Galleries of Sound Artists hope weekend concerts at Tacoma Art Museum, sound and video festival break classical music boundaries by Jen Graves, The News Tribune, Tacoma, April 18, 2000
To look at the repertoire of classical music ensembles today, you'd think it was impossible to teach an old instrument new tricks.
Let alone introduce new instruments.
After all, it's classical music, right? Which means it has to have been written a long, long time ago.
True, classical music does refer to a time period - the Classical era, from about 1775 to 1820. But it's generally identified by what it is not - i.e., it's not rock, jazz or country.
Contemporary classical music has been pursued and accepted by mainstream orchestras in waves. At times, it's virtually disappeared from performances. An explosion of experimentation in the '60s and '70s has since largely been relegated to a cultish underground.
But diverse representatives of contemporary sound will surface this weekend, at Tacoma Art Museum concerts by bass clarinetist Michael Davenport and members of his group, Tacoma New Music, and at the Shy Anne Sound and Video Festival 2000, curated by sound artist Dan Senn.
Tacoma native Davenport, 56, was trained - and has performed professionally since he was 15 - in traditional classical and jazz. But what really interests him is new work. He received a Tacoma Artists Initiative Program grant from the city of Tacoma this year for the commission and performance of works by Czech composer Vaclav Kucera. Davenport likes performing other people's works, but he also writes his own.
Senn, 49, grew up in Wisconsin but moved to Tacoma in 1992 and built a studio - a silver shed, to be precise - in the back yard of his home in 1993. He is known for his cutting-edge compositions and performances including self-made, toy-like instruments as well as hyper-electronic and mechanistic concoctions.
Visiting both of the men in one day gives a good sense of how broad contemporary music can be, and how it's represented in Tacoma.
Davenport lives in South Tacoma and works in the front room of his 1922 home, where two chairs with music stands sit in front of a cello and a grand piano. A large, flowered, antique amplifier horn from a Victrola phonograph is mounted on the ceiling.
It's hard to believe this is the guy who was kicked out of the Tacoma Symphony in 1960 for "being rebellious," as he recalls.
Davenport graduated from Stadium High School in 1961 and attended the University of Washington. He got a bitter taste of the obscurity of alternative instruments when he wanted to major in the saxophone but couldn't for the lack of a saxophone major. (The bass clarinet, which he now plays for its six-octave range, had its first solo recital in 1955 in Prague, he said.)
He played in the Seattle Symphony from 1964-68 and for a Seattle group called New Dimensions in Music.
Then, Davenport traveled to study and perform, but for years he vacillated between living in Seattle and living in Tacoma. About a year ago, he brought to Tacoma his 4-year-old nonprofit group, centered around new music and new or underused instruments, and renamed it Tacoma New Music. The ensemble is backed financially, in part, by Davenport's Alea Publishing and Recording, which supports and cultivates new music.
When based in Seattle, the group performed at the Seattle Art Museum, Asian Art Museum and the Kirkland Performance Center. This weekend's concerts will be its first formal appearances in Tacoma.
Each performance includes some improvisation, Davenport said. The music is akin to classical and jazz, but more than likely you haven't heard the pieces before. Two of the Kucera pieces are world premieres.
None of that means the music will be difficult to listen to. It's a stereotype - like the one that nips the heels of contemporary art - that all contemporary music is inaccessible, he said.
"My experience is that if audience members feel performers are deeply committed to their performance, they like it," he said.
Still, little attention is paid to new music, he said. Compare today's standards to those during Mozart's lifetime, for example.
"Everything we're playing (this weekend) is a U.S. or West Coast premiere," he said. "But only one thing was written this year. If you and I were sitting around in Salzburg in 1784, we would be appalled at that."
Borders between accepted and unaccepted styles of music and instruments are dissolving, though. Davenport believes a more interdisciplinary way of thinking is setting in.
"This very compartmentalized way of life is starting to break down," he said. "The great musicians of the last 40 years have been guitarists and alternative instrumentalists."
Interdisciplinary thinking and working is a way of life for Senn, whose festival this weekend will feature sound and video artists from around the world.
He has a doctorate in music from the University of Illinois, with a minor in ceramics and pottery. Until his current incarnation as a full-time artist - during which time he's created a sound garden in Point Defiance Park, among other things - Senn taught music composition and ran studios in electronic music and interdisciplinary computer art. He also wrote software for computer compositions.
Senn says if he has any virtuosity, in fact, it's on computer instruments. "I compose music using artificial systems. The idea is to create an alter creative ego, a smart system that you put information into that is, at times, a better composer than yourself."
Senn's silver studio, where the festival will be held, shines in the sun at the back of his home in North Tacoma. The studio houses at least seven stereo speakers, nine TV and computer screens, CD players, a record player, digital camera and neat stacks of black electronic equipment. Countless cords hanging in tidy figure-eights cover a large wall area. A double bass stands in a corner, plugged to a soundboard by a clip-on microphone.
It's a control booth. Senn fussily ushers a chair to the middle of the room for optimal acoustics and plays snippets of the sound pieces festivalgoers will hear this weekend.
The first is Paul Koonce's "Walkabout," a traffic dreamscape of bells, crashes, honks and deranged whistles. The next, by Dutchman Paul Goodman, sets you underground, buried in a sealed tunnel, trying to listen to what's going on up there.
Both works bring about the surprising and simple realization that your ears are, normally, woefully underused.
And that you haven't heard much like this before. Or have you?
"This kind of music strongly influenced the Beatles and is probably what gave music like that the edge to make it so important in our culture," Senn said. "Jimi Hendrix's use of the guitar is directly influencing me in developing sounds for this bass fiddle."
It's not only rock 'n' roll that's relevant here, Senn said. Experimental sound art is just what classical music is.
"All of classical music was experimental music once," he said. "This is one of the bizarre things of the symphony orchestra playing only old works and rejecting experimental music of the time we live in. It's an unresolved hypocrisy."
Senn started to say that sound art is a kind of music that requires of its listeners patience and a knowledge of the language it's built on. But that would mistakenly portray the music as elitist, he said.
"It must function as a thing of beauty or a thing of interest first," Senn said. "Nobody has the right to make a piece of art that intimidates people."
Davenport would agree that new doesn't mean off-putting or overly intellectual.
"New music or new art - all it means is that you're not guaranteed the applause," Davenport said. "You're not doing something where people can reminisce."
They are doing something where people with open ears can listen, and consider their own time.
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* Staff writer Jen Graves covers fine arts. Reach her at 253-597-8568 or jennifer.graves@mail.tribnet.com.
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Preview
What: Michael Davenport on bass clarinet with members of Tacoma New Music, pianist Kim Davenport, cellist Laurie Tuttle and guitarist Clement Reid.
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday and noon Friday.
Where: Baskin Gallery, second floor at the Tacoma Art Museum, 1123 Pacific Ave., Tacoma.
Tickets: $6-$4 for Thursday's concert; free with museum admission Friday.
Information: 253-272-4258 or www.new-music.org.
Preview
What: The Shy Anne Sound and Video Festival 2000.
When: 8 p.m. Friday; 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.
Where: Shy Anne Studio, the silver building behind the residence at 4218 N. Cheyenne St., Tacoma.
Tickets: $5 for admission to all five events; $3 for students.
Information: 253-759-2556 or www.newsense-intermedium.com/NI/SHYANNE/FEST2000/index.html