Let’s
talk about classical music. The real
thing. Not what might smack of boredom
to you from the occasional overdrawn wedding ceremony or moribund hospital
waiting room. Real classical pierces and
penetrates and re-invents itself with every generation. Wordless and without image it commands with a
timelessness and still has great power to challenge perceptions after hundreds
of years.
It starts with only a tongue tip taste of a chord resonating and elevating into flavor-bursting measures then further into a rich decadent movement to which your senses gorge and every nerve shocks then complies as if all sound itself a fluid chocolate: yes and more please! Yes! More!
The dark intensity of Wagner and Tchaikovsky or the playful lightness of Chopin and Schumann. Perhaps a Whitman’s sampling of Vivaldi and Mussorgsky. Or that sad sweetness that lingers long after like Debussy, Rachmaninov or Glass.
Meet Martha. She’s been enjoying this dessert while adding her very own post-punk flavor.
It starts with only a tongue tip taste of a chord resonating and elevating into flavor-bursting measures then further into a rich decadent movement to which your senses gorge and every nerve shocks then complies as if all sound itself a fluid chocolate: yes and more please! Yes! More!
The dark intensity of Wagner and Tchaikovsky or the playful lightness of Chopin and Schumann. Perhaps a Whitman’s sampling of Vivaldi and Mussorgsky. Or that sad sweetness that lingers long after like Debussy, Rachmaninov or Glass.
Meet Martha. She’s been enjoying this dessert while adding her very own post-punk flavor.
Martha:
As an adolescent, I never felt pretty in my own skin. I was too internalized and driven for something more to focus on appearances so I turned to music. When I attended music school at 17, the same rules applied. I didn’t want to be hedged into traditional norms.
Although I studied tradition. I practiced Bach, learned counterpoint and sat outside rehearsal rooms, mouth agape, as the most committed older students improvised late into the night creating sounds I’ve never heard before. I was too bound by my own self-imposed structures then to comprehend such freedom of expression. But I saw the possibility and worked hard to overcome my limitations until eventually, I found myself in Paris.
My teacher there was tough, thick-skinned, and matter-of-fact. Very much in the old school tradition and a perfect challenge to my previous, more nurturing, training. Afterwards, I moved back to the states with eyes open to experience and to become inspired. My comfortable suburban self was long lost. I travelled, dated a composer, paced the streets, and internalized everything, until I could no longer escape the creative pull of NYC.
Even as an undergrad in the Midwest I knew the “traditional” orchestral path was not for me. I craved an open ending, not a final stanza, and developed as an artists in those years along with new and upcoming names in the growing progressive-classical genre: Eight Blackbird, Claire Chase, and ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble). There was a movement of sorts along with an expanse of choices but it became scary, intimidating, and not very well-defined.
Along with creative freedom I also needed some clear definition and logical structure as another academic study interest, mathematical models in chemistry, helped me realize. Even though the study of systems that can predict chemical phenomena never held enough mystery to commit to research or warrant my full passion, the concept of logic in chaos helped frame my musical expression.
At 25 I finally landed in NYC following a whirlwind of experiences and collaborations with different artists in Europe and Canada. I spent the first few months going to concerts and gobbling up books- just another face in the crowd. I also began a graduate contemporary music track along with my first improvisational concert 8 years after I stood as an outsider envious of those same wild sounds seeping from rehearsal rooms. I got lucky. The band I became part of was committed to freedom and spontaneous creation with no planning beyond which instruments we held in our hands.
Imagine: microtonal scales of a series of flowerpots along with the thundering rain of non-percussionist mallets and sticks clicking against any surface. In hindsight, I wish we has recorded- in image or sound- the improvisational sessions which felt like a wave of collective tribal mania that could carry me, suspended in the moment, forever. It felt powerful, undeniable, and unlike anything I had ever done in my life up to that point.
I learned to trust my instincts from then on and how to use my experiences and training as a springboard towards a much more expansive sonic universe which also seduced me away from the rules of “classical” music. I still play Bach, Haydn, Mozart to keep my chops up, plus they are great for intervallic intonation. But, ultimately, I feel most free when I am helping to forge a new classical sense whether that involves trekking through the soundworld of a composer’s invention or some new, unexplored territory that has yet to be fathomed.
As an adolescent, I never felt pretty in my own skin. I was too internalized and driven for something more to focus on appearances so I turned to music. When I attended music school at 17, the same rules applied. I didn’t want to be hedged into traditional norms.
Although I studied tradition. I practiced Bach, learned counterpoint and sat outside rehearsal rooms, mouth agape, as the most committed older students improvised late into the night creating sounds I’ve never heard before. I was too bound by my own self-imposed structures then to comprehend such freedom of expression. But I saw the possibility and worked hard to overcome my limitations until eventually, I found myself in Paris.
My teacher there was tough, thick-skinned, and matter-of-fact. Very much in the old school tradition and a perfect challenge to my previous, more nurturing, training. Afterwards, I moved back to the states with eyes open to experience and to become inspired. My comfortable suburban self was long lost. I travelled, dated a composer, paced the streets, and internalized everything, until I could no longer escape the creative pull of NYC.
Even as an undergrad in the Midwest I knew the “traditional” orchestral path was not for me. I craved an open ending, not a final stanza, and developed as an artists in those years along with new and upcoming names in the growing progressive-classical genre: Eight Blackbird, Claire Chase, and ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble). There was a movement of sorts along with an expanse of choices but it became scary, intimidating, and not very well-defined.
Along with creative freedom I also needed some clear definition and logical structure as another academic study interest, mathematical models in chemistry, helped me realize. Even though the study of systems that can predict chemical phenomena never held enough mystery to commit to research or warrant my full passion, the concept of logic in chaos helped frame my musical expression.
At 25 I finally landed in NYC following a whirlwind of experiences and collaborations with different artists in Europe and Canada. I spent the first few months going to concerts and gobbling up books- just another face in the crowd. I also began a graduate contemporary music track along with my first improvisational concert 8 years after I stood as an outsider envious of those same wild sounds seeping from rehearsal rooms. I got lucky. The band I became part of was committed to freedom and spontaneous creation with no planning beyond which instruments we held in our hands.
Imagine: microtonal scales of a series of flowerpots along with the thundering rain of non-percussionist mallets and sticks clicking against any surface. In hindsight, I wish we has recorded- in image or sound- the improvisational sessions which felt like a wave of collective tribal mania that could carry me, suspended in the moment, forever. It felt powerful, undeniable, and unlike anything I had ever done in my life up to that point.
I learned to trust my instincts from then on and how to use my experiences and training as a springboard towards a much more expansive sonic universe which also seduced me away from the rules of “classical” music. I still play Bach, Haydn, Mozart to keep my chops up, plus they are great for intervallic intonation. But, ultimately, I feel most free when I am helping to forge a new classical sense whether that involves trekking through the soundworld of a composer’s invention or some new, unexplored territory that has yet to be fathomed.
