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Third Angle goes to China….

Our bags are packed (nearly)….a few days left for last minute errands, a final rehearsal on Wednesday, and then we’re off to China for performances in Nanchang and Beijing (and hopefully a side trip to Tibet). A journey like this isn’t possible without the support of our audience and the best board of directors anyone could ask for. We are honored to have received this second invitation to perform at the Beijing Modern Music Festival, and even more excited to share our experiences with you via this blog.

Our programs feature a few familiar works, and a few that are completely new to us:

Black Angels by George Crumb – the iconic masterpiece for amplified string quartet; we are bringing twenty crystal glasses (plus mikes, thimbles, plectrums, bass bows, oh my…)

 

Cat O’Nine Tails by John Zorn - Tex Avery meets the Marquis de Sade, in this inspired homage to cartoon music

Violin Phase by Steve Reich - an adaptation of the four violin piece for solo fiddler

Ning by Chen Yi - Violin and cello are joined by pipa virtuoso Min Xiao Fen in this vivid evocation of the massacre of Nanjing

Written on the Wind by Huang Ruo - Min Xiao Fen performs this solo work that was written for her

The Long Song by Chen Danbu - The Third Angle string quartet will join Beijing Central Conservatory faculty in this exciting collaboration, performing this new work by this brilliant composer

Stay tuned for updates from our journey….xie xie!

Published:
May 16, 2012 – 2:35 am
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By Ron B.
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New Ideas in Music……

Next week, we present our New Ideas in Music winning compositions (click here for ticket info).…huge thanks to Betsy Russell for her generous sponsorship of our inaugural contest! Also, big thanks to our other concert sponsors, including Nel Centro (and the brilliant Dave Machado), WillaKenzie Estates (and the vivacious Ronni Lacroute), and Portland State University School of Music (and the marathon maestro, Bryan Johanson).

Our competition featured an impressive lineup of judges, including Eve Beglarian, Chen Yi, Zygmunt Krauze, Bryan Johanson, and myself. The three categories were geographically based (regional, national, international), and our concert features the winner and runner up from each category. As the competition was for previously unperformed works, our concert thus will be an evening of six world premieres (plus an extra goody….***).

Four of the six composers are unable to attend the premiere of their pieces, so I asked them to send us brief video introductions of themselves and their music.

The first of these is the winner of the international category, Chronophage by Tom Coult:

 

Next is Matthew Peterson, winner of the national category for Nacken….

 

Chinese born composer, Wang A Mao, is the runner up in the international category, and describes her composition, Spirit of Zheng:

 

American Steven Snethkamp is the runner up in the national category, and introduces us to Disembodied, for solo flute:

 

Portland based composers Justin Ralls (regional winner) and Dr. Greg Steinke (regional runner up) will be on hand to introduce their works. Justin has written us a lovely evocation of an afternoon walk through Oaks Bottom nature reserve, titled Anthrophony. Greg’s trio is entitled “….found dreams….”, a lovely work inspired by the poetry of S. A. Marjason.

***We’ve added Cat O’Nine Tails by John Zorn to the program, a work we’ll be performing next month at the Beijing Modern Music Festival. This gives us a chance to take the piece out for a test drive, and to preview our forthcoming season.

Published:
April 16, 2012 – 10:19 pm
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By Ron B.
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“…we’re not going to be here very long…”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Morty, in his own words:

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“…I mean why might bring something into the world that is us that did it. The fact that it might be impermanent seems to be….I can’t see it’s philosophical and sociological ramification. I’d rather see it, in a sense, more in its religious element. I know that when I write a piece sometimes, I’m telling people we’re not going to be here very long…”

In a couple of days, my friends and I will take on the legendary String Quartet no. 2 by Morton Feldman. It’s been quite a journey with this amazing music….it’s been on my bucket list for quite some time. I confess that it was the sheer spectacle of playing a four-hour string quartet that intrigued me at first; I tend to like those kind of unreasonable challenges.

FSQ2 excerpt (performed by the fabulous Flux Quartet):

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It’s really easy to be distracted by the scale of this work….”THE SIX HOUR STRING QUARTET!!!!!” (in our case, four)….the fact is it doesn’t ever feel forced or distended. The ideas in the piece need this long to develop. And if we’re really serious about the concept of music as a sincere spiritual experience, how then can we place mortal time limits on such a thing? Seriously…..

