ken for their well thought out answers!!
David Bernabo: To start, what is the Unsound Sound?
David Smooke: I like the pun of this phrasing. In a nonmusical definition the words sound and unsound are opposites, but when applied to music their juxtaposition presents somewhat of a paradox. Also, it accentuates the idea that our ideas live in a realm far afield of the musical mainstream.
Ken Ueno: It was David who came up with it, but how I related to it was that it seemed to name a shared concern for advocating for sounds which have traditionally been denied in classical music: those sounds which are not privileged enough to have a letter name.
DB: When you present an improvised work at a concert, do you discuss a method of attack beforehand, is it completely "free", or does it vary depending on circumstance? Are restrictions imposed?
DS: Personally, when playing with top-notch musicians, I very much prefer completely free improvisation. Even in the moment, people like Tim and Ken think in terms of ebb and flow and musical argument, so the end result will sound like a well-conceived composition. The advantage of working freely is that we can challenge ourselves and each other to explore new sonic possibilities that hopefully will surprise even ourselves.
KU: We do not discuss anything before hand, but nothing is ever completely “free” in life. I often liken our approach to that of conversation. Over the course of many years, each player discovers personal sounds on his/her instrument and spends time developing fluency, a dexterous access/control of those sounds. This stage I might liken to developing a vocabulary. What is important to us, aesthetically, is that the sounds are personal enough that there is the possibility of latent writing. That is, a quality that is opposed to the standard classical lexicon of sounds. For example, whenever, say, a middle C is performed or written, there is as much a rewriting -- a borrowing that is impersonal -- that occurs, as there is a new writing. Metaphorically, latent writing might be akin to inventing a new syllabary – especially since new sounds demand new syllabograms.
Next, as we come together to “converse,” we listen, agree, provoke or divert, or perform any of these modes at the same time. There is a particular empathic exchange that can happen, that feels transformative. The accumulation of these empathic exchanges creates trust over time. In the same way that our most important conversations are those in which we share (and develop) our most personal topics, topics that shape our identity (as Milan Kundera said, “friends remind us of who we are”), the most cherished improvised “conversations” are performed with those we trust most musically. It is also true that, in a way, when we perform again with those trusted partners, we reengage in a lifelong conversation. We at once reengage with a shared score (transcribed in our bodies from previous shared experiences) and continue to add to that shared score (thereby creating a richer text to reengage with in future performances).
Sometimes, when we are most in agreement, it is hard to tell whose sounds are whose. The most exciting moments are those in which we discover new sounds, moments in which the experience has expanded our musical capability, which means we have also discovered an expanded capability for the body.
The audience is a participant, too. There is an energy exchange that directly influences the structure of our piece. For example, when the audience is listening intensely, it is an energy we can feel. That energy can translate into an encouragement to take more risks. The restrictions are only the a priori physical constraints of our instruments, which we have yet to discover how to transcend. Sorry that was so long-winded. Ask me about coffee sometime.
DB: I'm going to break this next one into a couple of sections: In Pittsburgh, I've had several discussions dealing with increasing attendance at experimental and new music performances. In your (Smooke) "Scare Tactics" article, you mention that the last two decades of music have been devoid of the public outrage enjoyed by prior 20th century music, while the art world has seen a fair share of controversy. It does seem that contemporary art has the ability to draw a wider audience than contemporary music in the new music sense.
Do you think this relates to the economic impacts of music vs. art?
DS: Well, I was talking about popular music in addition to experimental music, so no, I don't think it's about economic impact. I think it might have to do with the fact that the most egregious popular music receives no overt government funding while experimental music can be easily ignored, whereas contemporary art has tackled controversial topics explicitly and on the public's dime.
KU: I think, yes, contemporary art can definitely draw a larger audience! In late capitalism, the tangibly commodifiable still carries more social prestige – e.g. Damien Hirst vs. any of the most successful composers.
DB: With record labels, radio stations, and music outlets owned by corporations, has the corporate control of music outlets resulted in a less informed public even though all forms of music are generally easier to access?
DS: The audience for experimental music is more fragmented and is a smaller percentage of the general public than reports from 40 years ago would indicate was the case then. However, the internet has been an incredibly powerful tool for getting the word out about non-mainstream acts. I believe that this has allowed for the proliferation of a consumer who is remarkably well informed about all sorts of independent artists and who seek is seeking to experience something exciting and new.
KU: I agree with David. I might posit that we are in a period of greater democratic access, less centralized corporate control of music than ever before! Consequently, each individual consumer of music is more variously informed than ever before. The listener today probably listens to more different kinds of music, from a broader geographic reach, than ever before.
DB: Following this thought process, has frightening music popped up in the past 20 years without the public's knowledge? Thinking of John Zorn's hardcore music among others.
DS: Yes! But whereas the general public felt the need to cavil about the horrors of Elvis and punk music and gangsta rap, they can righteously ignore John Zorn and Matthew Rosenblum and Ken Ueno and David Smooke without worrying about all the fear that our music should probably inspire.
