NEW SOUNDS #1: BAYOU BORN - René Eespere and Evan Chapman

Hey there, reader/listener/new friend!

Thanks for stopping in! All of us here at Loop38 firmly believe that it’s much easier to enjoy a concert when you have some background in what you’re about to hear and why it’s incredible! SO, leading up our concerts this year, I will be posting these short little tidbits about our featured composers. Hoping that this will feel like you’re chilling with a friend, getting psyched about great music! Feel free to take a peak, have a listen, and get a taste for what’s to come!

Our upcoming concert bayou born is in only two days away!! It will be up at the Live Oak Meeting House, which is also a James Turrell designed space. If that isn’t enough to motivate you to come join us, let’s get to know a couple of the composers on our program, René Eespere and Evan Chapman!

First up we have Estonian composer René Eespere! Eespere was born on Dec 14th, 1953 in Tallinn, Estonia. Eespere became publicly known first by his allegorical short ballets A Man and a Night, The Furies, and Ancient Dwellers that were all staged in the 1970s at the Vanemuine Theatre (Tartu). He is well known for incorporating idomatic influences of baroque and rock music into the world of estonian folk music and minimalism. Spiritual and ethical questions dominate eespere’s work, including contemplations on existence and humanity. He is especially well known for his vocal music and using that idiom to carry these ideals.

If there is a better way to contemplate the meaning of life than through gorgeous chanted Estonian folk music, then I don’t know what it is. Listen below to a selection of his choral work from a HUGE outdoor song celebration in Estonia:

As previously mentioned, Eespere’s first chamber works were inspired by Baroque music, with an emphasis on sound colour and exploration. You can hear this Baroque sensibility in his piece for guitar and violin, Respectus:

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Up next is the multi-talented Evan Chapman!

Evan Chapman is a composer, percussionist, and filmmaker out of Philadelphia. A signature of his work is his seamless blend of multimedia and contemporary music. Especially his skills as a filmmaker have brought him in collaboration with many prominent names in classical music like Bang-On-A-Can, Chris Cerrone, Alarm Will Sound, and Julia Wolfe. Here is the trailer for an incredible collaboration between him and So Percussion!

In addition to his incredible film work, he is a founding member of the contemporary-classical percussion trio/band Square Peg Round Hole. I’m really digging their stuff, take a listen to one of their videos below!

If you’re as into Evan’s music as I am, check out one of his many compositions with video up on Youtube! This dark, pulsing number is one of my new favourites, especially with the dance component.

Hope you all had a great time listening to all that groovy music! If you want more (which I hope you do!!) make sure to sign up for a spot at bayou born this Tuesday night! Did I mention it’s free?

See you next time xx

-Ally

"how they flow apart and together"

Happy 2019!! As January comes bursting in to all of our lives, we here at Loop38 thought it might be nice to take a moment to reflect while looking forward. What better way to do this than with the music of our time, inspired by our city?

That being said, our program on January 29th is BAYOU BORN, happening at the Live Oak Meeting House in Shady Acres. The meeting space in was designed by James Turrell. For those of you unfamiliar with James Turrell, he is an artist whose work primarily deals with light and space. He designs rooms that welcome in the sky and ask us to look out and above to the beauty of the world around us.

All that being said, when percussionist Craig designed this program he thought Live Oak Meeting House would be a perfect compliment to this music that asks us to listen to our own internal pulse and look outward.

Composer Pauline Oliveros, the genius behind “Deep Listening”

The program is conceived of as a single meditation to be performed without breaks.  The central work is by Annea Lockwood and is a graphic score written in honor of Houston-born and recently deceased, Pauline Oliveros. Pauline Oliveros is most famous for her concept of “Deep Listening”. ‘Pauline Oliveros herself described Deep Listening as “listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what one is doing.” Basically Deep Listening, as developed by Oliveros, explores the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the voluntary, selective nature – exclusive and inclusive -- of listening.  The practice includes bodywork, sonic meditations, interactive performance, listening to the sounds of daily life, nature, one’s own thoughts, imagination and dreams, and listening to listening itself. It cultivates a heightened awareness of the sonic environment, both external and internal, and promotes experimentation, improvisation, collaboration, playfulness and other creative skills vital to personal and community growth. Annea’s piece takes Houston’s Bayous and puts them central in her work. “Each of [our] six players in the piece represent a different bayou; how they flow apart and together is how the music is formed.”*

Composer Annea Lockwood

The other incredible pieces on the program include magnetic works by Julia Wolfe, René Eespere, Evan Chapman, and Arvo Pärt. We’ll be telling you all about these pieces throughout this week, so make sure to check back here!