Another FSQ2 excerpt:

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The piece is published as a handwritten score, without individual parts. We’ve addressed the challenge of page turns (120 of them) by projecting the pages on computer monitors, advancing the pages with a single foot switch, operated by me. This way, we’ll always be together at least once per page ;-)

We hope you can join us for some or all of this performance, this Friday. It’s been a great pleasure to be a part of the whole Rothko series of events here in PDX. Our thanks to Cynthia Fuhrman and Portland Center Stage for the opportunity to present this musical masterpiece…

Concert info here

Published:
February 22, 2012 – 12:27 am
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By Ron B.
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Shadows and Paradise…..


You will hear music…and shadows….shadows!

Thus ends the fantastic poem that Matthew and Michael Dickman will read at our concert next week (Hearing Voices..January 20, details here). Shadows features original music by PDX musician Nalin Silva, a violin and guitar soundtrack to accompany their evocative poetry, a quartet of voices and electric strings.

Shadows is a dream state, a collage of images from idyllic times and spectres of lost family and friends. The ideas in the poetry keep coming at you, like a Mozart opera, one right after the other…

Oh, to be on earth….to walk barefoot on the cold stone and know that the woman you love is also walking barefoot on the cold tile in the kitchen where you kissed her yesterday….

Do you think that’s music we’re listening to? Ambulances and dogs….strangers walking their darlings beneath streetlights…..sirens and trees….all the music that’s left….You know how we are going to disappear, into the dirt forever….


 Stephen Taylor is many things…professor (University of Illinois), arranger for Pink Martini, brother of Oregon Symphony trombonist Robert, and brilliant composer of Paradises Lost. Stephen has arranged a chamber version for us, with seven Third Angle instrumentalists joined by an Illini crew of four singers, the librettist Marcia Johnson (providing a bit of narration), and video imagery by David Warfel.

Paradises Lost, a 2002 science fiction novella by Ursula K. Le Guin, tells the story of the Discovery, on a 200-year voyage to explore and colonize a planet known as New Earth, or Shindychew.

Discovery would build a vast and delicate rainbow bridge across space, and across it the true gods would walk: information, knowledge. The rational gods.

The opera opens with active, rhythmic music that describes the carefully controlled environment onboard the spaceship…here’s an excerpt:

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Our concert begins with Jason Schooler performing Failing, a very difficult piece for string bass by Tom Johnson, a serious attempt at succeeding to fail…..challenging music with color commentary. Is it OK to say, “Good luck, Jason”???

Published:
January 12, 2012 – 7:21 am
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By Ron B.
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Another year……

It’s time to begin the slow recovery from caloric overload…..holiday sugar binging is the culprit, a sufficient scapegoat for the need to crow about the past year’s successes. And the chorus of crowing non-profits is practically inescapable, reaching a murderous level in these last few days of the calendar year.

Musical art is a difficult pitch to make, an artistic form that exists invisibly in the sound waves, organized (sometimes) vibrations that seek resonance with the artist within each listener. It’s always amazed me how sound can be either exasperating (Barry Manilow’s voice sending me back to a horrible prom night) or astonishingly transformative (Brian McWhorter and Eve Beglarian performing Wayfaring Stranger). On a basic level, both are just sounds, nothing more, though the fact that one gives me hope for humanity, and the other makes me reach for the Lotrimin, is what we’re really talking about. Great music needs resonance, it needs minds eager for new sonic experiences, it needs listeners who want to get out more and meet new musical friends, start new relationships with pieces that tantalize with the promise of long and healthy relationships. At Team 3A we want to be your sonic matchmakers….(cue Can’t Smile Without You)

Time to tout our accomplishments from this past year:

  • We brought Pulitzer Prize winner David Lang (co-founder of New York’s Bang on a Can) to PDX for an evening of beautiful music an inspiring conversation
  • We continued to dig deeper into new Asian music, presenting new works by Ye Xiaogang, Xiao-Ou, Huang Ruo, Pulitzer Prize winner Zhou Long and Narong Prangcharoen.
  • We celebrated 25 years of Third Angularity by pulling off another epic homage to Steve Reich, this time with Drumming, in the amazing Montgomery Park atrium
  • We welcomed New York composer Eve Beglarian to PDX to tell a musical story of her travels from the headwaters of the Mississippi to New Orleans. (I’ll be in NYC in January to join Eve and her BRIM ensemble)
  • We traveled to Asia to perform in the Thailand Modern Music Festival, presenting and recording Vedana by Narong Prangcharoen; for release this spring on Albany Records.
Looking ahead:
  • Hearing Voices (January 20th, Kaul Auditorium) will feature the brilliant Michael and Matthew Dickman reading their poetry, accompanied by an original score by Nalin Silva. The program also features Stephen Taylor’s chamber opera, Paradises Lost, based on the novella by our brilliant friend Ursula K. Le Guin
  • Rothko - we’re part of the city-wide celebration of Mark Rothko, including performances of Morton Feldman’s epic 4 hour String Quartet no. 2 (February 24th, the Armory), and Rothko Chapel (March 10, Portland Art Museum)
  • Competition - new works from winners of our first bataille des artistes (April 26 & 27, PSU), generously sponsored by Betsy Russell
  • China - 3A string quartet returns to the Beijing Modern Music Festival, joined by pipa virtuoso Min Xiao Fen