KU: Yes. Rebecca Black’s Friday. Very frightening. In contrast, the Merzbows and Lachenmanns of the world are a womb-wall insulating us from such scariness. Just because the public has watched it on YouTube doesn’t mean it is knowledgeable of how scary it is.
DB: Many of the recent controversies surrounding musc have little to do with music, but deal more with ownership. Take the recent extensions of plunderphonics with The Avalanches and Girl Talk. Would you consider these acts as artists who have frightened the public?
DS: Certainly any art that can be construed as violating copyright frightens the owners of that copyright. Of course, this is not a new phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination! I am old enough to remember the lawsuit that De La Soul lost to the Turtles which closed the original floodgate on free sampling in music.
KU: They are part of a larger movement of what Jacques Attali calls autosurveillance, a post-industrial stage in which the profusion of technology leads to a DIY, and therefore decentralized, culture. So, the Oswalds, the Avalanches, and Girl Talks encourage their audience, though example, to make their own music as well. Oswald extended Tenney’s Collage #1 (Blue Suede). The Avalanches bought studio refinement to Oswald. Girl Talk’s genius is decoupling performance histrionics from the instrument (i.e. dancing in front of the laptop). What is sacrificed in an era of casual information exchange is the traditional trace to the author. My greatest, personal, conflict is reconciling my fervent advocacy of democracy versus my nostalgia for the trace to the author.
DB: From the well-established membership of LotUS, it seems like a built-in crowd would be a guarantee. How is LotUS trying to draw new audiences? Does touring help spread the word about the ensemble's goals?
DS: You are correct that we have been fortunate to have been able to engage with appreciative audiences at all of our previous concerts. In part we try to present limited performances in any one place in order to avoid saturating the market. Also, if I may say so myself, the musicians of LotUS are some of the best around, which tends to create its own sort of built-in buzz.
We are thrilled to be collaborating with Music on the Edge and the Andy Warhol museum for this concert. It's always a privilege to partner with like-minded organizations and to help entertain their audiences with some new music. One of the more exciting aspects of working with different presenting organizations has been getting to know the music from the people in these communities, and we are quite fortunate to be able to present a world premiere by Matthew Rosenblum, a Pittsburgh-based composer whom I've long admired, on this concert.
DB: Could you talk about the pieces LotUS has performed that incorporate movement? Can visuals enhance a musical work?
DS: Live musical performance is essentially a performance art, whether or not the players recognize this fact. Guitarists step forward into their solos, and lead singers dance while they croon. While bowing a viola or blowing into a bassoon, the musicians inherently incorporate movement. The instrumentalists in LotUS tend to be very comfortable with conveying the basic musical flow in sound and in visual communication, with each other and with an audience. Therefore, it's a short step from well-articulated musical performance gestures to pieces with prescribed movements. Some works, like Ken Ueno's "Two Hands" are very subtle in their use of theatrical elements--in the case of that piece the different performance techniques (including pouring salt) simultaneously convey visual and aural meaning. My piece on this concert, "Topographies: transit/dis(solve)" is more literal in its use of movement, asking the players to partake in a ritual transformation that will have them gradually move through the venue.
DB: From your first season, each concert has a nice mix of new compositions, older pieces, and improvisation. Do many of the compositions include an improvisational aspect? Is improvisation still a radical concept or should it be (or is it) treated as another tool in music creation?
DS: Thank you! Of course, the oldest piece we've performed is from the 1980s, which in many contexts would be considered blindingly new. I think our repertoire mix has a lot to do with the odd configuration of our ensemble, which really came together around the Gubaidulina piece "Quasi Hoquetus." There are few pieces that use both bassoon and viola, and we've been very fortunate to have had many amazing composers willing to work with us to expand this repertoire. For me, improvisation has always been a part of my basic musicianship, whether public or in private, and always has been part of my basic compositional toolbox. And I find it incredibly fun to be able to collaborate on new performances with musicians like Ken and Tim.
KU: There is no improvisation in my piece, Two Hands. Inspired by the way Gerhard Richter has photorealist paintings as well as abstract expressionist works, from work to work there are differences - there are written pieces and improvised performances. In some pieces, the written and the improvised are both present. Improvisation is still controversial within the milieu of classical music – but accepted elsewhere. The written still carries a heftier prestige value in classical music. It delivers an illusion of fixity, which gives the illusion of rigor, albeit the reality is that it also reduces the possibility of latent writing. The illusion of fixity also delivers comfort for those who are afraid of death.
DB: Who will be performing in LotUS for the Pittsburgh show at The Andy Warhol Museum? What pieces will be performed?
DS: For this concert, we will have Tim Feeney, who was a founding member of So Percussion and who is on faculty at Cornell University playing percussion; Michael Harley, a founding and current member of Alarm Will Sound and faculty at University of South Carolina on bassoon; Wendy Richman, a founding and current member of ICE on viola; Ken Ueno, a composer who has won the Rome and Berlin Prizes and who is on faculty at UC Berkeley will also perform vocalizations; Shirley Yoo, who I met when she was on faculty at Peabody and who is now at Mercyhurst College will play piano; and I will play a little piano (a toy piano, actually).