What is so compelling about this program is that it is an invitation for all of us to participate. We all live in this beautiful, complex, and sometimes confounding city. We know the sounds of our bayous and of our own lives. This concert will be a journey in exploration and an invitation to quiet our minds and hear what fills us.

We really hope you’ll come and join us for this evening of music, meditation, and love for our city.

*Thank you to the Deep Listening Institute for the information on Pauline’s mission and brilliance!

Ally Smither

On to the Next One! Looking Forward to the Rest of the Season

Hi everyone! This is Jacob, violinist with Loop38. I had a blast performing in strange~wild~weird Monday night, and since we’re on the last day (!!) of our fundraising campaign, I wanted to share some of what I’m excited about in the rest of our season. We have concerts coming up every month through April, and I think it’s incredible how diverse and unique they all are.

First, in January we’re heading out to the Live Oak Friends Meeting House in the Heights, which features one of artist James Turrell’s Skyspaces. This will be one of our location-specific concerts this season, with a program created specifically for the Meeting House. The central work on the program is bayou-born by Annea Lockwood, written in honor of the late Houston-born musical pioneer Pauline Oliveros. In this piece, six performers converse with and flow around each other, mimicking how Houston’s bayous wind their way through the city. Bookending the program are ensemble works by Estonian composers: Sculpture’s Morning by René Eespere and Estonian Lullaby by Arvo Pärt. In between are works by Julia Wolfe, Angélica Negron, and Evan Chapman which feature one or two of our performers in short, often meditative pieces. As a specifically Houston-based ensemble, we wanted to create something that would highlight our connections to the city, and we hope that this concert will be a meaningful, meditative experience and a moving tribute to what it means to live in Houston.

In February we’ll be performing a completely different program: Bach/Berio at the Silos. For this concert we’re breaking into solo acts to perform music by Johann Sebastian Bach and Luciano Berio at the Silos at Sawyer Yards (thus the name of the event!). These two composers come from completely different time periods and wrote in completely different styles, but they both created sets of works for solo instruments that pushed the boundaries of what was thought to be musically and technically possible. In this program, we’ll perform various solo works by Bach and juxtapose them with performances of Berio’s Sequenzas. What makes this possible is the unique set-up of the Silos: each silo is its own performance space, but the audience can move between them. So when I’m playing Berio’s Sequenza 8 for violin, Loop38’s cellist Ariana might be playing a Bach cello suite in the silo next door. By playing these works back-to-back and simultaneously, we want to explore what it means to play and listen to both Bach and Berio in the 21st century. In modern life we are constantly inundated with many different sounds from many different sources, from city noises to top-40 hits on the radio to snippets of orchestral excerpts from practice rooms (or maybe that one’s just me!). But everything we hear has a history—some very recent, and some quite old. So in honor of our fragmented, postmodern (or are we now post-postmodern?) culture, it seems appropriate to explore what this means in classical music with two of the most important composers of their eras.

All this, and I haven’t even touched on all our other concerts coming up! In March, we’re collaborating with Rice University’s Theatre Program to perform Words and Music by Samuel Beckett and Morton Feldman, a cross-disciplinary exploration of the interaction of words and music, and of the natures of semantic meaning and tonal law. Plus, we’ll continue our collaboration with Sawyer Yards: on the Second Saturday of each month, we present our musical interpretation of one of their artists’ works, drawing on the tradition of graphic scores. This culminates in our season finale in April at MATCH—which is a surprise! (Stay tuned…) For more details on all of these concerts, be sure to check out our homepage.

I’m excited about what we have coming down the lane (bayou?) because I think it really shows who we are as a group: passionate, adventurous, virtuosic, willing to push boundaries and explore the eclectic, the unique, the new. And we want you to join with us in making this vision happen. If you’re even half as excited as I am, please consider making a donation. With your support, I think we can make the rest of this season truly special.

Words From Our Clarinettist: How Do We Spend Your Money?

