New Music composer Evan Williams is no stranger to Memphis, having lived and taught here from 2018-22. And, as he noted in his remarks in the Crosstown Concourse East Atrium last night, his time as a assistant professor of music and director of instrumental activities at Rhodes College made an indelible impression on him. Indeed, Wednesday evening’s premiere of his new work, Crosstown Counterpoint, was a deep rumination on that iconic space and its place in the city’s history.
But that multi-movement suite was book-ended and contextualized by other pieces that helped situate Crosstown in time and space. Williams began with a trombone solo titled Amber Waves, in honor of the semi-rural Chicago suburb where he grew up. His use of delay effects only added to the natural reverberation of the towering atrium, with its echoing brass tones reminiscent of Sean Murphy’s Sketches of Crosstown from 10 years ago, featuring tuba and saxophone in the abandoned Sears Tower, pre-renovation.
There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, it makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop!
Historical recordings of Savio’s words were woven into a duet for flute and cello, and, echoing through the cavernous space of Crosstown, the combination served to remind listeners of the political and aesthetic dimensions of such a public commons, and the citizens’ duty to make good on any promise that such a space implies.
And then came the centerpiece of the evening, taking place within the very space it celebrated. Subtitled “for two antiphonal string quartets and audio playback,” Crosstown Counterpoint and Memphis’ own Blueshift Ensemble made use of the concourse’s multiple levels, with one quartet on the ground floor and another on the mezzanine above. The sound of stereo strings responding to each others’ hypnotic patterns evoked the origins of Sears, Roebuck and Company’s founder, Richard Warren Sears, in the railroad business; and as recordings of voices were heard on the P.A., the effect was reminiscent of Steve Reich’s Different Trains. But the voices’ stories were closer to home.
Those voices, originally recorded for the Crosstown Concourse Breaking Ground Oral Histories Project, were provided to Williams by Crosstown Arts, and recounted decades of history, from the original Sears department store to its demise and abandonment, and finally its rebirth. In one moving passage, a Memphian observes, “The building has a personality,” then adds, “and layers of history,” a phrase which repeated as the strings played on, the words echoing through the very walls being remembered.
Throughout the proceedings, it was as if the atrium itself was an instrument, its reverberations throwing the composer’s sounds back at us in real time. When Crosstown Counterpoint concluded, Williams then led an expanded ensemble through a classic of the modern classical canon, Terry Riley’s In C.
Evan Williams leads scattered musicians through Terry Riley’s In C (Credit: Alex Greene)
This piece was also well-suited to the space, full of cascading, contrasting patterns played by various musicians scattered strategically throughout the atrium, on multiple levels. The slightly out of sync parts would ebb and flow, harmonizing with each other in unpredictable ways. Though considered groundbreaking when it premiered in 1964, the piece is not often heard in Memphis, though Williams noted that he led a group through the piece during his time at Rhodes.
In this case, the ever-shifting piece held the crowd’s attention for nearly a half hour, as audience members wandered through the atrium, sampling the sounds from different niches of the concourse. It was met with a standing ovation and raucous cheering as the evening came to end, the reborn vertical village of Crosstown still resonating with its own history.
Blueshift Ensemble (Photo courtesy of Blueshift Ensemble).
Blueshift Ensemble has been at the cutting edge of New Music in Memphis for years now, often collaborating with jazz, hip hop, and alternative artists, but one of its most fruitful partnerships could have easily fizzled out when Covid brought everything to a halt. From 2017-2019, the ensemble of local classical players favoring music a bit left of center had an impressive run with New York’s ICEBERG New Music Collective, presenting works by the collective’s 10 composers at the Crosstown Concourse for three summers in a row. Then 2020 arrived, and lock-downs put the future of the collaboration in doubt.
But next week, ICEBERG will be back in Memphis for the first time in three years, as Blueshift Ensemble performs a collaboration between the composers — Drake Andersen, Victor Baez, Stephanie Ann Boyd, Alex Burtzos, Yu-Chun Chien, Derek Cooper, Jack Frerer, Max Grafe, Jessica Mays, and Harry Stafylakis — and poet Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz in a suite of new works, The Peace Chronicles, Parts 1 & 2. Recently, the Memphis Flyer reached out to ICEBERG’s composer and board member Alex Burtzos to learn more about what he calls “the best thing we’ve ever done.”
Memphis Flyer:It seems ICEBERG New Music is based in New York, yet I see that some of the composers work elsewhere. Would you still call it a New York collective?
Alex Burtzos: That’s a good question. When we first started in 2016, we were all based in New York City. But since then, as our careers have gone in different directions, I would say we’re now a global organization, because we have members that live in four different states and three different countries. But we’re incorporated in New York, and we always have two concerts every spring in New York City. So we’re still based in New York as an organization. But our members are based all over the place. Only three ICEBERG members are based in the city now. The rest of us are in and out. And we do meet in New York. For example, almost all of us were together for our two concerts with the Decoda Ensemble in April and May of this year. The pandemic continues to complicate things, but we do convene as much as possible. I’m looking forward to much more of that as the pandemic relaxes.
Alex Burtzos (Photo: Stephanie Ann Boyd)
Do you work together as you create compositions, playing each other works in progress and that sort of thing?
