"Concert at City Gallery Offered Top-notch Performances"

The Post and Courier

May 31, 2006

"Best Way to Get a New Music Fix Outside of Spoleto:

The New Music Collective "

Charleston City Paper

March 1, 2006

"Best Of Charleston" Issue

" The New New Thing

Of original new music, phased percussion, New York sensibilities, and amplified cardboard tubes "

Charleston City Paper

February 1, 2006

"Chamber Rock: A youthful new chamber ensemble fuses musical genres into a jolt of modernism"

Charleston City Paper

September 14, 2005

The Post and Courier

May 31, 2006

"Concert at City Gallery Offered Top-notch Performances"

-by William Furtwangler, Post and Courier Reviewer

Piccolo Spoleto's Spotlight Concerts for years have provided a high-quality, low cost option for music lovers, offering local musicians as well as those from "off."

On Tuesday, the City Gallery at Waterfront Park was the venue for the New Music Collective, a young group from Charleston who promote composition, performance, and education on current music and art.

20th century serious, or concert, music has diversified in various ways, in several cases with color replacing melody to create form, as in the works of Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992). Nathan Koci, on a solo French Horn, tackled "Interstellar Call" from Messiaen's "Des Canyons aux Etoiles" (1974). Unseen on the balcony above, Koci filled the gallery with Messiaen's other-worldly tones which ran from light to dark and back again, disembodied, yet exotic.

Philip White (b 1981) offered up his "unplug everything blindfolded," which we were assured by host Koci was completed two days ago. Composed for percussion (including steel drum) and electronics, "unplug" employed lots of loud cymbals set against an electronic backdrop.

Mariah Dodson (b. 1982) composed "I Still Have my Mother's Hands" (2006) for horn, marimba, and electric guitar. The marimba had a pleasant, calming quality. The other instruments provided a raw quality offsetting the marimba's too pleasant resonance.

John Cage (1912-1992) wrote his "Suite" for toy piano in 1948. Cage's short seven movement divertisement was well-executed by Koci, given the limitations of this instrument. To quote Cage, "I have nothing to say, and I am saying it."

Dodson on saxophone (electrically amplified) and White, with his computer, literally improvised. The result was rhythmically arresting and sonically intriguing, particularly when White took Dodson's saxophone and ran it through his software.

The final offering, Steve Reich's "Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Organ" (1973) gave the full group of eleven the opportunity to show off. Reich's minimalist study for marimbas, glockenspiels, organ, vibraphone, and voices (Dodson, plus Christina Demos and Emi Mastey) is a modern classic with lots of repetition in different meteres.

The mallet instruments were overlaid with drones from the organ and voices, except for Dodson, who effectively provided some of the rare rhythmic variation.

These were top notch performances.

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Charleston City Paper

March 1, 2006

"Best Of Charleston" Issue

"Best Way to Get a New Music Fix Outside of Spoleto"

The New Music Collective

Nathan Koci, Philip White, and Ron Wiltrout are trained musicians who have chosen to take a different path than most people their age. Not for them are the screaming, thrashing crowds of local rock clubs, nor do they have any interest in donning their dress blacks and taking up residence in a symphonic orchestra. Instead, they've created a chamber group that focuses on the musical regions where the two genres overlap - what's known in classical corners as "new music." It's the kind of stuff that Spoleto associate director John Kennedy sticks in his Music in Time series: weird, wonderful, eccentric, and wholly outside the canon of the classical "greats." Koci, White, and Wiltrout have a churning pool of other local musicians they work with, and they often perform their own original compositions in addition to those of masters like Steve reich, Louis Andriessen, and others. If there's a local group who's doing for music what Redux is for visual art and PURE is for theatre, the NMC is it. -- Patrick Sharbaugh

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Charleston City Paper

FEBRUARY 1, 2006

Read the Charleston City Paper Article.

FEATURE | The New New Thing

Of original new music, phased percussion, New York sensibilities, and amplified cardboard tubes

BY PATRICK SHARBAUGH

Shortly after 8 p.m. on Friday, at the Wando High School Performing Arts Center in Mt. Pleasant, the Charleston Symphony Orchestra will be working its way through the world's umpteenth iteration of three classic symphonic works, two of which date roughly to the tail end of the Civil War and another that emerged from the Great Depression. At exactly the same moment, downtown at Redux Contemporary Art Center, an upstart group of young, brash, professionally trained musicians known as the New Music Collective will be presenting a concert of an altogether more contemporary nature.