Hi all, Thomas Frey here! Have you ever arrived to a concert early, sat down in the audience, and, watching the musicians meander to their seats and nonchalantly test their instruments, wonder to yourself how much do these people make?  Is it a lot, or not that much at all? Maybe your cousin was a musician who needed to teach to make a living. Maybe your aunt hit it big on The Voice, holds two platinum albums, and has a garage full of Ferraris.  Musicians are strange people anyways, especially when it pertains to our income. So how much DO we make?

To answer this I must first address how we receive money and how we allocate it.  Many of our concerts this season are Pay What You Can, with suggested donations of $10.  We also sprinkle in a few ticketed concerts here and there to cover specific venue costs, but the majority of our money comes from donations.  Most organization take at least 3 or 4 years to become profitable, and we’re so close to passing this line! If ticket sales and concert donations alone were enough to cover our costs, this is what we would spend our donations on:

Only joking! Granted, the wonderful Fractured Atlas helps with a good chunk of our costs, but since Loop38 has still not received ~platinum status~ on our album yet (hoping the jury’s still out on that one), we rely on online donations to lessen the financial deficit our concerts create. But speaking seriously, a more accurate depiction of where we allocate our campaign donations looks something like this:

The unfortunate reality is that the spending we cut when our budget exceeds our income comes from our musician’s pay.  Now $6,000 is a lot of money, don’t get me wrong. But when a stage-full of talented musicians dedicate all of their energy to bring unique, and underplayed music to life, spending hours practicing, rehearsing and thoroughly learning these pieces, we want to give them as close to a fair wage as we can.  To upset this deficit, many of our core artists donate part or all of their pay as honorarium for our guest artists.

15 extraordinary people already donated to our campaign online, covering a whopping 3rd of our $4,000 #GivingTuesday donation goal.  As a contemporary ensemble we want to share new music of all types to the Houston community we love, with its people of all types and backgrounds.  Above all else we want to give you the opportunity to hear some weird music, whether you’re into that or not. If you enjoy the music we make, great!  If not, that’s okay; it is a little strange after all. If you do enjoy our music, however, please consider donating so we can keep performing it. However big or small, every bit helps make us a permanent part of Houston.

– Thomas

NEW SOUNDS: NIGHT HERON!

Hey there, reader/listener/new friend!

Tomorrow night is Loop38’s concert STRANGE, WILD, WIERD! We are so excited to celebrate the best hour of the day (happy hour) with you all at Night Heron, one of our favourite Houston bars! Whether you’re reading this before sneaking off to bed, or first thing in the morning we want to give you a little taste of what you should DEFINITELY come and hear after work on MONDAY DEC 10th!!

Our program opens with Jonathan Newman’s “OK feel good new” is a colourful rhythmic playground. He is unreal at incorporating sounds from jazz and pop into his work. This piece will pep you up and put a tap in your toes for sure.

One of his favourite works of mine is “Blow it up, Start again” -- take a listen here:

Next up will be “Switches”, by Sam Pluta. This piece was awarded the 2009 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composers Prize. It features heavy rock influences, and sounds maybe not expected from a traditional chamber music experience. Our viola star Siggy will be rocking out on this with our guest percussionist Jamie Kollar.

Here’s a little clip of his work “Machine Language”:

Up third will be Canadian composer Nicole Lizee’s “Malfunctionlieder”. I first sang this work in a competition, and it’s one of the most difficult, rollicking scores that I’ve ever worked through. The entire piece is an incredible exploration of absurdity and pop culture, taking clips of famous movie and warping them. The singer and pianist in turn, I would say,, get a little warped themselves! Nicole is one of my favourite composers around right now, take a peek at her “Hitchcock Etudes” for piano, tape, and video (watch closely, she makes an appearance herself):

Our harpist Caitlin will be transporting us to the mesmerizing and trance-like world of Angelica Negrón in her piece “Technicolor” for harp and electronics! Negrón’s music is known for it’s heavy pop influences and transcendent sound world. This piece is no different. Take a peek at the composer herself performing one of her works:

Keeping in the pop sound world, we have a selection from Gabriel Kahane’s “Craigslistlieder”. In writing these songs, Kahane took actual adverts from Craigslist and set them to music. The results are nothing but hilarious.