The concert will include two world premieres. The first will be "Two Harmonies", a work for microtonally tuned pianos, viola and percussion that University of Pittsburgh composer Matthew Rosenblum wrote for Wendy Richman. The second is my own "Topographies: transit/dis(solve)" for bassoon and viola, a work that involves movement and several unusual performance techniques, including bowed piano and slide piano.
We'll also play two "older" pieces: Ken Ueno's "Two Hands" [which he'll talk about himself!] and Sofia Gubaidulina's ecstatic and highly virtuosic "Quasi Hoquetus" for viola, bassoon and piano.
And there will be improvisation as well.
KU: My piece, which Wendy (viola) and Tim (percussion) will play, is Two Hands. It was originally written for Kim Kashkashian, and the percussionist, Robyn Schulkowsky. It was inspired by their suggestion to compose a piece which responds to the poetic selections contained in the anthology, Reich mir die Hand. My five-movement piece responds to Anne Sexton’s poem, Two Hands. The different movements set, or reflect upon different fragments of Sexton’s poem that I found especially moving. The movement titles quote those fragments.
I. …even the prison of their bodies, as Christ was prisoned in His body
II. …with the altars of the tides…closing the eyes
III. Unwind…you angel webs
IV. …with the silences of the fishes…
V. the salt of the mother
DB: Thank you both for the terrific answers!
(Gallery 1412) Seattle's Paul Hoskin is going to play contrabass clarinet, the biggest and lowest clarinet regularly made, and a thing you don't see much, but he's going to be outweirded by his collaborator, Bay Area composer and vocalist Ken Ueno, who admits that his singing makes people think he's throwing up "or I might have digestive problems." Since he was a child, Ueno has been singing more than one note at once—a technique called multiphonics, or throat singing. He also sings so low, it's beneath the middle of the earth. He's kind of like a life-affirming version of a death-metal singer. To Ueno, the body is a lab for resonation: He wants to see what it can sound like that it hasn't sounded like before.
Date: Winter, 2010
All the composers interviewed for this article have vivid musical imaginations and their music pushes the envelope. But with his use of extended techniques for instruments and voice, ethnic musical elements and instrumentation, and computer analysis of frequencies to shape his orchestration, Ken Ueno '94 reaches even further afield.
Born to Japanese parents and raised in California, Ueno has deep reverence for his Japanese heritage and culture, but grew up thoroughly American. During his youth, he didn't envision a career as a successful new-music composer. "My life plan was to go to West Point, become a general, and then return to California and become a senator," Ueno reveals. "I was really interested in politics and thought that would be my career. I planned for it, worked hard, and got into West Point." But everything changed during the summer after his freshman year, when Ueno suffered a serious injury that necessitated his departure from West Point to recover for a year and half.
"Before I went off to college, I had discovered Jimi Hendrix," Ueno recalls. "So during my year-and-a-half convalescence, all I did was go to physical therapy and play guitar eight, nine hours a day. I really learned to play during that time. As I was planning what I was going to do with the rest of my life, it dawned on me that maybe I should pursue music." Ueno started playing in bands and writing songs and ultimately entered Berklee in the spring of 1991.
Once there, he got heavily involved in jazz and took Herb Pomeroy's legendary Line Writing and Duke Ellington classes, which Ueno calls his "best pedagogical experience in music." Professor John Bavicchi introduced him to the string quartets of Béla Bartók. "When I first heard Bartók's fourth string quartet, it was a kind of second [musical] conversion experience after Jimi Hendrix. This was visceral, powerful music, and I was instantaneously inspired by it. But I also felt that there was something I didn't understand about it. The intellectual part is what got me interested in classical composition."
After graduating from Berklee, Ueno earned his Ph.D. in composition from Harvard University. His music has since won him the Prix de Rome, and last fall, he received the Berthold Leibinger Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin. Now Ueno is a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley. He has received commissions to write for virtuosic classical instrumentalists, including violist Kim Kashkashian, percussionist Evelyn Glennie, the Hilliard Ensemble, clarinetist Laura Carmichael, and many more. A work commissioned from Ueno yields a piece tailored uniquely to the sound, technique, and abilities of the work's dedicatee.
"I take into consideration the specific skills of the performers and analyze them using computer technology to develop structures, form, and sounds from the analysis. When I write for myself and orchestra, I do overtone singing and multiphonics, then analyze the frequencies and create an acoustic resynthesis of some of my sounds. I think in frequencies even when writing for traditional instruments."
Often the result is music that can be performed only by the person for whom it was written. "When I saw Jeff Beck, I thought there's no other guitarist who could do what he does. But we don't think a lot about that in classical music. If it's a Beethoven piano sonata, anybody with the technical skills should be able to play it. Listening to Hendrix, Coltrane, or Bob Dylan, the meaning of what I perceive seems so intrinsically linked to the persona and aura of the person that it's hard for me to divorce musical materials from that person."
