Music of Invention: Crossing stylistic boundaries

New music series at SICA on third Thursday of month

BY KATHY HALL Correspondent

BY KATHY HALL
Correspondent

At left, an improvisational opera composed by Wilbo Wright (peering from behind a tuba) will be presented Nov. 17 as part of the Music of Invention series.  PHOTO BY ANDREW WILKINSONAt left, an improvisational opera composed by Wilbo Wright (peering from behind a tuba) will be presented Nov. 17 as part of the Music of Invention series. PHOTO BY ANDREW WILKINSON Carlton Wilkinson knows that serious contemporary music isn’t the easiest art form to sell, but he’s committed to bringing it to New Jersey audiences.

A founding member of the Trenton Avant Garde, a nonprofit that produces arts events, Wilkinson is currently vice president of the Black Box Theatre of Asbury Park and producer of its Music of Invention series, which is being held this season at the Shore Institute of the Contemporary Arts [SICA] in Long Branch.

Now in its second year, the series presents artists whose work cuts across stylistic or cultural boundaries, on the third Thursday of each month through May.

“It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Wilkinson said. “If you never program it [new music], and then you do, people will react violently. The farther the thing you are presenting is from the main stream, the harder. The general public needs permission to come to an event. They need to know that other people find it exciting.”

Above, the Chamber Cloud Bowls invented by Harry Partch and used to play microtonal music. COURTESY PHOTO  Above, the Chamber Cloud Bowls invented by Harry Partch and used to play microtonal music. COURTESY PHOTO “What we learned from the first season was that the audiences who come, love it,” said Black Box president Terri Thomas. “They love the experience, they love the intimacy and immediacy of the performance and audience connection. They love the unexpected innovation that they find.”

Despite the potential for small audiences, Wilkinson is excited about the artists he is presenting.

“I like people who really felt the need to invent their style from the ground up,” he said. “Musicians who take a style or handful of styles, deconstruct it and reassemble it into something more personal. They are playing music you can’t hear on the radio, and unless you are in New York, it’s hard to hear it in performance. This is stuff you can’t hear in the concert halls.”

“This series is tailor-made for the Black Box since our artistic vision has always been to support projects that wouldn’t be possible under the constraints of commercial theater,” Thomas added.

Wilkinson has seen interest in new music grow during the past 20 years thanks to residencies sponsored by Meet the Composer, a funding organization that supports the music of living American composers, and a shift in styles among contemporary composers away from the atonality of serialism toward music with a “more natural dramatic sweep.”

A student of contemporary composers Charles Wuorinen and Robert Moevs, Wilkinson works in a variety of genres including symphonic, choral, chamber, solo, electronic and electroacoustic. He is the recipient of a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship and a Meet the Composer grant. His works have been performed throughout the United States, including New York City and New Jersey as well as internationally in Torino, Paris, Frankfurt and Seoul.

When he isn’t composing or programming contemporary concerts, Wilkinson teaches piano at the Ocean Grove campus of Westminster Conservatory (a division of Rider University’s Westminster Choir College), and theory, composition and performance at Brookdale Community College, Middletown, and Middlesex County Arts High School.

The Music of Invention series continues on Nov. 17 with “Damthesnes” (pronounced “damn these knees”), Wilbo Wright’s improvisational opera in two acts for two musicians. Set in the future, the opera tells the story of two brothers, Damthesnes and Hildago, who run a business that Wright describes as “a sort of clearing house for happiness in the age of interdimensional relationships.” Problems of operatic proportions arise when Damthesnes falls in love with a computer icon.

“There is plenty of back-stabbing and death to go around for tragedists and action fans, but an underlying romance makes it the perfect “date opera,” Wright observed.

Patrons need not worry about understanding the words, because this opera doesn’t have any.

“The scenes are open to interpretation by the improvisers, who are working with a loose but predetermined palette of sounds in accordance with the story line and characters,” Wright explained.

Wright is a jazz bassist, composer and member of the experimental band Ui. He has played with Yo La Tengo, Chris Harford, Marc Ribot, the Tibetan Bowlers and many others. He promises the production will involve “no singing or bad acting.”

The Dec. 15 concert will feature the Harry Partch Ensemble, a microtonal orchestra led by Dean Drummond. Partch, who died in 1974, invented his own tuning system in 1930. In traditional Western music, each note in an octave is the same distance apart and the 12 distinct pitches must be at least slightly out of tune in order to maintain the same proportion. Partch’s microtonal system contains a 43-tone scale. Wilkinson describes the music as sounding “smoother” than more conventional tuning.

To play his new music, Partch invented and built more than 25 instruments.

“They are really very beautiful,” Wilkinson observed. “He taught himself carpentry and furniture design to build them. … The instruments have a ‘Dr. Seuss’ quality to them.”

Among Partch’s instruments are the Mazda marimba, 24 tuned amplified light bulbs that sounds something like a coffee percolator; the Kithara, a lyre-like instrument with 72 strings, stretched vertically, arranged into 12 sets of six that sounds like a cross between a bottle-neck guitar and a harp; and the Cloud Chamber Bowls, perhaps the world’s most delicate percussion instrument, consisting of sections of 12-gallon glass carboys suspended from a redwood frame on ropes and played like gongs. The original bowls were found in the University of California’s radiation lab, where they had been used as cloud chambers to trace the paths of subatomic particles.

The only set of Partch’s instruments in existence is housed at Montclair State University, Upper Montclair, where music students have learned to play them.

January’s concert will feature solo flutist Patti Monson. Monson has performed at a number of new music festivals including Pittsburgh’s Music on the Edge Series, New York’s Bang on a Can Marathon, the Lincoln Center Summer Festival, and Spoleto Festival USA. She is a flutist for the new music ensembles Sequitur, Flute Force and the Curiously Strong Wind Quintet, and is currently on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music as director of the Contemporary Ensemble Tactus.

“Last year’s audience, in an informal poll, voted her the best,” said Wilkinson. “We are really pleased that she is coming back.”

The Black Box is currently without a permanent home and is part of the newly formed Arts Coalition of Asbury Park, which is working to develop a cultural arts plan and arts district in Asbury Park.

“The Black Box is always looking for sponsorship and volunteers,” Wilkinson said. “We’re trying to develop a new audience in Long Branch and re-establish a presence in Asbury Park.”

“We don’t see this [series] as a risk,” Thomas concluded. “We see this as being responsible for the future of the arts. It’s the job of small, innovative nonprofits to promote and incubate new work and to keep established nonmainstream but great work in front of the public. Many works that were banned in the past are now mainstream.”

Music of Invention concerts begin at 8 p.m. at SICA, located at 20 Third Ave. in Long Branch. Tickets are $10, or $8 for students and seniors. For more information, call SICA at (732) 775-9980 or the Black Box at (732) 988-6337.