CUBE Reviews

Spring music fest has East-West touch

Though 80 and gravely ill, composer Ralph Shapey, a maverick titan of American music, is still writing works as robust and fiercely passionate as ever. He has been prolific, too, penning close to two dozen pieces since retirement from the University of Chicago in 1991.

A sampler of what he has been up to and what has helped define his ruggedly romantic style was presented by the chamber collective CUBE in a birthday salute Wednesday night in Roosevelt University's Ganz Hall.

Patricia Morehead, CUBE's oboist and co-founder who had studied composition with Shapey, organized the event.

In a rare occurrence for the local music community, there were nearly 20 composers in attendance, which harked back to the heyday of the Shapey-led Contemporary Chamber Players, when worthy music of all ideological stripes was championed.

Shapey came from the '50s New York scene that favored Schoenberg's later 12-tone method, yet he chose to use dissonance to express tension, even fury, while setting up bold sound blocks that clash then feel their way toward resolution. Much of his music since then has been urgent, obsessive and tactile, not abstract.

A succinct example of his early experimenting is the 1952 Quartet for Oboe and String Trio, which opened the concert. The oboe and the trio seem in opposition but their alternately lyrical and pungent utterances aren't antagonistic. In fact, bouts of wit and sentiment heighten a camaraderie, which was nicely conveyed by Morehead and Teresa Fream (violin), Frank Babbitt (viola) and Elizabeth Start (cello).

Also from the '50s were the Rhapsodie for Oboe and Piano (1957) and Form for Solo Piano (1959). In the Rhapsodie, the two instruments go about their own businesses, with the oboe intoning ethereal, lovely passages while the piano splashes about extravagantly. Morehead and her pianist husband Philip Morehead gave a convincing account of the odd-couple juxtaposition. In "Form," a defiant yet tender homage to Beethoven with its own emphatic four-note motif, the pianist Morehead pounded out the notes vigorously and paid attention to the tricky rhythm.

He and Babbitt were empathic partners in "Evocation III" for viola and piano (1981), a Beethovenian stunner in which enraptured ruminations give way to anguish then to calm acceptance. Babbitt's performance was brilliant, abetted by Morehead's energetic accents and punctuations.

Shapey seems to have mellowed a bit since his gnarly, snarly grand-scale "Concerto fantastique" for the Chicago Symphony in '91, which provoked strong responses. He seems now to find solace in miniatures. His "Images" for oboe, piano and percussion (1998), ably performed here by the Moreheads and Dane Richeson, revels in a cool beat as it traipses through episodes of merriment.

The evening's revelation, however, was the trio of works newly written and similar in design. "Lul-la-by II" for soprano, flute, alto flute, piccolo and tape follows up on "Lullaby I" from a decade ago and also dedicated to the composer's grandkids. Soprano Barbara Ann Martin and flutist Mary Stolper performed them in chronological order with spellbinding radiance.

The first one is filled with coos as the singer gently caresses the text's syllables. In the second, the singer utters the text in various cadences then hums and beseeches accompanied by embellishments from the flutes. All this is recorded and played back while the performers go over the text in a lower register – which is also recorded then played back in the third go-around of the text in yet another register. The overall effect is spontaneous and affecting, as if layers of memory were recalled and superimposed.

The same strategy is used also in "Night Music I" for three flutes and tape – which, as done by Stolper and Caroline Pittman, resembled a bel canto showcase – and in "Night Music II" for violin, viola and tape, which was turned into a tour-de-force of dexterity and timing by Babbitt.

With these new pieces, Shapey is insisting to us that this lion in winter hasn't lost his roar. And he even purrs now.

CUBE Contemporary Chamber Ensemble presents "The Sopranos" at Columbia College

Plague strikes the South Loop

I expect not many people know that upwards of 3,000 people around the globe die each year from Bubonic plague, the disease that scourged Europe during the middle ages. Perhaps even fewer know that a Chicago-based composer has taken a fragment of the plague's genome and converted it to music.

Back to that dubious enterprise in a moment. What is more important and of more lasting interest is that there is a Chicago-based music organization that enthusiastically embraces new music and it has just embarked on a South Loop Music Festival playing new music of all kinds. (Future concerts in the festival are on Apr. 8, 20 and Jun. 6. Call 312-554-1177 for information.) The CUBE Contemporary Chamber Ensemble has been around since 1987, bringing Chicagoans the weird, tlie avant-garde, and the pleasantly surprising. Attend a CUBE concert and you won't soon forget it.