Audience + Composers + Performers = Third Angle…….all three elements are essential to producing great musical art, the essence of collaboration. Thank you for your attendance, your attention, your suggestions, your enthusiasm, and of course, for your support of our work.

Please follow this link to our donation site: Third Angle donations

Sincerely,

Ron Blessinger

Artistic Director, Third Angle Ensemble

 

Published:
December 28, 2011 – 8:13 pm
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By Ron B.
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Let’s get ready to rummmmmmmble!!!!!!!

We’re thrilled to announce our first New Ideas in Music Competition (NIMC)! Details for entry can be found on our home page here….. Our stellar judging panel includes Chen Yi, Eve Beglarian, Zygmunt Krauze, Bryan Johnson, and Ron Blessinger (myself). In addition to the significant cash awards, the winning compositions will be performed on our April concerts, and recorded for download on our website. We are looking for fresh, exciting works….music that touches our hearts and minds, that offers new perspectives on the art form. So, bring it on, composers of the world! Give it your best shot…dazzle us, challenge us, show us how music is, really, the coolest thing in the world….

 

Published:
November 29, 2011 – 4:10 pm
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By Ron B.
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Eve on NewMusicBox

This is a great video of Eve talking about her creative process….I love when she describes how she’s not in love with compositional techniques (rhythm and harmonic structures), but will use what she needs in order to tell the story she wants to tell.

Click here for program and ticket info for “One Mississippi”, October 21 at the Alberta Rose Theater

Published:
October 6, 2011 – 10:57 pm
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By Ron B.
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One Mississippi, revisited….

We open our season on October 21 with One Mississippi, river as muse, welcoming back composer Eve Beglarian for a concert of music, poetry, film, pictures, and tales from her four-month long journey down the mighty Mississippi.

Eve describes how this personal WPA style project came about:

“I’m not an extreme sports person or anything like that, I’m a reasonably nerdy composer who has lived in New York City all my adult life. But somewhere around the free fall of the economy and the election of 2008, I got the idea to take a human-powered journey through the heart of the country. Without much pre-planning and with even less experience or training, my idea turned into a four-month kayak and bike trip down the length of the Mississippi River in the late summer and fall of 2009.

The only real credentials I had for doing this were first, that the idea grabbed hold of me and would not let go, and second, that my practical responsibilities are practically nil: no kids, no mortgage, no regular job with a time clock or faculty meetings or quarterly reports (or a W2 form either, for that matter.)”

Eve enlisted a platoon of friends and colleagues to join her for portions of the journey, which she chronicled in her excellent blog: Eve’s River Project. Eve will be returning to the river in the weeks leading up to our concert, performing music along the way with her BRIM ensemble. She promises to send us regular updates as she retraces her steps. Please check back in on this blog, on Facebook, and Twitter to hear/see what new discoveries Eve is making.

Eve’s music is so…..Eve-y; gorgeous, poetic, melodic, inviting, funky, seemingly simple yet complicated under the surface…the work of a very humane artist who covers tremendous territory in her music. Politics, poetry, nature, friendships, it’s all there, given voice by this remarkable, free spirited, grilled cheese loving, babe on a mission.

A few samples from the program:

Simple Person – Eating ice cream and watching children dancing in the parking lot. Solfege on a warm summer evening…

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Early in the morning – “I was awakened in Iowa one night by an incredible din of frogs and insects. I recorded the racket, and its percussion creates the rhythmic material for the piece….about a year later, I came across a recording of Early In the Morning, a Mississippi Delta work song that became the basis for this piece”.

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Bach Feet - Feet Don’t Fail Me Now meets Bach’s g minor Violin Sonata meets James Brown…

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Click here for tickets. See you all on 10/21!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Published:
September 24, 2011 – 11:49 am
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By Ron B.
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After the jet lag

(By Wanpen, elephant painter from Chiangmai)

It’s been a week since our return from Thailand, and finally the jet lag has subsided. Our bodies are curious things….even a week of gorgeous weather isn’t enough to reorient the sleep clock. Though it’s been nice to get a lot done before 4am, the 1pm wipeout won’t be missed.

