February 2024: Conference
Chamber music, schmoozing, and hope for the future
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Around this time last year, a TikTok video featuring jazz-fusion singer-songwriter Jacob Collier “playing” his audience as an instrument landed on my For-You Page. Collier roughly divided his audience into three sections, assigning each a starting pitch. From that major triad, he used outsized arm movements to lead his organ of voices through a satisfying bit of counterpoint — one diatonic step at a time.
Art music spheres love to hate Jacob Collier (I frankly can’t be bothered to form an opinion), but I think this is a great gimmick: memorable, unique, fulfilling, and as a cursory Google search showed, infinitely repeatable. That said, the clip in question garnered three times more views than any of the other “audience choirs” Collier had posted — nearly thirty million eyes on his profile, and a similar number on someone else’s. This iteration was simply better. The singing was prettier and more confident. The chords were uncannily in-tune. The melodies were more sophisticated, and the leading tones were just a touch high, exactly how my music theory teachers told me they should be.
The missing context told the story: those videos were filmed in Cincinnati’s Music Hall at the American Choral Directors’ Association’s (ACDA) 2023 National Conference. Collier’s audience (2,300ish assuming max capacity, alongside the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers and a small orchestra onstage) was perhaps the country’s largest pickup choir. Where else are you going to find a higher concentration of lapsed voice majors eager to belt their hearts out — or, hell, people who aren’t tone deaf? (Actually, tone deaf choral conductors exist, as a grad student I once sang with aptly showed…)
In my mind, “nerd convention” conjures images of Comic Con, and with that definition, I’m not really interested — I love many nerdy franchises, but none enough to overcome my distaste for costumes. (Again, I just can’t be bothered. You do you.) But I’ve often wondered how these nationwide gatherings of music geeks play out. Some say they’re magical. Many more say they’re insufferable, especially in the case of ACDA.
Just as I was mulling over the press policies for the Association of Performing Arts Professionals’ (APAP) annual NYC conference — where networking sessions start at 8am sharp — an insider opportunity presented itself. My fabulous editor from Chamber Music magazine (remember the Kronos Quartet article?) asked if I’d report on the conference of their parent organization, Chamber Music America (CMA), an agglomeration of presenters and performers from around the country. It promised a lower-key entry point than the zoo that is APAP, and I gleefully accepted.
Ostensibly, I was there to cover a particular set of composer readings, a morning works-in-progress clinic with the Attacca Quartet jointly furnished by Access Contemporary Music and the Boulanger Initiative. I’ll muse on that session at length in the next edition of Chamber Music. But as long as I was in the neighborhood, I figured a bit of schmoozing wouldn’t hurt.
Three days later, I left the Times Square Westin completely schmoozed out. I wondered what happens at these conferences, and I got my answer: networking. Of course, that word can mean so many things, especially in the music world. Sure, by the end of each day my right back pocket was full of business cards and my backpack overflowed with loose pamphlets about touring ensembles and educational programs and album releases. But for me, networking is making friends — after all, geeking about music is what I do for fun. (And for work. It’s a charmed life, at least in theory…)
At CMA’s conference, much of the business happens in the main exhibition hall, where artist managers, who seek gigs for their artists, pitch their rosters to concert presenters, who have gigs to provide. In that room, it sort of paid to be neither the vendor nor the buyer. I got to play the curious fly on the wall, buzzing around and asking questions specific enough to catch the managers a touch off-guard. They always looked a little confused as to why I cared — but as soon as I mentioned my concert-organization day job, they decided I was worth their time. (Joke’s on them: I was asking out of genuine curiosity. Teehee!)
The hottest gossip from the floor: The same manager who is charting the Isidore String Quartet’s rapid rise to stardom (the subject of my very first article for Chamber Music) is responsible for the time I ran into my favorite French harpsichordist at a Halloween party. (He is Le Consort’s new US booker.) Rye whisky and tequila make people a lot more interested in your wares — the folks at album label Bright Shiny Things’ booth were pouring generous shots for 3pm on a Thursday. I wasn’t important enough for booze, but I’m still excited for Chicago saxophone quartet ~Nois’s spring album drop, the same collaboration (with the Kinds of Kings composer collective) that I raved about at 2022’s Bang on a Can Long Play.
And interestingly, more conservatories than I thought have dipped their toes into artist management. The Curtis Institute atelier’s table was consistently mobbed, and San Francisco Conservatory of Music recently absorbed one of the largest firms in attendance with nebulous end-game. (They currently have far greater sins to atone for than a dodgy bit of vertical integration.) But, I learned, Los Angeles’s Colburn School also has in-house management for a select few “students on the cusp of professional careers” — read: competition winners. Can you believe the country’s most toxically competitive conservatory found a way to become more toxically competitive? I would have loved to learn more, but their representative was nowhere to be found in the half-dozen times I stopped by their booth.
I spent more time spectating performances than panels — personal preference — but the one discussion I attended, an unmoderated chat about new music for early instruments, produced some fascinating nuggets. My favorite: “Love your limitations; they give you your style,” sage wisdom from singer Tracy Cowart, who also co-directs the medieval ensemble Alkemie. (Cowart also pitched the most difficult question I fielded all weekend: “What do you do to relax?” Uh, I don’t know, play Mario Kart and moan into the Substack void about how I need a nap?)