CUBE's South Loop Music Festival kicked off last week with a concert in Columbia College's Concert Hall on Michigan Avenue. The main work on the program was Karlheinz Stockhausen's Kathinkas Gesang als Luzifers Requiem from his opera Samstag aus Licht scored for flute and six percussionists. There was top-rate, riveting flute playing from guest artist Mary Stolper, who was unfazed by the unkind things the. composer occasionally asked her to do to her instrument. The six percussionists, sober young men dressed all in black, were scattered throughout the hall with a battery of "magical instruments," apparently the technical term for percussion tools fashioned from the leftovers of a low-rent garage sale. (Example: an empty coffee can, which a friend quipped should be called a Maxwell Davies House drum.)

Peter Maxwell Davies was, in fact, one of the composers represented in the program. Flutist Janice Misurell-Mitchell chose to be expansive in the Solita for flute, employing the optional music box (which was given its own microphone). There were obviously more contrapuntal possibilities in the fugue movement when using this second, albeit wheezy, voice. Particularly charming was how the ritardando was dictated by the music box's last breaths.

My favorite work on the program was Leaving, Arriving for violin and ensemble by University of Chicago graduate student Russell Grazier. Full of energy and inventiveness, it has a wonderful violin cadenza in the middle. Guillaume Combet, to whom the work is dedicated, gave a stylish and urbane performance. An Exaltation of Larks by Bruce J. Taub didn't convey either rapture or birdsong to my cranky ears, but flutist Caroline Pittman invested considerable skill in her performance. She had a vibrato wide enough to let through a shriek of piccolos, but this was surely done on purpose, possibly to emulate all those unexalted larks requiring Prozac.

Cime lointaine by Violetta Dinescu is an alpine vignette far removed from those annoying cough drop ads where men in silly clothes employ huge horns to call goats. Oboist Patricia Morehead took us on a picturesque mountain journey expertly navigating the score's crags and cliffs.

But the work that still haunts me – in the worst sense of the word – is La Peste (Yersinia pestis) by Peter Gena. In no way does fault rest upon the able shoulders of Morehead, whose technical skill was always in evidence.

The composer of this pesky piece got his hands on a fragment of the plague bacterium genome and proceeded to mash it through equations and computer programs until the final product – ugly strings of notes – could be rendered on the oboe d'amore, accompanied by electronic tape. The whole pursuit seems just another misguided effort to exploit the vast amount of genetic information now widely available. Some linguists trudge through genomic sequences in search of a linguistic-genetic Rosetta Stone, and surely it won't be long before the Psychic Friends foretell your love life after you shovel a smattering of your DNA profile in their direction.

The idea that the fundamental building blocks of life might also be constructively employed in conceptual art is one of those nerdy, faddish conceits with an inevitably brief shelf life, like the idea that Al Gore could be elected president or the entire concept of dairy-free cheese.

I showed the program notes to several academics – molecular biologists and biochemists – who all got the vapors. (I would have showed them details of exactly how the work was created, but the composer did not email them to me as promised.) It's genuinely difficult to view this exercise as anything other than sausage-making. And baloney is a kind of sausage.

The local chamber collective CUBE is so fanatical about contemporary music that it goes to great lengths to uncover distinguished composers almost unknown and largely overlooked by performers in America. Works by two such composers were on the group's bountiful potpourri program presented Friday night in Columbia College's Concert Hall.

Judging by their two compositions, both written last year, Maria Niederberger and Yehudi Wyner seem to feel at home elaborating on the ideas and idioms from the middle of the last century, drawing from the reservoir of mildly dissonant sounds compiled by the likes of Bartók, Shostakovich and Hindemith.

Niederberger, who teaches college in Tennessee, cast her Concerto for Oboe and Instrumental Ensemble as a series of exchanges between the solo oboe and an assortment of instruments that includes harp, horn, flute and clarinet. The scheme is hardly novel, and there's much meandering in the three movements. What makes this 20-minute chamber concerto distinctive, however, is the gorgeous writing for the oboe whose musings are often seconded by a string quintet and garlanded in a striking way by horn calls and harp murmurs.

Patricia Morehead, to whom the work is dedicated, played her heart out. One of this city's premier oboists, she knows how to wow a crowd with her verve even when not all the notes are perfect and the intonation isn't quite on the mark--as was the case here. Her supporting cast -- especially Alison Attar (harp) and Greg Flint (horn) -- was in fine form; Philip Morehead, her husband, kept the proceedings in smooth order.

Quartet for Oboe and String Trio by Brandeis professor Wyner also puts the oboist on a pedestal. In fact, that seems to be the raison d'être for a piece that otherwise sounds like an academic's string quartet circa 1960: the oboe joins the strings as a sub for first violin or steps out for its solos. It mostly functions as an energizer that shakes the trio of strings from their broodiness. Though the lengthy music is dotted with piquant flourishes, its ruminations ultimately get wearisome, leaving the oboe's perky passages the only saving grace.

