Memphis Avant Garde – Memphis Flyer

Readers may wonder why an iceberg is present in the music blog, and rightly so. Is this some kind of stealth climate change activism? While its true that climate change has become an unavoidable iceberg in the room of our lives, ICEBERG is quite a different matter: It will be very much present in the East Atrium of Crosstown Concourse today and tomorrow, but it won’t be either melting or dangerous.

Rather, the ICEBERG new music collective hails from New York, a group of 10 young composers who promote the idea that “classical” compositions should draw from a broad array of influences in their work — including popular music, avant-garde techniques, and everything in between. The ICEBERG composers hail from different schools and cultivate radically different sounds, but with their longstanding collaboration with Memphis’ Blueshift Ensemble, they often compose for the same group and present their works during a joint concert. The result is a glimpse into the ever-widening possibilities of art music in the 21st century.

Not to be confused with the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), also based in New York, ICEBERG was founded by composer Alex Burtzos in 2016. Almost from the beginning, they’ve cultivated a relationship with Blueshift Ensemble, often being featured in the Continuum Festival that typically takes place this time of year. While there’s no festival per se, Blueshift, which happens to include flautist Jenny Davis, Crosstown Arts’ music department manager, will be performing a selection of compositions from the ICEBERG group.

This weekend, they’ll be joined by another ensemble, the Coalescent Quartet, an all-saxophone group playing everything from traditional to contemporary works. Regular members Nathan Bogert, Michael Shults, Nick Zoulek, and Drew Whiting will be joined by Heidi Radtke, instructor of saxophone at Butler University. All told, Coalescent’s members have taught at Ball State University, Silver Lake College, the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire, UW Oshkosh, UW Whitewater, the University of Memphis, and Oakland University, and collectively the quartet has presented master classes across the country.

It’s an all too rare chance to delve deeply into the world of contemporary art music, all live and all free. Why not welcome this ICEBERG into the safe harbor of Memphis, and help keep this cutting-edge collaboration a going concern?

Blueshift Ensemble & Coalescent Quartet perform ICEBERG New Music in the East Atrium of the Crosstown Concourse, Friday, August 20 and Saturday, August 21, at 7:30 p.m. on both nights. Free.

Ben Rednour

Jenny Davis plays amplified cacti in John Cage’s ‘Child of Tree’ at the 2018 Continuum Fest

While several cities have renovated former Sears, Roebuck & Company warehouses/retail centers, including Minneapolis, Atlanta and Boston, Memphis’ own Crosstown Concourse may take the cake in terms of grounding such projects in community art projects and concerts. And, far from curating softball ‘pops’ concerts and blockbuster movies, Crosstown Arts, the nonprofit that jump started the local Sears building’s revitalization in 2010, has kept the “urban” in its original vision of a “mixed-used vertical urban village.”

In this context, urban means bringing to Midtown the kind of pioneering music that one might find at world-class halls like the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) or C4 Atlanta’s FUSE Arts Center. With three venues, an artist fellowship program, a recording studio, a music film series, and other resources for local and international musicians (and other artists), Crosstown Arts has become one of the nation’s premier centers of innovation.

Case in point: the upcoming Continuum Music Festival, now in its third year, which, in hosting events in the Crosstown Theater, the Green Room, and the East Atrium Stage, may make the fullest use yet of all the old retail center’s environs. As a festival of new sounds, from experimental to electronic, classical to multimedia, Continuum is beyond most precedents in the local scene. Headlining is Project Logic, featuring local bass wunderkind MonoNeon, guitar virtuoso Vernon Reid (Living Colour), and drummer Daru Jones. The festival also features Opera Memphis’ staging of the transgender-themed work As One, a chamber opera created by Laura Kaminsky, Mark Campbell, and Kimberly Reed.

CROSSTOWN ARTS PRESENTS: CONTINUUM MUSIC FESTIVAL 2019 from Crosstown Arts on Vimeo.

From Continuum Fest to A Change of Tone, Crosstown Keeps It Edgy

The kick-off show on Thursday, August 15th features the Blueshift Ensemble playing compositions by longtime collaborators from the ICEBERG New Music collective and is to be held at Crosstown Brewing Company.The festival will also feature a Duet for Theremin and Lap Steel, a concert by multi-instrumentalist New Memphis Colorways, and a performance of Sarah Hennies’ ‘The Reinvention of Romance’ by Two Way Street.

Finally, like any good gathering of the tribes, there will be many interactive workshops and talks: Sweet Soul Restorative (Yoga with Live Music); The Quest for the Perfect Pop Song; The Metaphysics of Sound; Sheltering Voices: Impactful Community Storytelling; Breaking Boundaries: The Music of ShoutHouse; and The Sounds of ‘Starry Night:’ Writing Music to Van Gogh’s Masterpiece.

But Continuum is really only among many examples of the cutting edge curation of the Crosstown Concourse space going on now. In addition to last year’s Mellotron Variations or this spring’s Memphis Concrète electronic music festival, more ideas are percolating in the wings. For example, musical artists who are pushing the very boundaries of how concerts are experienced will be featured in next spring’s A Change of Tone concerts.

Four such shows are planned for April 18th-21st, 2020, but we don’t yet know what we’ll hear. Musicians of any genre are applying to be featured as we go to press, and may do so until September 10th of this year. Click here to submit a proposal.

One thing they all will have in common is thinking outside of the music box, or rather, outside of the venue. Subtitled “In/Out of Sync,” the concerts will be organized around a weirdly specific, yet open ended theme: Musicians will “exhibit” their music for a listening audience over loudspeakers in one venue as they simultaneously perform it in another, creating a non-traditional listening experience.

With a live-feeds between The Green Room music venue and Crosstown Theater, audio from the latter will be piped over to the audience in The Green Room to listen to, as the musicians, out of sight, perform their original work live in the otherwise empty Crosstown Theater auditorium. The second feed will video-capture The Green Room audience for the performing musicians in the theater to see on a screen, so that they may virtually watch their audience as they play. With such technological feats, concert organizers hope the performers “might achieve a vivid and seemingly living omnipresence.” As the organizers further expound:

Similar to the experience of being inside of a haunted house or abandoned building, this spectral approach to auditory perception will be, among other things, a sonic experiment in vulnerability. It will be an attempt to enhance and heighten the audio-sensory experience for the listener, and perhaps will intensify the presence and impact that music can have when our fight-or-flight response is instinctively activated, giving the sounds we hear the power to demand our full attention.

It’s an embarrassment of riches, really, for those hoping to reimagine their sonic art. In fact, the many series at the Concourse may be remaking the musical arts as Crosstown Arts remade the empty shell of an abandoned retail center only a few short years ago.