Three of the pieces in the evening's presentation, collectively entitled "Workers' Union," are in fact premieres of original works that the members of the NMC commissioned from two New York composers and local composer Philip White. One is called 23, by composer Ted Hearne. Another, Vega, for horn and percussion, was written for them by Jody Redhage, a composer and cellist living in Manhattan who'll be in town for the premiere.

White's new piece, untitled so far, involves a mixed ensemble spaced throughout the labyrinthian Redux facility.

"It's an event-based work," explains NMC member and director Nathan Koci. "We'll use stopwatches to play certain things at certain times, and each musician will be in a different room, utilizing the studios, nooks, and crannies of Redux."

The ambitious work requires the assembled talents of pianist Laura Ball, Ron Wiltrout on percussion, White on guitar, Koci on horn and accordion, David Heywood on flute, Ray Evanoff on drums, and local vocalist Bill Carson, also on guitar.

"While we definitely love playing 'classic' new music works," Koci continues, "like those from Steve Reich, Louis Andriessen, and many others, it's a goal of ours to build a repertoire of truly new works that we ask people to write for us. It's really exciting for us to be able to make a space for brand-new works and premieres."

If the CSO has the repertory of the classical masters pretty well sewn up, Koci's group carves out a niche for itself from the kind of music — much of it not even composed yet — that locals generally see only once a year, during John Kennedy's Music in Time series for the Spoleto Festival.

A highlight of the evening will be a performance by New York percussionist David Cossin, who'll be performing his original Video/Piano Phase, an interpretation of minimalist master Steve Reich's Piano Phase, originally written for two pianos.

In Reich's original composition, two pianists play exactly the same pattern of 12 notes — a constant stream of 8th notes at a steady rhythm. The two performers start the piece in unison, but one of them speeds up ever so slightly, creating a "phase" between the parts, until the second performer is exactly one note ahead of the first. They continue this until the two parts come back around to unison. Such phasing is a standard element of Reich's minimalist work, and it's remarkable how effective the technique can be, musically.

"What David has done is to arrange two sets of MIDI drum pads on either side of him," explains Koci. "He has the notes of the piece programmed on them, so he can play the pattern on the pads. He then filmed himself playing this apparatus at a steady tempo. The performance consists of him sitting behind a scrim with this setup. The video is projected onto the scrim in front of him, playing the steady-tempo version. Behind the scrim, he performs the phasing part, speeding up, so that you get an amazing visual representation of what the piece is essentially doing. And it looks like he has four arms."

Cossin will also be performing an improvisation on an instrument he created, the amplified cardboard tube.

The final piece the group will be playing is called Workers' Union by Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, written "for any loud-sounding ensemble" of any number of instruments the players wish.

"Every performer reads off of identical music," Koci says. "In the music, everything is notated: rhythm, dynamics, tempo, articulation, etc. The only thing that's not notated are the actual pitches. There's not a traditional five-line music staff, only a one-line suggestion of a staff, with the notes indicating only when to go higher or lower. Each performer chooses his notes as he wishes, creating an awesome cluster of rhythm intensity. It's awesome."

"The community thing for me is the bottom line," says Koci, "for people to be creative and share that creativity and to collaborate with other people and other groups here in Charleston and elsewhere. That's what it's all about. Everyone needs a show and tell — there's so many creative people in town. The key to starting that community is bringing all those people together."

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Charleston City Paper

September 14, 2005

"Chamber Rock: A youthful new chamber ensemble fuses musical genres into a jolt of modernism"

by Patrick Sharbaugh

When Charleston horn player Nathan Koci talks about "new music", he's not referring to the latest single from whatever tattooed, angst-ridden, post-punk, pretty-boy garage band canoodlers are dominating the Billboard charts at the moment. He's talking about music that's been written in the past 50 years or so. From one perspective, that covers just about the entire spectrum of rock 'n' roll history; from another, it's just an eyeblink in a tradition of composition that stretches back hundreds of years to the very beginnings of the art form.

"New," to Koci - a founding member of the nascent New Music Collective ensemble - is therefore relative, as are his feelings about the primacy of any single musical tradition over another. Classical, rock, jazz, blues, gospel, minimalism, electronic, Gregorian chant, folk, rap: it's all just music to him, and he sees a new generation of listeners evolving to embrace music that's of all these genres and none of them.