Look to the right to watch Kahane himself singing and playing some excerpts from the complete Craigslistlieder:

We close our program with “Anthem” by George Lewis, both a professor of composition at Columbia University and a MacArthur Fellow (2002), a Guggenheim Fellow (2015). Anthem is an exhilarating work about belonging, power, celebrity, and desire. I first heard this work performed a couple years ago and I just about lit something on FIRE I was so worked up afterwards! I’m really hoping it has the same effect on you (but please don’t light anything on fire)!!

All in all, this program TOMORROW is going to be a RIGHTEOUS good time. Really really really really hope you can come! Until then - get excited and get those ears ready!

Ally xx

Loop38 @ Night Heron: STRANGE~WILD~WEIRD

MONDAY, DECEMBER 10TH @ 6PM

ON THE PROGRAM:

Jonathan Newman Ok feel good now

Sam Pluta Switches

Nicole Lizée Malfunctionlieder

Angelica Negron Technicolor

Gabriel Kahane Craigslistlieder

George Lewis Anthem

Hey folks, Siggy here…I absolutely cannot believe it’s December and we’re all running around town for “Gigmas Season.” Loop38’s Season Opening concert on November 14th Behind The Scenes-Behind the Sounds was evocative, challenging, and a great success! We usually have some time to breathe in between events but in addition to the holiday shows and end-of-year performances, we had our December Second Saturday at Sawyer Yards event today at 2:30 pm, STRANGE~WILD~WEIRD at Night Heron on Monday night, AND a $4000 fundraising campaign that closes on December 12th!!! We’re busy, ambitious, and if there’s something I can say about my Loop38 colleagues…they go all-out and want to do it well!

So I know you’re thinking “These new music nerds are cool; I’m gonna go to one of these events” right? We’re looking forward to seeing you there and here’s how you can help us fund the rest of our 2018-2019 Season…Click on the button above and check out our Giving Tuesday fundraising campaign! Our generous donors have helped us reach 33% of our goal thus far. I invite you to attend one of Loop38’s upcoming events and I hope you’ll consider supporting the work we do and the rest of our season!

Here’s an awesome writeup on STRANGE~WILD~WEIRD by Ally Smither, our program curator:

Do you like cocktails? Sounds? Laughs? Happy Hour?
Obviously, you do. We definitely do too.
And you know what we love even more? HOUSTON.

Join us at one of Houston’s best bars, Night Heron, for a happy hour program of things STRANGE~WILD~WEIRD. It’s going to be a fun, hour long, program of works that will shock, inspire, and make you laugh. Afterwards, you can catch Night Heron’s weekly SpeedRack practice. Did we mention that it’s happy hour priced cocktails and drinks ~ALL NIGHT~?

Night Heron is Agricola Hospitality’s fabulous bar close to the Menil Collection. The manager is Danny Kirgan; he is not only a veteran of the service industry, but also a trumpet player who has played with the Chicago Civic Orchestra. The program we devised seeks to show our audience that their perceptions about classical music and, especially new music, may be very wrong! As a group, we are all young and excited - this music really reflects that. It encompasses sounds, stories, and energies that are upbeat, exhilarating, and looking forward. Our composers come from a myriad of backgrounds, ethnicities, and genders; the world is incredibly vibrant and multifaceted, so we also seek to be just that.

From the trippy technicolor sound world of Angelica Negron to the wild, raucous, Big Brother-y commands of George Lewis’ “Anthem,” all of these pieces explore sounds that our audience may find closer to the pop music they are accustomed to. You’re doing to hear drums sets, electronics, wild words, and maybe even some references to your favorite movies.  We hope that the combination of this and Night Heron’s welcoming atmosphere will invite our audience to let down their guard and experience music in a new way.

Kick your night up a notch by opening your ears to new sounds in a new space! This is going to make your ears perk up, your body dance, and your brain tingle. Let us take you on a Strange, Wild, Weird journey through the music of George Lewis, Jonathan Newman, Nicole Lizee and MORE all while you sip on one of Night Heron’s vibrant cocktails. Doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

November 14 concert + Giving Tuesday

“There was a palpable sense of renewed purpose and energy in this young ensemble…[Loop38] threw down the gauntlet with this difficult opening program.”

Sherry Cheng
Arts and Culture Texas

Today we are right in between our first and second concerts, so I thought I would take the time to recap our November 14 performance: Behind the Scenes – Behind the Sounds. Our brave and curious audience spent their evening with us for a program of works that “explore the physicality of sound and challenge the definition of music itself.” You can read more about the music in Sherry Chang’s wonderful review over at Arts and Culture Texas, but right now I would like to shed a little light on what went into our preparation.