Historically, classical composers have written music with the hope that it will be performed by various artists and have lasting appeal, but Ueno feels differently about composition. "In this postcapitalist society, there's so much music. Even the pop music I like to listen to sometimes seems so ubiquitous. I want to write music that somehow privileges the people who want to go see the live performance. . . . I'm not out there for ubiquity but for people who are more committed. When the audience hears the music, they realize it's something that they can't get anywhere else."
http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/Decoding-Ken-Ueno/
Ken Ueno is a man comfortable with a gear shift—a composer of music that thrills with its interior complexity in one case and probes the ear deeply with a simple overtone vocal line in the next. He is also as likely to pick up the inspiration for his work inside a candy store and a childhood memory as in the text of Calvino, Beckett, or Joyce. "I think about the influence of the internet and cable television and globalization," says Ueno, a Brooklyn-born Japanese-American. "I am a multiplicity of identities, maybe unresolved. And maybe one possible contemporary proposition is that it doesn’t have to be a resolved linearity. I think that's part of the liberation of being a musicmaker today; we can engage with all of these things."
Ueno was a bit delayed to that engagement. As a West Point cadet he was headed towards a career in civil service and politics before an injury redirected his course. An guitarist by avocation, he opened a window on a professional music career at Berklee College of Music, and topped that off with further study at Boston University, Yale, and Harvard. A year at the American Academy in Rome followed, and this fall he leaves an assistant professor position at University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, to teach at the University of California, Berkeley. A scan down his resume paints a picture of a man deeply engaged with the theory and the production of music in addition to one with an impressively weighty library of scores—one which encompasses everything from work for his own solo voice to full orchestra pieces.
That's not to overlook the scuba diving license in his wallet and the Mohawk that accents his head (though it would be hard to miss it).
As you might expect with a CV that loaded, Ueno comes to the table with a few ideas about music, but he has a tendency to speak in a way that builds up the dinner-table conversation without dominating the room. And maybe it's fitting, then, that no matter the number of players on the stage or the amps flowing through the gear, Ueno is focused on the real over the reproduction: The alchemy of performers and audiences in a room.
"Usually you think of technology and recordings as something that enhances the means of art in reproduction, but I've been interested in ways that that can be kind of subverted," explains Ueno. "If you privilege the live experience, then you privilege the fact that it’s ephemeral."
In his own life, the most important listening experiences—the ones that have stuck with him and transformed his thinking—have been those dynamic live concert experiences, and those are the kind of experience he wants to create for his own audiences. "The audience knows there's a certain part of it that is not reproducible through mechanical means; that having gone to see it, they know that they've shared in this communal thing that happened and then at that moment realize that if they were to experience a CD or DVD representation of what had happened, they know that they would have definitely lost something."
It's also a focus he applies to composition. Though his music can convey expansive plains, it often also carries an intimacy that feels expertly fitted to the performer on stage and that's no accident. "It's one of the things I have to think a lot about. Who am I writing for? What would make them feel comfortable and in what ways can I engage with what they're good at doing so that together we can create something that's meaningful for all?"
Ueno equates his role in this process with that of an expert tailor. "I get a look at the guy [and ask], 'So are you going to wear this on your wedding day or is it everyday you're going to wear this?' and I take the measurements. Then hopefully it's comfortable and the person wears it and everybody thinks 'Hey, you look good, man. Where'd you get that suit?'"
Date: May 27, 2005 Page: D15 Section: Living
CAMBRIDGE- "If it wasn't for Jimi Hendrix," says Ken Ueno, "I wouldn't be a composer." Ueno, a Cambridge resident whose piece "Kaze-no-Oka" ("Hill of the Winds") gets its world premiere tonight at Jordan Hall and whose music let it be stated at the outset sounds absolutely nothing like Hendrix's, nonetheless had his artistic Big Bang as a guitar-noodling 16-year-old, during a lonely afternoon in a California ski cabin, with a copy of "Are You Experienced?"
"It was like being hit by a bolt of lightning," Ueno, 35, recalls over coffee at Harvard Square's Cafe Algiers. "The complexity of the sound, and the rawness! I later found out that this is a very common phenomenon for guitar players when they first hear Hendrix, but at the time I thought I had some sort of special communion." Ueno (pronounced, he says, "like the Spanish word `bueno' but without the b") writes "new music," or modern classical: drones, forebodings, weird scribbles of strings, and sudden percussive jabs. His work has been called a fusion of Japanese underground electronic music with European modernism, and he's composed using pen, paper, and computer for everything from the baritone saxophone to the hand-cranked music box. His work has been performed in places from Lincoln Center to the Norfolk Music Festival, and he's written for ensembles from Philadelphia to Holland.
The composer himself cuts an engagingly paradoxical figure: He's a theoretician committed to "visceral energy," an avant-gardist with a taste for the basics. He will discourse with subdued intensity on the patterns made by cigarette butts on the paving stones of European cities, or on the concept in Japanese traditional music known as "sawari," whereby the rattle or buzz of an instrument is given the same value as the notes being played.