The New Music Collective is an ensemble of young local musicians (in addition to Koci, there's guitarist Philip White, percussionist Ron Wiltrout, and pianist and vocalist Laura Ball, as well as other occasional members) who are hoping to create a year-round audience in Charleston for the kind of music one generally finds here only during the Spoleto Festival's Music in Time series, programmed by enthusiastic new music guru John Kennedy. Using a combination of computers and live instruments, NMC play seminal works from the 20th, mix genres across the board, and push the envelope of how music "lives."

"We believe the music being written today is some of the most exciting music in existence. In the last 50 years music has grown into a wonderful mixture of genres, styles, and periods," Koci writes on the Collective's MySpace.com page (which includes a pair of music samples entitled "Coming Together" and "Variations on a Dream"). "The classical chamber ensemble is now becoming amplified, mixing electronics, computers, and elements of rock 'n' roll to the traditional classical idiom. Young people are hearing more music and more kinds of music than ever before. A juxtaposition of all of this is where the New Music Collective gets its inspiration."

At the NMC's next concert, for example, at the CofC Simon's Center's Recital Hall on Thurs. Sept. 15 (8pm, $5), the small group will perform works by minimalist godfather Steve Reich, and contemporaries including Paul Smadbeck, Alvin Lucier, Arvo Part, and John Harbison - names that would look not at all out of place on Kennedy's Spoleto program. On Fri. Oct. 21, they'll participate in (and help organize) a multimedia shindig at the Humanities Center where White will premiere "a new work for chorus, electronics, and complete darkness."

On Thursday's program at Recital Hall is Paul Smadbeck's "Rhythm Song", a marimba solo, says Koci, which the group has adapted to include electronics. "Philip does a lot of electronics," he says, "so we've taken a standard rep piece for the marimba and turned it into a duet, with Ron on marimba and Philip processing and manipulating the sound on a laptop."

Thursday's concert opens with Reich's "Clapping Music", a typically minimalist but rich Reichian work that involves just two performers who perform with their palms in a dynamic generation and degeneration of rhythms: "It's just two people clapping," says Koci. "It's the essence of what Reich does, lots of phasing."

Anyone who saw New York-based ensemble So Percussion perform at two of Spoleto 2005's four Music in Time concerts - they performed Reich's "Drumming", and Iannis Xenakis' monumental "Pleiades" - knows ho mesmerizing even so minimal a performance can be. Koci says that he was also in the audience on the second Friday night of the festival when the four guys of So trekked out to the Village Tavern in Mt. Pleasant for an impromptu concert at the rock club.

"Those guys are complete badasses. They could hang in any classical orchestra, but they choose to work on their own," Koci says. "The fact that they have this level of virtuosity and they're willing to play in a bar in Mt. Pleasant, that's so cool. That's what the whole new music buzz in New York City is like right now. We want to be a part of that - questioning the old way of how music is created and presented and perceived."

The group [New Music Collective] first came together last spring (with flutust Jamie Self, who's since moved to Boston) for a pair of performances: one of them at the group exhibition The Floating in May, and another at the Humanities Center-sponsored multimedia event Pieces of Sanity - a big project for the NMC, and one which they hope to use as a model in organizing future similar events at the site. Last weekend they performed at the Gibbes Museum's 100th anniversary celebration on Saturday, and on Sunday at the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in Avondale behind the Voodoo Lounge, where they played a work by Arvo Part entitled "Fur Alina," originally written for solo piano. "We added orchestra bells, electric guitar, triangle, and a low-ass B natural on the organ and came up with a knock-out arrangement of the piece."

The ensemble's goal going forward, says Koci, is "putting as many different musical ideas out there as possible through a series of concerts. We want to unite young Charleston composers and musicians all under the New Music Collective name, mixing different styles, ensembles, and aesthetics. We want to get people excited about contemporary music any way we can."

NMC hopes also to leverage its close ties with Redux Contemporary Art Center into not just a regular audience but an entire aesthetic. "I'm way more interested in appealing to the Redux crows than the typical classical music crowd," Koci says. "It's an easier crossover from contemporary art to this than from orchestral music. I think people assume a classical ensemble is going to be a little pretentious, that they're gonna hear people telling them a certain kind of music is more 'important.' It sometimes gives off an impression that you can't do this. I like bringing a classical ensemble to the level of a rock show: it's not a prescribed experience."

"We're into breaking simple musical ideas wide open and making the process transparent to people," he adds. "There doesn't have to be any meaning past the music - it's just fun and cool. We don't want to have to justify the music and what we're doing. Everyone in the audience has the capacity to enjoy this and take something from it."

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