Three works by better-known local composers were also performed. CUBE member Janice Misurell-Mitchell's String Quartet No. 1 (1983), a conscientiously crafted graduate-student exercise modeled after Bartók, has way too many gestures that don't add up.

Far more succinct and assured are the Five Songs by William Russo about aspects of love set to texts of Millay, Auden and Cummings. Each is an astute character portrayal, sung with much feeling by Carol LoVerde. Augusta Read Thomas' Incantation for solo violin (1995) demonstrates the virtue of brevity. It's an elegy as intense, soulful and concise as a Bach partita. CSO violinist Cornelius Chiu eloquently conveyed its sense of inconsolable loss.

Ted Shen, Chicago Tribune, Sunday, February 27, 2000

CUBE Shows Music Needn't Be Square

It's nearly impossible to walk out of a concert by CUBE Contemporary Music Ensemble without a smile.

Not simply because the performers, among them CUBE core members Patricia and Philip Morehead, Janice Misurell-Mitchell and Caroline Pittman, are fine musicians. Not simply because their programs of contemporary chamber music, like the one Friday night at the new Columbia College Concert Hall on South Michigan, are skillful blends of the old, the new, and occasional high jinks.

The smiles bubble forth because the atmosphere at CUBE concerts is so relaxed. The CUBE musicians take their music seriously, but at their concerts, serious is never stuffy.

Friday's program, which kicked off CUBE's five-concert 1999-2000 season, offered works by three established 20th century composers, Debussy, Mario Davidovsky and Olivier Messiaen. A 1990 work by Tristan Murail honoring Messiaen was on the program, along with a world premiere by Timothy Edwards and two new collaborations between Richard Santiago, a visual artist, and CUBE musicians.

Computer-generated music popped up in several works, including Edwards' "Folding into White" performed by Pittman on flutes and Patricia Morehead on oboe and English horn. They also provided the sounds on the tape, whose exotic effects ranged from shimmering oscillations to the sound of underwater bubbles.
The piece opened with flute and oboe tightly woven in an elusive but almost-tonal melody. They pulled apart and the taped sounds appeared and disappeared like shapes in a fog, but the music had a sense of purposeful direction that kept us anxious to hear what would happen next.

In "Neon Conversations," a collaboration between Santiago and CUBE, the musicians wore derbies with neon circling the brims which flashed on and off whenever they played a note. Short sections with such titles as "The Lecture," "Gossip" and "Discussion" offered good-natured musical pictures of didactic professors and self-important busybodies. It's amazing how forceful, repeated chords can conjure memories of boring teachers.

One of the great discoveries Friday night was the new Columbia College Concert Hall, at 1014 S. Michigan, former home of the Sherwood Music School. Seating 160, the concert hall is brand new and audience-friendly with amenities including theater-style seats, good sight lines, clear acoustics, stylish design and well-located, sparkling clean restrooms.

Wynne Delacoma, Chicago Sun-Times, November 14, 1999

CUBE at Arts Club

CUBE is a collective of friends dedicated to the cause of contemporary music, so for its season finale Monday evening at the Arts Club, it cast the net of friendship far wider by presenting of local premieres of chamber works whose authors, with one exception, are mentors or close associates of Patricia Morehead, one of the group's founders. Morehead, a Canadian, naturally included three fellow countrymen: Samuel Dolin, her teacher at Toronto's Royal Conservatory, Donald Steven, her boss at Roosevelt University, and Timothy Bowlby, a junior colleague fresh with a doctorate from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The American contingent was represented by George Crumb (the exception), Ralph Shapey (Morehead's thesis advisor at the University of Chicago) as well as Janice Misurell-Mitchell, a CUBE member. Morehead tipped the scale north of the border with a song she'd dashed off just for the concert.

Not surprisingly--given the composers' varied ages--pluralism was the order of the night. "Variables" (1992) by Dolin, an elder who went through this century's stylistic tumults, is the most conservative. Scored for cello and piano, it is a set of variations on a Bach cantata as Mozart might have written them. Cellist Tsuyoshi Tsutsumi and pianist Philip Morehead (Patricia's husband) played this accomplished throwback with plenty of verve even though the teamwork was not always smooth.

Steven's "Illusions" (1971) is a showpiece for solo cello that relies on the sort of mid-century lexicon familiar from Bartok and Shostakovich for its intense, vaguely dissonant lyricism. It's well-crafted but also frightfully anonymous. Tsutsumi's performance, though, was a model of precision and ardor.