But he can also talk heavy metal. "I think the attempts to politicize the differences between types or classes of music are less relevant for my generation than they ever were," he says. "There's a level of commonality between Metallica and Bartok some grammatical differences, sure, but at the visceral level they're the same. I mean, when I play Xenakis [Iannis Xenakis, a legendarily "difficult" Greek modernist composer] to my friends in LA who are in heavy metal bands they get it. It's just gritty, fantastic music."
Ueno's "Kaze-no-Oka" is part of a tribute to the 20th-century Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, presented by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and featuring internationally acclaimed soloists Kifu Mitsuhashi on the bamboo flute and Yukio Tanaka on the short-necked lute. The two soloists will also be performing some of Takemitsu's more famous pieces. "When I thought of commissioning a piece for a tribute to Takemitsu," says BMOP's founder and artistic director Gil Rose, "I immediately thought of Ken. I thought he could take us into that sound-world, that meld of the ancient and the modern, of East and West"
Takemitsu, for Ueno, is the "Akira Kurosawa of Japanese classical music, the first and greatest example of an Asian composer who's been able to garner international respect, and he's such an inspiration to those composers who are not part of the dominant culture."
Ueno's own attempt, as a Japanese-American, to participate in the dominant culture ended when he was 18. Born in Bronxville, N.Y., he was guaranteed a peripatetic childhood by his father's job with Japan Airlines, and he lived in Japan and Switzerland before settling in California. Ueno's grand plan, as an adolescent, was to go into politics and become a senator, and at the age of 17 he entered the US Military Academy at West Point.
"I was a sensitive young man," he says, "and I suppose this was a dramatic way of proving that I was American." One year later, a neck injury ended his time as a cadet, and for 18 months he did nothing but play his guitar and endure physical therapy. "My life plan had been shattered," he says, "so I had to reinvent myself."
By the end of that period, Ken Ueno the musician had been born. At Berklee College of Music he was exposed to Stravinsky and Bartok; there was no going back. Now getting his doctorate in music composition at Harvard, he is an assistant professor and the director of the Electronic Music Studios at the University of Massachussetts at Dartmouth. Under the name DJ Moderne, he also hosts a show on Cambridgepublic-access television that has featured such prize-winning local composers as John Harbison and Bernard Rands.
A conversation with Ueno is a split-level affair. Above, hovering over the table as it were, is the cold and radiant world of theory, from which words like "hierarchicize," "intentionality," and "psychoacoustic" come blowing down. Below, darkening his brow and agitating his hands, is the more human restlessness of a young composer trying to get his work heard.
"I just want to offer people, for this 15 to 20 minutes of their time, which is not going to come again, an experience some sort of life-changing excitement," he says. "My favorite music has done that for me."
One of the tasks of a composer of new music, he says, is to "try to think up new mechanisms of interaction," ways in which what he calls "allergies" to unconventional sonic values can be overcome. In 1996 and 1997, Ueno was a volunteer music instructor at the Robert J. Watson House in Cambridge, a residential facility for young male offenders. During one weekly session, after tracks by Dr. Dre and Marvin Gaye, Ueno played his class the cello-and-piano movement from Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time," which was composed and premiered in a German internment camp in 1941.
"It was the only time I ever saw those kids quiet. And it couldn't have been further away from them culturally I mean, these were gangsta kids, and here I was playing them the music of this midcentury Frenchman, this colorblind ornithologist in a beret," he says. "But something about it just got their attention. You can feel when people are listening. Maybe the fact that it was written in a prison, in captivity. . . . But it just proved to me that if the music is good enough, and the context is set up well enough, you can get through."
By Keith Powers
What do a West Point cadet, an electric guitar player, a DJ with a TV show, a classical music composer and a Harvard doctoral candidate have in common?
They're all the same person. Ken Ueno, whose commission ``Apmonia'' will be given its world premiere tomorrow by the Pro Arte Cham-ber Orchestra at Sanders Theatre in Cambridge, has been all of these things. And it all makes perfect sense to him.
``I evangelize for new music in as many ways as I can. I don't think composing is enough,'' the 34-year-old Ueno said over coffee in Harvard Square. ``I didn't have a classical background. I just picked up a guitar and started playing. I was 16, and I had a totally different life then. I went off to West Point - it was my way of searching for an identity. I was going to become a general, serve my country, then go home to California and become a senator.''
But life took a different turn. Ueno injured his neck and had to leave West Point; he returned home and spent a year recovering. ``All I did for a year was play the guitar and rehab,'' he said. ``Gradually, it dawned on me that music might be what I wanted to do. Then I heard the fourth Bartok string quartet, and it was immediately apparent to me.
``I had the same response to Bartok as I did to Hendrix or Black Sabbath or Coltrane. It might have been more complicated structurally and harmonically, but for me it achieved the same result. It was visceral. It goes beyond technical means or academic explanations.''
So Ueno studied first at Berklee College of Music, and later achieved degrees from Boston University and Yale before coming to Harvard. He will complete his dissertation, a large four-movement orchestral work, sometime next year.