The Thailand International Composition Festival 2011 was a blast, a gathering of new music nuts, composers, performers, and the cheeriest music students you can possibly imagine. There were many highlights:

  • Flute virtuoso Luisa Sello dazzled with a solo recital that featured 12 works by composers such as Bischof, Dalbavie, and Varese
  • The Quadrivium Ensemble (USA) integrated acoustic instruments with electronic media masterfully, particularly in The Ends of Histories by Christopher Biggs
  • Violist Michael Hall was everywhere, playing a gazillion concerts, including Xian Shi by Chen Yi
  • Pianist Tomoko Honda was fabulous with everything she played, including The Pursuit of Benyakai by Pradit Saengkrai
  • the newEar Ensemble (USA) presented a wonderfully varied program, including The Diary of a Female Warrior by Fay Wang
  • My colleagues, Susan and Joe, performed brilliantly in our program, even recording Narong’s new horn trio in under an hour…total pros!
It was also great to meet wonderful young composers such as Kee Yong Chong, Koji Nakano, Mara Gibson, Boonrut Sirirattanapan, and many others; inspiring to be around such creative minds who are pushing boundaries and seeking new audiences for their art.
In 5 days, the festival presented 10 performances, 10 panel discussions, and the best cafeteria food in the world (not to mention the best iced mochas I’ll ever have). A typical dessert below…..what lucky ducks we were!
Returning to our fair country is always interesting, and humbling. We are so lucky to live in a place with such a strong environmental lobby! Though the pollution wasn’t nearly as bad in Bangkok as it was in Beijing, it’s always a blessing to come home to clean air and water….and abundant toilet paper.
Still…..it was a bit troubling to see signs of how we are lagging behind some of these Asian countries. In Bangkok, new music schools are being built. The Incheon airport in Seoul is a marvel of technology and cleanliness (Sea-Tac was dreary and trashy by comparison). The consumate service we experienced everywhere (stewardesses, waiters, you name it) was far behind us when we returned home. English was well spoken in most places we visited.
The westward musical focus of Thailand and China (and from what I learned in the panel discussions, the rest of Asia) is starting to be matched by significant resources and a big cultural push. While the career path of the Asian composer still leads westward, this path is increasingly a full circle for  major artists like Chen Yi and Tan Dun, who are increasingly active in their native country of China. It will be fascinating to track their progress in developing domestic audiences for new music…..
Thus completes the blog series on our Thai adventure….Thanks to Linda Czopek and Vern Rifer for their support in making it happen. Also, all the Kickstarter friends…..you guys rock! Thank you, thank you!!!!!

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Published:
August 4, 2011 – 12:09 am
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By Ron B.
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Goodbye Phuket

Resort destination for vacationers worldwide. We’ve seen tourists from everywhere…India, Europe, Japan, China….you name it, they’re here. Even in the middle of the ‘low’ season (constant rains….imagine that), it’s a fabulous place to decompress. Gorgeous beaches, the warm Andaman sea, it’s paradise. Even the skeeziness of Bangla street in Patong can’t sully the magic of Phuket.

The weather cleared enough for us to catch a tour to Ko Phi Phi. This has been Joe’s fondest wish on this trip, to see the fabled beaches of these gorgeous islands. It was an amazing day, with snorkeling, swimming, and a boat ride in rough waters that was the equivalent of the most rigorous Thai massage. This epic day was rounded out with a spectacular sunset, as seen from our hotel….

The day wasn’t over, however…we caught a red-eye to Seoul, Korea, where we had a nine hour layover, just enough time to get into town and do a little sightseeing and last minute shopping. We made it to Changyeonggung Palace, seeing first hand the incredible craftsmanship of the Joseon dynasty artisans.

On our way to the palace, we discovered how truly connected this trip is to the cosmos, as we came across this Brahms coffee shop, built (obviously) by Seoul’s biggest Brahms afficionado, with non-stop recordings of Brahms’ music, and pictures of Brahms all over the place. Even the ceiling was well utilized to convey the level of Brahms love that the owner has going on..

And now, it’s time to board the second to last plane of our trip (final leg from Sea-Tac to PDX tomorrow). It’s been a fantastic journey, one that we’re eager to share with friends over some Hong Thong whiskey, asap….one last blog post will wrap up the whole deal-io….

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Published:
July 26, 2011 – 1:53 am
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By Ron B.
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