NPR Review of Evan Ziporyn’s Album: Big Grenadilla; Mumbai

by Anastasia Tsioulcas

By whatever name you call it — Mumbai, Bombay, Bombaim — India’s largest city is a culturally complicated and gloriously layered place. Despite its main train station being officially redubbed Chhatraptai Shivaji Terminus some years ago, I’ve never met a Mumbaikar (Mumbai resident) who calls it anything other than Victoria (as in the British queen) Terminus, or VT. In the Mumbai suburb of Bandra stands the Portuguese-era Castella de Aguada, aka the Bandra Fort. Mumbai isn’t so much a melting pot as it is like chaat, the addictive snack sold all along its Chowpatty Beach: simultaneously spicy, sweet, savory and sour.

Those kinds of balances have long fascinated composer Evan Ziporyn. Along with teaching composition at MIT, Ziporyn is an expert in Balinese gamelan. He founded the wonderful Boston-based Gamelan Galak Tika and is a founding member of the ever eclectic New York-based new music collective Bang on a Can. Those cultural interchanges pervade Mumbai, a concerto for the expressive Indian percussion called the tabla.

In his written introduction to this recording, Ziporyn notes the upsetting circumstances that surrounded the composition of this work, which features tabla player Sandeep Das with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and conductor Gil Rose. In 2008, just after Ziporyn began writing, terrorist attacks in Mumbai, including at VT, shook India and the rest of the world. As his response to those events, the piece’s three movements became structured as Before, During and After. But Mumbai isn’t a work that catalyzes grief. Instead, it’s luminous and dreamlike, unfolding with a glow and a sense of wonder both intimate and soaring. This is music you climb inside as the tabla cuts through the gleaming strings.   MORE

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded Fellowships to MIT Professor of Music KEERIL MAKAN and another 180 scholars, artists, and scientists in its eighty-eighth annual competition for the United States and Canada.  Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants.

Often characterized as “midcareer” awards, Guggenheim Fellowships are intended for men and women who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.

Recipient of the Luciano Berio Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, Keeril Makan has also received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fromm Foundation, the Gerbode Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, Meet the Composer, the Aaron Copland House, the Utah Arts Festival, and ASCAP. Described by The New Yorker as “an arrestingly gifted young American composer,” and by the New York Times as “consistently stimulating,” his work has been commissioned by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, American Composers Orchestra, Harvard Musical Association, and Carnegie Hall, among others. Makan’s work has been featured at the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco and the MATA Festival in New York, and internationally at the Gaudeamus Festival in the Netherlands, Musica Nova in Finland, and Voix Nouvelles in France. The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Scharoun Ensemble Berlin, the Argento Chamber Ensemble, the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Dal Niente, the Sonar Quartett, the Del Sol Quartet, Nuova Consonanza, the New Juilliard Ensemble, percussionist David Shively, guitarist Seth Josel, pianist Bruce Levingston, pianist Ivan Ilic, and others have performed his music. His first CD, In Sound, was released on the Tzadik label with performances by the Kronos Quartet and Paul Dresher Ensemble. Starkland Records has released his second CD, Target, with performances by Either/Or, the California E.A.R. Unit, and soprano Laurie Rubin. His music has also been recorded on Innova and Carrier Records. Schott is publishing his compositions.

Current projects include: an opera for Alarm Will Sound, Persona, with a libretto adapted from the Ingmar Bergman film by Jay Scheib, directed by Scheib and produced by Beth Morrison Productions; an evening-length chamber work for Either/Or, commissioned by Meet the Composer; and a new CD recorded by the International Contemporary Ensemble for release on Mode.

