Performances + Events
Last month’s NEC Festival, the theme of which was Charles Ives, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and American Musical Innovation, included a concert that featured the Conservatory’s Contemporary Musical Arts department in a program titled I, Too Sing America: Ruth Crawford Seeger and Other Untold Stories of America.
“Because this October celebrated Charles Ives’s 150th birthday,” Eden MacAdam-Somer said, “and because he was such a prolific and revolutionary composer, I knew that there was going to be plenty of his music featured during the festival. With that in mind, I wanted the CMA department to focus on other stories of the early 20th century.”
MacAdam-Somer, who chairs the Faculty Senate Steering Committee, which organized the festival, is co-chair of the Contemporary Musical Arts department and, along with faculty members Anthony Coleman and Lautaro Mantilla, coproduced the CMA department concert. The November 12 program, MacAdam-Somer said, was conceived in response to questions that she and her colleagues asked of themselves and in meetings with CMA students: “What about Ruth Crawford Seeger, one of our most unique, brilliant, and still-unrecognized American composers? What about the art and innovation taking place as a result of the folk revivals, the Harlem Renaissance, and the influx of immigrants to this country around the turn of the 20th century? What about the often unheard or submerged stories of communities of color, of Indigenous peoples, of other music that typically falls outside the parameters of the ‘canon’ or the concert hall? And what about contemporary composers drawing on the legacies of those artists and movements?”
The program opened with a performance by MacAdam-Somer of John Heiss’s Episode No. 1 for Violin and Electronics, a nod to the late faculty member who created NEC’s festival series in the 1970s. The concert concluded with a performance of Diné artist Raven Chacon’s American Ledger No. 1, whose narrative score tells the story of the founding of the United States. “We were very lucky to have Raven Chacon as our artist-in-residence, engaging with students on creative approaches to composition and scoring, but also working with our department on a performance of his piece,” McAdam-Somer said.
From beginning to end, the concert served as a reflection of the innovation the festival was celebrating. Heiss’s indelible legacy was part of that, as was the late Gunther Schuller’s. It was during Schuller’s tenure as president of NEC that the CMA department was born, founded in the mid-1970s by Ran Blake as the Third Stream department, named for the term Schuller had coined a few decades earlier. While offering a nod to the past, the concert looked ahead.
For this year’s festival, the department commissioned Grammy nominated NEC faculty member Farayi Malek ’17 to write a piece drawing on Langston Hughes’s iconic poem, I Too. The poem, MacAdam-Somer said, “speaks to the harsh reality of racism as well as determined hope for a better future, and still feels incredibly timely.” I, Too was performed by the CMA Vocal Ensemble. “I wanted to be able to echo the sentiment of I, Too,” Malek said of scoring the work for voices and seeking to convey the meaning of each of Hughes’s phrases through music.
Ives’s vocal music was given special treatment by the Indie Punk Art Rock Ensemble, led by Mantilla, who, as a student at NEC, took Heiss’s class on Ives and served as Heiss’s teaching assistant. “It was like Ives himself was teaching the class,” said Mantilla, for whom it was important to connect Ives to the CMA department’s work by way of the concert program. Mantilla and the students in the ensemble performed Ives’s song Memories, reimagining the music in a style that reflected the personalities of the musicians in the ensemble and the raw energy Mantilla found in a recording of Ives playing his own music. “It’s about the intention of it,” Mantilla said of his ensemble’s reimagination of Ives’s work, “the attitude.”
Ruth Crawford Seeger, too, was represented during the CMA department concert, which featured performances of her Music for Small Orchestra and her String Quartet. Also featured on November 12 was a performance, led by Coleman, of John Zorn’s COBRA, which MacAdam-Somer described as “a reflection of all musical and compositional approaches, inviting each performer and the ensemble as a whole to create a work on the spot as they draw on every aspect of their individual experience.”
With the festival’s theme as inspiration, the CMA department’s concert dug deep into the meaning of “American innovation” and into the ethos cultivated at NEC by the likes of Schuller, Heiss, Blake, and others including current CMA students, who performed a traditional American song drawing on Pete Seeger’s field recordings, an original piece based on the work of Yiddish poet Celia Dropkin, and Peggy Seeger’s Song of Myself. Mantilla reflected on the area between tradition and innovation. “On that bridge,” he said, “is where we are standing.”