Ueno's music often blends traditional instruments with amplified ones and ``found'' instruments such as soda cans. ``It's not that I listen to this genre or that genre and put them together,'' he said. ``And I don't always amplify things. But amplification allows me a way to make sounds that have been denied by classical tradition. I sometimes work acoustically with the benefits of the research I've done in electronics.
``Things thought of as noise in classical music are more in the foreground in other traditions. Like Hendrix with feedback. The guitar is amplified enough so that you hear his fingers sliding on the strings, and that's part of the musical expression.
``Tradition is difficult for me,'' Ueno said. ``I have to acknowledge it but find my own way. How does a Japanese-American make it in western classical music? I actually think real tradition is progress. When Beethoven used a trumpet for the first time, he altered the symphony form. Or when Stravinsky used non-linear, cinematic effects in `Rite of Spring.' Hendrix and Coltrane also redefined their media. In that respect, I'm traditional. You preserve the tradition by expanding it.''
His Pro Arte commission, ``Apmonia,'' does just that. In his program notes, Ueno likens his struggle as a Japanese-American seeking an artistic identity to German filmmaker Wim Wenders, who struggled to find his identity in an art form largely foreign to his native culture.
Wenders found similarities in Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, and framed his own film ``Tokyo-Ga'' with the actual beginning and ending credits from Ozu's ``Tokyo Story,'' placing his film in a sort of Ozu parenthesis. Similarly, Ueno begins and ends ``Apmonia'' with musical quotes from Harvard professor and composer Bernard Rands, to whom the work is dedicated.
Ueno cites Rands' insights into the works of Samuel Beckett, who coined the term ``Apmonia,'' meaning the irrational heart, in his first novel, ``Murphy.''
``The whole piece is kind of like one big breath: one inhalation, one exhalation. There's something meditative about it, something poetic. We are being taken hostage by events beyond our control, threatened every day. Maybe looking at the reality is a way of achieving understanding,'' Ueno said.
;``Classical music needs to be more inclusive, with other types of audience. Amplification and electronics are new ways of participating. I couldn't evercompete with Beethoven's Ninth. It was that time period, it had to happen, and he did it. Like Shakespeare, or Mozart's operas. But electronics is still developing, and I might be able to participate from the beginning with something new.''
( The Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra premieres Ken Ueno's ``Apmonia'' tomorrow at Sanders Theatre, Cambridge. For tickets and information, call 617-661-7067. )
By Robert Kirzinger
Boston-based composer Ken Ueno (b. 1970) was born in New York to Japanese parents. His father was an executive for a Japanese airline, and the family moved several times during Ueno’s childhood, to Japan, to Switzerland, and finally to California, where he attended high school. His first formal music training came in the form of clarinet and recorder lessons and at sixteen he took up the guitar, but he had little notion at that time of entering into a career in music. Instead, intent on coming to grips with his role as an American, Ueno participated in debate and speech activities in high school and ran track, and after graduation entered the officer training program at West Point, with an ultimate goal of entering into politics.
At the end of his first year at that school, Ueno suffered an accident during training that kept him in physical therapy for more than a year. While recuperating he took up the guitar again, playing every day for hours on end, and also began to rethink his chosen career path. He began playing guitar in bands and writing songs, eventually deciding to restart his higher education by attending Berklee College of Music. It was his first exposure to Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet that steered him toward new music composition, and following Berklee he attended Boston University, Yale, and Harvard. His teachers have included John Bavicchi, Bernard Rands, and Mario Davidovsky, among several others. An important aspect of his activity is that of “evangelist” for new music, and in that capacity he has taught at a halfway house for court-involved teens as well as produced and hosted a cable access television program, “The Modern Music Show w/DJ Moderne,” where his guests have included Davidovsky, John Harbison, Beth Wiemann, and many others. Ueno himself recently joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, where he is an assistant professor and director of the school’s electronic music studios.
Ueno’s work has been performed by numerous ensembles around the world, including BMOP, the Hilliard Ensemble, Eighth Blackbird, the Prism Quartet, and the American Composers Orchestra, to name just a few. He has received numerous grants, awards, and recognitions, including recent commissions from the Fromm Foundation for the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra and the Radius Ensemble, and Harvard’s John Green Composition Prize, which included a summer residency at Fondazione William Walton in Italy last year.
Ken Ueno is an insatiable intellectual polymath whose deep interest in modern critical systems (including the work of Derrida and the post-structuralists), literature (particularly Samuel Beckett), and film has influenced his work on many levels from the abstract to the particular. His ongoing development of a compositional language has led him to a method of “phonetic” or “alphabetic” details juxtaposed with more complex musical “ideograms”—a metaphorical construct taken from observation of Western, alphabetic languages versus the pictorial Japanese, which coexist in Ueno’s own experience. This is one basis, as well, for the establishment of musical gestures operating on different, often seemingly independent, levels. In recent works, Ueno has concerned himself with the organic extension of apparently chaotic, or locally unpredictable, gestures into large-scale forms of satisfying, even seemingly inevitable cohesion. One way of achieving this kind of unity, for example, involves the employment of discrete pitch arrays that, through various transformations, remain the (mostly) audible foundation of a particular work (almost, but not quite, analogous to a “key”). This array may be based on an analysis of a key instrumental component of the ensemble. Microtonal inflection is often present as explication of a specific overtone.