14 hours of rehearsal time: In addition to individual practice time, our artists met for rehearsals in the two weeks leading up to this concert. We were generously given space in both MECA in the Heights and West University Baptist Church. As we mature as an ensemble, the amount of time we need to get inside a new work continues to shrink. However, this time will always be a necessity in order for us to offer quality performances.

Unusual Equipment: This program required a lot of new gear, from the high tech (electromagnetic resonators, surround sound speakers, bass flute and clarinet) to the utterly nonmusical (chains, a tube of super glue). Our conductor Craig even spent one afternoon searching junkyards for the most resonant piece of sheet metal!

Add that to all the fixed expenses of renting a venue, renting the scores, paying our affiliate artists (our core members play for free!), purchasing equipment, and hiring an audio engineer, and this concert came to a total of $3,465.

As it goes with performing arts organizations, ticket sales will never the cost of putting on a show. And for that reason, we are launching a Giving Tuesday fundraiser through the fiscal sponsorship of Fractured Atlas. Over the next two weeks, we aim to raise $4,000. That will be enough to sustain us through the end of this season, and we are looking for your support to get there! Click through to read more about our campaign, and to learn about our upcoming performances.

NEW SOUNDS #3: LEWIS NIELSON

Hey there, reader/listener/new friend!

Thanks for stopping in! All of us here at Loop38 firmly believe that it’s much easier to enjoy a concert when you have some background in what you’re about to hear and why it’s incredible! SO, leading up our concerts this year, I will be posting these short little tidbits about our featured composers. Hoping that this will feel like you’re chilling with a friend, getting psyched about great music! Feel free to take a peak, have a listen, and get a taste for what’s to come!

Our upcoming concert BEHIND THE SCENES, BEHIND THE SOUNDS, on November 14 features performances of electro acoustic works by Maja Ratkje, Ashley Fure, and Lewis Nielson.

(CONCERT IS TOMORROW !!!!)

Today we’re going to be getting to know the final featured composer on our November 14th program: Lewis Nielson! We were lucky enough to have Lewis come and visit us this past weekend to offer valuable insight on his piece USW.

When he isn’t coming to Houston to ~hang~ Nielson is busy doing all sorts of not-so-low-key incredible things. He was the chair of the composition department at Oberlin College, had received numerous awards, and has had his works recorded and performed by symphonies and groups across the United States and the world. His music is infused with the picturesque and the political, his work that we will be performing on Wednesday is no different.

Since we had Nielson captive for a couple days, I was lucky enough to have him answer some relevant (and maybe not so relevant) questions

Which composers have inspired your work?

Not many composers, really.  If anyone, Helmut Lachenmann and his ability to do what is necessary, not what others would do regarding the present day.  I love the music of my friend Reiko Füting in NYC--he's one of the few I listen to these days. Mostly, I spend my time listening to Renaissance polyphony (Ockeghem and Dufay mainly), some Bach, some Beethoven and Chopin piano music.  The present is too present. The past helps me hear without being influenced by the actual materials.

What is your favourite piece of music theatre/opera/performance art etc?

In history, [Mozart’s] “Die Zauberflöte” for sure; in present  “Das Mädchen mit dem Schwefelhölzern”, although I've seen two productions and the staging didn't do justice to the music

Favourite food?

India India India!!!

Favourite city?

Amsterdam......although there's also Berlin.

How did you find Houston on your little visit!!

Wetter and colder than I had thought it would be!  I live in Vermont now and I was expecting some heat..

Nielson’s work that we will be performing on Wednesday is USW, a multimedia chamber opera based on the life of revolutionary Rosa Luxembourg. Nielson himself combined fragmentary passages in several languages from Luxemburg, Karl Marx, German poet Georg Trakl and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The overall work is striking in it’s beauty as well as it’s affect. If that hasn’t peaked your interest, our bassist Austin will also be singing in the work! You do not want to miss this, he sounds fantastic.

So, all in all, if you like well-written, beautiful, and arresting political music, you NEED to know the works of Neilson. Luckily for you, you can come get to know them with us! So, you know the drill:

Hope to see you there tomorrow (!!!)

Xx ally xx