Makan was raised in New Jersey by parents of South African Indian and Russian Jewish descent. After training as a violinist, he received degrees in composition and religion from Oberlin and completed his PhD in composition at the University of California–Berkeley. Outside the US, he spent a year in Helsinki, Finland, at the Sibelius Academy on a Fulbright grant. After receiving the George Ladd Prix de Paris from the University of California, he studied for two years in Paris, France. Makan is Associate Professor of Music at MIT where he holds the Lister Brothers Career Development Chair. He makes his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In addition to Mr. Makan’s website, http://www.keerilmakan.com, view this link for recordings and videos.

in: Reviews

March 18, 2012

Colors, Solo Writing Appeal: Sharifi’s Awakening

by Mark DeVoto

The MIT Wind Ensemble, directed by Frederick Harris, Jr., displayed their considerable skill and accomplishment in a concert at Kresge Auditorium last night, with major attention focused on a new work composed for them that filled the second half of the program. The evening’s first item, ably conducted by assistant conductor Kenneth Amis, was Divertissement for Doubled Wind Quintet (1895) by the French organist and composer Émile Bernard (1843-1902). Bernard may have been only a petit maître, but he had plenty of melodic and harmonic imagination and all the skill needed to produce a delightful work, very much in the same vein as the somewhat better-known Petite symphonie for the same combination by Charles Gounod (1885). Call it an homage, too, to the Paris Conservatoire’s tradition of woodwind playing, which has remained unsurpassed for a century and more.

The rest of the first half consisted of New England arrangements. Copland’s short and lovely Variations on a Shaker Melody is the last part of Appalachian Spring, well known on band programs. When Jesus Wept (1958) is William Schuman’s arrangement of one movement from his orchestral New England Triptych (1956), and it is dull indeed, almost as dull as one of Virgil Thomson’s hymn tunes; I suppose it shows what happens when a New York composer takes off from William Billings, who at least was a genuine Bostonian. On the other hand, Profanation, the scherzo movement from Leonard Bernstein’s Jeremiah, was exciting and beautifully played, and Harris handled the very tricky meter changes, full of fives and sevens, with effortless grace. This lively piece foreshadows the “Masque” movement of Bernstein’s second symphony, Age of Anxiety, and even the “rumble” music of West Side Story. Jeremiah is his first symphony, composed in 1942 when he was 24, and although it is rarely heard it sounds as full and sturdy as any American symphonic work of the period, and it wears well even in a band arrangement. I couldn’t remember whether it was this movement or another part of the symphony that contains Bernstein’s direction to beat the timpani with maracas; at any rate, I didn’t see it.

After the intermission came Awakening: In Recognition of the Arab Spring, by Jamshied Sharifi, composer in residence at MIT and himself an alumnus of the class of 1983. This expressive work in three movements received a warm welcome from the large audience. The first movement, “Maghreb / Bouazizi / The Uprisings, began with an ornamented oboe melody in dialogue with a group of flutes, supported by a warm G-minor chordal background, followed a while later by a piccolo solo with vibraphone tremoli, and a horn melody with dotted accompaniment punctuated by percussion in slow harmony. The second movement was titled “Reflection: Let Each One Hear Her Own Thoughts.” This was appropriately reflective, in F-major/minor with light textures in a slow six-beat, and a good deal of accompanimental ostinato. The final movement, “Ahead: The Real Transformation Has Barely Begun,” wavered between D-minor and F-major modal harmony, with shifts of triple and quadruple meter, coming to a big fortissimo that ended with a sign of hope.

“For those of us with Persian heritage who watched the earlier political protests in Iran, initially with hope and then with bitter disappointment, the success of the civil movements in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya were especially gratifying,” the composer wrote in his program note. I congratulate the composer also on his well-differentiated use of colors within the ensemble, including plenty of solo writing. Too many composers for the symphonic wind ensemble and concert band use too much tutti too often. Here, the composer kept the tutti in reserve only for the necessary moments.

I am aware that MIT has made a special effort to put all of its lecture courses on line, which means a special video effort. This was over-abundantly evident at last night’s concert, with three manned stationary cameras on tripods at the rear and sides, and a roving cameraman on stage throughout, whose constant changes of location (at one point even bumping into the percussion players who were only trying to do their job) were exceedingly annoying, at least to this spectator. I suppose this is part of the technological wave of the future, but I don’t like it. But despite the visual distraction, the concert was very good indeed.

Mark DeVoto, musicologist and composer, is an expert in Alban Berg, also Ravel and Debussy. A graduate of Harvard College (1961) and Princeton (PhD, 1967), he has published extensively on these composers and many music subjects, most notably, harmony. His most recent book is Schubert’s Great C Major: Biography of a Symphony (Pendragon Press). His website is here.