But at first experience, the listener to Ueno’s works isn’t struck by their compositional rigor so much as by their tactile, physical nature, a quality that recalls the composer’s early experience with music as a disciple of Jimi Hendrix and a purveyor of virtuosic heavy metal. The impact of Ueno’s work is still positively palpable and sensuous, driven even when apparently static, with, at its core, that essentially human quality of played music, music that grows directly from the bodies and hands and hearts and minds of expressive musicians—music of real soul.
Ken Ueno’s new work, a BMOP commission, receives its world premiere this evening.
http://www.berklee.edu/careers/interviews/kenueno.html
What are the major achievements of your career?
As a composer, I have been actively involved in a wide range of activities in order to evangelize for modern music. As DJ Moderne, I host and produce a weekly live half-hour public access television show devoted to introducing new music and new music composers and performers to the public at large.
I have had the good fortune to have had performances by some great ensembles including: The Hilliard Ensemble, Albany Symphony's Dogs of Desire Ensemble, the American Composers Orchestra, the New York New Music Ensemble, the AUROS Group for New Music, ‘yesaroun, and Odd Appetite. Among those who have conducted my music are David Allan Miller, Paul Dunkel, Lawrence Leighton Smith and Harvey Sollberger.
Upcoming performances of my music include: Eighth Blackbird at Alice Tully Hall in New York's Lincoln Center (March 5th), International Electroacoustic Music in Cuba (March), the MATA festival (April 8th), Bang on a Can All-Stars at Harvard (May 25th), the Hilliard Ensemble at Engers, Germany (August 3rd), and a new work for the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth College will be premiered in October. Recent residencies include travels to Alaska (November 2001) and Italy (Modena conservatory and Venice in January 2002).
In addition to composition, I have focused some of my academic energies toward research of Latin-American Electroacoustic music. I have contributed articles to a forthcoming book, Border Crossings: Latin American Music in New Contexts, to be published by University of California Press, and been invited to present a paper on Latin American composers at the Fifth International Congress of the Americas in October 2001.
What made you decide to pursue composing as a career?
It just gradually developed over time. There was no one definitive moment when I decided to become a composer.
What are the skills that you are called upon to use daily in your work?
There are compositional skills and administrative skills. The compositional skills are those that include the technical demands of creating the music - like having command over harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration, and using electronic music and notation software. The administrative skills are those involved in concert production - like preparing a budget for a concert series, calling performers and organizing rehearsals.
What is a normal day like in your line of work (assuming there is such a thing as a normal day)?
I usually spend a large portion of the day taking care of administrative details and I compose late into the night.
What is your favorite thing about your job and/or career?
Hearing a live performance of a composition. It takes a lot of time and an exaggerated amount of effort to get to it. It takes months of preparation on the part of the performers to play some of my music. It always amazes me, and I feel blessed to have in my life some people who devote so much time to learning my music. So when it all comes together, it's a collaboration between the composer, performer and the audience. It's a communal ritual, a celebration of human effort.
What is the most challenging aspect of your job and/or career?
Trying to remain faithful to the music and continuing to have the courage to be as radical as I feel I want to be. Trying to push myself so that I keep learning from and about music.
What are some of the rich rewards that have come with working in this field?
There isn't as much potential for financial rewards as in pop music. But, there is the potential satisfaction that one had lived an uncompromising life of art in having created the music that one wanted to make unencumbered artistically by the demands of consumerist tastes.
What do you think are the requisites for someone entering this field?
Traditionally, the requisites were/are: background in classical music; strong academic pedigree; a list of awards, performances and commissions. But I think more recently, and in the future, one needs only the will to be a composer. I came into music without a classical background. I started playing guitar at sixteen (16), and went off a year later to West Point to become an officer and serve my country. It took some time for music to become the most important thing in my life for me to want to pursue it seriously. But, I think my profile is increasingly sympathetic with the experience of many other American composers - especially the background in rock and jazz before going "classical."
How did your education at Berklee train you for what you are doing today?
It was at Berklee that John Bavicchi introduced me to Bartok's Fourth String Quartet and I heard Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. That was the impetus for everything that followed. Additionally, I think that the classes I took with Herb Pomeroy (Line Writing and the Duke Ellington classes) are still the best writing courses I have ever taken. Although I don't write much jazz anymore, his lessons still probably influence almost every compositional decision I make now - from a detailed consideration for the spacing of chords to a hyper-sensitivity for every interval and orchestrational color variable.
What are the current trends in the field of composing that will most likely shape your future and the future of this industry?