At CMA, I mostly listened to string music — in the leadup to the final evening’s Cleveland Quartet Jubilee, it seemed only topical. I was most taken with the Poiesis Quartet, four recent Oberlin grads who tore through works of Kevin Lau and Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson with a captivating combination of sheer joy and uber-serious laser focus. I don’t need to tell you they’re going places — the jury from last year’s Fischoff Competition already did — but it’s always refreshing to see quartets breaking out of their buttoned-up ancestors’ molds. The Poiesis squad are an unabashedly young, unabashedly passionate, and most comfortingly, unabashedly queer future for a straight-edged quartet world. (I don’t know if you heard, but queer is the future of classical music.)
A few other fabulous performances:
Cuban and Brazilian charts with the Toomai String Quintet. Bassist, leader, and chief arranger Andrew Roitstein makes his accompaniments pop with textural rhythm, and violinists Alex Fortes and Emma Frucht played octaves so in tune my jaw dropped behind my N95. The set was so compelling that I reached for their album on my subsequent commute home — a wonderful use of half an hour.
The very first notes of the festival, Momenta Quartet’s performance of Alvin Singleton’s fascinating Fourth String Quartet, “Hallelujah Anyhow.”
The Ivalas and Adeline Quartets’ masterclasses with former members of the Cleveland Quartet — one coaching was revelatory, the other supremely unhelpful.
And at the final jubilee, a blistering movement of Bartók’s rash Fourth from the Borromeo Quartet — such phenomenal lower voices! Former Cleveland Quartet cellist Paul Katz followed with an anecdote of conductor-composer Pierre Boulez, who walked out on their performance of the same piece. (“The Iceman Conducteth,” The New York Times said of the stony Boulez during his 1970s NY Phil directorship.)
That jubilee, which celebrated the Quartet’s namesake Chamber Music America prize, was balm for a weary heart. It was story after heartwarming story, speech after teary-eyed speech, and one too many descriptions of the leg infection that kept one-time Cleveland violinist Don Weilerstein from joining the celebration. The Director of Artistic Planning at Carnegie Hall (throwing it into the ether that this is my dream job) recounted buying Cleveland Quartet CD’s as a young violist. Katz traded stories of reviews both ruthless and uplifting with former colleague violist Atar Arad — one child likened the Clevelands to her stuffed octopus, “one brain and eight hands.” And I hope one day to improvise a speech half as compelling as that of cellist David Ying, who brought tears to my eyes when he spoke of Paul Katz’s impromptu trip to St. Louis to intercept a mid-tour Ying Quartet breakup.
The jubilee reminded me that, while the classical music world has historically been full of abusive shitheads (as the Clevelands well know), it’s also full of wonderful people who nurture, and care, and touch lives for generations to come. And I can only hope that the Cleveland Quartets of the future* will continue on the classical music world’s long, arduous trek toward becoming a place that breaks down gates and cycles of abuse instead of perpetuating them. It’s a long, fraught history to contend with, but if there’s one thing I learned at CMA, it’s that the kids are all right.
*Well, actually, the Cleveland Quartet business model is largely unviable today. But more on that another time!
What’s On
(note: performances happen in the evening unless otherwise noted)
Fourth Wall Ensemble — Resonance 1: Stuart Bogie
Sat Feb 3 (two performances) | Power Station at BerkleeNYC
The Stone: Rebekah Heller (BRING CASH)
Wed-Sat Feb 7-10 | The Stone at The New School
NY Phil: An Alpine Symphony and Bernstein’s Serenade
Thu Feb 8, Sat Feb 10,
Sun Feb 11 (matinee), Tue Feb 13 | David Geffen Hall
Composer Portrait: Carola Bauckholt
Thu Feb 8 | Miller Theatre (Columbia)
Juiliard415 with Kristian Bezuidenhout
Fri Feb 9 | Alice Tully Hall
Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Choir: The Music of Ruth Watson Henderson
(COME HEAR ME SING! MESSAGE ME FOR $10 TIX)
Fri Feb 9 | Church of Our Saviour
Mary Halvorson’s Amaryllis Sextet: Cloudward
Sat Feb 10 | 92nd St Y
The Marian Consort: The Forgotten Portuguese Motets
Sun Feb 11 (matinee) | Corpus Christi Church
The Stone: Tomas Fujiwara (BRING CASH)
Wed-Sat Feb 14-17 | The Stone at the New School
Handel: Made in America
Thu-Fri Feb 15-16 | The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, Met Museum
The Sebastians: The Italian Bach/The French Bach
Sat and Sun Feb 17-18 (early eve) | St Ignatius of Antioch Episcopal Church
Gesualdo Six: Lux Aeterna
Sat Feb 17 | Church of St. Mary the Virgin
Ensemble Connect
Tue Feb 20 | Carnegie Hall (Weill)
Composer Portrait: Amy Williams
Thu Feb 22 | Miller Theatre (Columbia)
Parlando: Transient Voices
(COME SEE MY SUPERTITLES!)
Sun Feb 25 (matinee) | Merkin Hall, Kaufman Center
Juilliard Opera: Erismena
Sun Feb 25 (matinee) | Willson Theater (Juilliard)
Met Opera: La Forza del Destino
Mon Feb 26 (continues in March) | Met Opera House
Tomas Fujiwara’s 7 Poets Trio + The Tomeka Reid Quartet
Mon Feb 26 | The Jazz Gallery
Contemporaneous: Songs at Night
Tue Feb 27 | Roulette Intermedium
<3 <3 <3