Yeah. I would say that for the most part, the craft of composition is not collaborative. So we’re still on our own a lot of the time, staring at dots. But to have a collaborative atmosphere that you can participate in is really valuable. So I’m constantly sending scores to the other members of ICEBERG and asking for feedback, and they do the same with me. Both artistically and professionally, it’s a really valuable thing to have that collaboration. And it’s kind of rare for a composer to have that sort of network.
The Peace Chronicles represents a whole new type of collaboration for us, because it was the first time we’d collaborated with someone from outside the music world — an artist from another discipline. Yolanda is an incredible poet, so we all read her most recent book, The Peace Chronicles, and selected poems from that book to act as the catalyst or inspiration for our pieces. And each one of us chose a different text, sometimes several texts. Then, having composed the pieces, we worked together to put them into a program that really led the listener on a journey from beginning to end.
Of course, Yolanda physically being a part of the show and reading her poems as part of the performance was an enormous part of that. To my mind, this is the best thing we’ve ever done. We are really, really proud of this program because it brings together so many artists. We have the artists from Decoda who are the ones who performed at the premier; and now Blueshift Ensemble’s stepping in. And then we have the composers, and Yolanda working with us. So it’s a really special show.
I gather all the pieces were written with her recitation of her poetry in mind, from the outset?
Yes, we always knew that she would be reading as part of the show, and it was up to the composers whether they would incorporate that spoken word into the piece, or whether that spoken word would precede the piece, and composers took different approaches. We also had members take very different tacks to how the words inspired them. Sometimes Yolanda’s words provided a sort of program for the piece; sometimes the words provided an image; sometimes the words were decoded, and individual patterns of letters became the basis of the composition’s form. And everything in between. So it was a nice demonstration of the diverse perspectives that the ten composers bring, and the ability of the collective to take those diverse perspectives and combine them into something that feels very unified and organic.
Does it flow like a single piece, with transitions from one piece to another?
There are no transitions; they are discrete pieces in the program. But of course we were in constant communication about the flow of the music in the concert, and the way each piece would prepare the listener for the next. There were a lot of conversations discussing that question.
Did Yolanda have input into how her words were woven into the music?
Yes. She was a fantastic collaborator. She immediately grasped what we had been talking about from a musical perspective, even though she’s not a musician. She was fantastic to work with as we plotted the trajectory of the show. Yolanda’s previous book was called Love from the Vortex, and her latest one is called The Peace Chronicles. And when I was reading these collections, I saw them as sort of a yin and yang, where they were meant to be complementary. Love from the Vortex is very concerned with feelings of hurt and regret, and The Peace Chronicles is very focused on healing. That’s a generalization. Not every poem fits into that mold, but taken together, that’s how I interpreted them.
Because we were primarily concentrating on the second of those two books, that translated into two programs that are very optimistic overall. It’s not always happy music, but it’s a program that trends towards a healing feeling. And getting the opportunity to produce this show in the spring of 2022, when we’re still coming out of two years of complete isolation, was very meaningful for us. We had people in the audience who were in tears, and who came up to talk to us afterwards about how much it meant to be out, listening to music, and getting to experience that show. So it meant a lot to us, and I’m sure it meant a lot to Yolanda, and it seemed to mean a lot to the listeners as well.
The book was written before Russia invaded Ukraine. So it’s not a topical book, exactly.
It is not a specifically topical book. It pre-dated the war in the Ukraine.
Yet what a perfect way to give voice to what we’re all preoccupied with these days.
Because we premiered it in New York, and because the war in Ukraine was somewhat young at that point, people that I spoke to tended to associate the program more with their own lived experience during the pandemic. But the more I’ve thought about the poems, the more it seems like their message is applicable [to the war]. So that would be a perfectly valid reading of the program, even though it wasn’t specifically created thinking about that.
The mark of a good ICEBERG concert is that it has a little bit of everything. These shows are no exception to that. There are moments that will feel very abstract, and moments that will feel very direct, and everything in between. There are some pieces that use extended techniques and more noise-based compositions, and pieces that utilize triads and chords you would recognize in any pop song. And we always encourage audience members to come and talk with the composers. If you liked the piece, or if you didn’t, come and say so. We’re always happy to engage with listeners in that way. That’s what we want as composers.
What kinds of instrumentation will be involved?
The two concerts both feature a quintet. The first will feature four string players with piano, and the second concert will feature four wind players with a piano. So the instrumentation is traditional, but that doesn’t mean that you’re not going to hear anything unexpected. For example, my piece utilizes two e-bows, and electromagnet that’s used mainly with guitar, but I’ve placed those on the piano strings to create a drone effect. So there are touches here and there that will be something you don’t expect.
I want to add a personal note of thanks to Crosstown Arts, to Blueshift Ensemble and specifically to Jenny Davis. This will be our fourth visit to Memphis. We feel like we know Blueshift very well, both personally and artistically. We’re frequently working with the same performers every time we come back, and they always do an amazing job. Memphis is our home away from home.
You know, it would have been easy for this collaboration to fall by the wayside during Covid, and it never did. So that’s a testament to everyone on both sides being committed to doing this. So, a huge thank you to those organizations and to Jenny in particular. We’re really looking forward to seeing everyone in Memphis. We’ve missed you!
The Peace Chronicles, Part 1 will be performed on Thursday, August 18, 7:30 p.m. – 9 p.m., at the Crosstown Concourse East Atrium. The Peace Chronicles, Part 2 will be performed on Friday, August 19, 7:30 p.m. – 9 p.m., at the Crosstown Theater. Visit crosstownarts.org for more information.