I think the two most important developments will be: 1) the further integration of live, real-time computer processing into compositional performance practice; and 2) the proliferation of non-traditional instrumental groups, including an increased participation of the composer as performer. I would like to see my main instrument, the electric guitar, come into its own as a concert instrument with new pieces that incorporate it in both chamber music and orchestral contexts. Additionally, I hope that in the future New Music will come out of the shadows of being a sub-category of Classical music and become an independent movement.
http://www.thephoenix.com/Article.aspx?id=14804&page=2
John Adams (b.
Ken Ueno: Latin American culture has made a resurgence of late. Not only are Latin American artists more visible and active in the United States, but also Latin American culture seems to be influencing our most important non-Latin American artists such as you. I would like to start our discussion by talking about your latest orchestral piece, the Nativity Oratorio El Niño that exemplifies this synergy between multiple cultures. You did your own translations. Do you speak Spanish? How well do you speak it?
John Adams: I'm not entirely fluent, but I have a comfortable reading knowledge and my spoken Spanish is improving by the day. It is easier to learn Spanish here in
Ueno: Were there intrinsic qualities of language that made working with Spanish appealing? How did you adapt the rhythms and qualities of the language to fit your musical style, or vice-versa?
Ueno: How did you go about transcribing the natural flow of the rhythms inherent in the Spanish language when you are not a native speaker?
Ueno: In composing a work in Spanish for an international audience, were you concerned that Americans in particular might associate the title El Niño with a meteorological phenomenon rather than the Nativity?
Ueno: The more violent aspects are certainly evident in the largest single section of the piece, which recounts the Slaughter of the Innocents. The text use you here is the Castellano in which she memorializes the slaughter of students during the 1968 revolt in
Ueno: How did you decide on the texts for El Niño
Ueno: When Peter Sellars suggested some of these Spanish texts to you, did he already have ideas about the piece?
Ueno: Composers from around the world are increasingly turning to ethnographic resources and popular music, not necessarily in their own culture. What are your thoughts on this so-called “globalization of culture”? To what degree do you feel you are dealing with aspects of culture, especially now having recently completed a major work which draws upon elements from Latin American culture?
Ueno: Do you think that Golijov’s use of Latin American rhythms and vernacular forms is culturally equivalent to your use of rock and roll references?
Ueno: You have conducted a lot of Ives, often programming pieces that showcase his interest in the vernacular. Another composer you have often conducted is Zappa, who in some ways is a more contemporary Ives.
Ueno: The composers who have a high profile in the
Ueno: Your method (or process) of composition depends upon computer technology in that you use sequencer software like Performer while composing. How dependent are you on that technology?
Ueno: Is it the empirical laboratory aspect that is helpful to you?
Ueno: Are there times when you are surprised when you hear the result with the live orchestra?
It would be interesting to study how working in a software environment has influenced the way one thinks creatively. Broadway composers would cut and paste, as did film composers (and I suppose Bruckner cut, if he didn’t paste), but that kind of procedure, which is so basic to this software world, was less commonplace when cut and paste meant an enormous physical effort. And here I can create structures by moving material around and I can also create kinds of harmonic relationships and contrapuntal relationships that one simply wouldn’t think of by walking in the woods or improvising at a piano.
Ueno: The pieces you were writing around 1992 and 1993 like the Violin Concerto and the Chamber Symphony represented a departure from your earlier work harmonically. This new progressive harmonic language seemed to point towards a completely new direction for your music, but in your compositions immediately following those pieces, like Gnarly Buttons, you reverted to the harmonic style of your earlier music. At that time, when I asked you about this return to a more familiar style, you said that you did not believe that a contemporary composer needed to be restrained by a linear, singular strand of artistic development, that there were many strands of styles and procedures from which one should be able to choose, as necessary, from composition to composition. More time has passed since Gnarly Buttons and you still have not investigated further the potential of the harmonic language in the Violin Concerto and the Chamber Symphony. Will you ever go back to that harmonic style?
Ueno: Did that level of dissonance did not feel natural to you?
Ueno: Your recent music, like Naive and Sentimental Music, has a dynamic orchestrational drama that is Mahlerian. In order to create a successful expanded time structure you depend more on extravagant contrasts in instrumental forces rather than on harmony. For example, juxtaposing the whole orchestra with passages for solo guitar.
Ueno: What do you mean by post-stylist?
Ueno: But there are composers working today with strong stylistic personalities. Your music has originality and a style that are definable.
Ueno: I wonder whether an underlying trend is that people are becoming less demagogic about their stylistic agenda or identity.
Ueno: Your music has always made references to vernacular styles, yet you have no qualms about being labeled a “classical” composer. Does that mean that you are addressing a more specialized audience for your music than the more general demographic that only listen to the vernacular styles?
Ueno: That is surprising to hear you say that, since you’re probably the highest profile American orchestral composer today.
Ueno: Does it bother you that classical music is not as much part of our life as pop culture?
Ueno: Why do successful and cultured people find complexity in music difficult to accept, whereas they are more likely to accept complexity when they experience other art forms?
Ueno: A lot of rap and heavy metal is more dissonant than most contemporary American classical music. Why is dissonance more problematic for classical music audiences than pop audiences?