In contrast, Shapey's Lullaby (1992) and Crumb's "The Sleeper" (1984), though relatively tame, are at least distinctive. The Lullaby, which Shapey wrote for his grandkids, is a gentle exhortation whose melodic line slowly rises into a soothing murmur. Soprano Barbara Ann Martin, accompanied by Caroline Pittman on alto flute, caressed the syllables with tender grace.

Martin's voice sounded a bit strained at first in the Crumb, a setting of lines from a poem by Poe, but it turned mesmeric imitating the gradual stupor from a whiff of opium. Philip Morehead didn't have any trouble dispatching the eerie glissandos and rhythmic chimes.

Of the three works composed within the last year, Bowlby's "Imprints" is the most studious and least novel. Though it serves up splashes of lively euphonies for an ensemble of winds, vibraphone and piano, the music, for the most part, simply tosses up and down the scale. After a while, even sly chortles from the vibraphone--and the energetic playing from CUBE's winds--couldn't break the monotony.

Misurell-Mitchell's "Kiddush" continues her experiment of melding flute and voice into one. She sang and at times spoke words of a Seder blessing (in Hebrew and English) into the flute, leaving a trail of echoes. The effect was a rough-hewn outpouring of unshaken faith.

But it was Morehead's "It Is Dangerous To Read Newspapers" that seemed most relevant. Set to a Margaret Atwood poem about the cruelties of war, it's ferocious in anger and anguish while sinking into deep pessimism. Soprano Martin neatly conveyed the ambivalence urged on by Philip Morehead's vigorous pounding.

Ted Shen, Chicago Tribune, June 8, 1999

BLEND OF CLASSICS, VISUALS KICKS OFF THE MILLENNIUM

"Origins" is the theme of the first phase of a citywide, yearlong arts celebration called Project Millennium. And it informed one of the kick-off events, a collaborative concert given by CUBE and the MASS Ensemble in Columbia College's new concert hall Thursday night. Titled "Spirits and Shadows," the program was an attempt at combining the peculiar talents of these two new-music collectives -- one, classically trained, the other, visually oriented.

Brazilian composer Luis Anunciacao's "Capoeira" (1975) features the berimbao, a bouncy, twangy, one-stringed folk instrument of African origin. It provides the pulse to the melodic bursts from flute and vibraphone in this winsome take on a popular Afro-Brazilian dance. Flutist Janice Misurell-Mitchell, percussionist David Leytze and Doug Brush plucking the bow made a frolicking trio.

Another unusual instrument is the long bow, a 25-foot electronic wonder designed by MASS cofounder and sculptor Bill Close. Sounds are produced by rubbing and pulling on its (five) strings. Musically, it's the equivalent of a very loud electric violin that allows the gloved players -- Close and Tatiana Sanchez -- to sway and prance in stylized motion.

The long bow is the centerpiece of most of MASS' New Age-inspired, multimedia performances, including the three here. "Solstice" is a minimalist riff accompanied by images on an overhead monitor of floating clouds and rushing streams. It's a sincere ripoff of Philip Glass and Stan Brakhage.

The reference point for "Renaissance" is Michael Nyman's hypnotic film scores. Drum beats and cello drones garnished this sassy revelry of ersatz medieval and Gypsy dance tunes. In "Fire," oboist Patricia Morehead and drummer Brush joined forces with the long-bow duo for an irrepressibly rousing stretch of music straight out of the "Xena" soundtrack.

Two heavily rhythmic works by avant-garde veterans -- Steve Reich's "Clapping Music" and Xenakis' "Dmaathen" -- were handled with different results. In the Reich, an artful homage to an African beat pattern, one pair of clapping hands overwhelmed the other. Morehead shined in the Xenakis, her oboe bleating, hissing and soaring -- in cahoots or counterpoint with the sound and fury from an array of percussions.

Of the two vocal works on the program, Misurell-Mitchell and Catherine Slade's "Gift of Tongues" is more experimental and provocative. It quotes from the Bible's description of the Tower of Babel, and, as performed by the two creators, comprehensible words rose from a primordial ooze of moans and grunts but dissolved later into a babble of disjointed syllables. Misurell-Mitchell expertly used the flute as her other voice.

"Dance: Women's Song of the Corn," Morehead's latest addition to her opera-in-progress on the life of the Sauk chieftain Black Hawk, was performed by most of the musicians assembled. The presentation--with dance and video montage too--was a sensory overload. But the song itself, set to an Amy Lowell poem, is uncluttered, skillfully tailored to the voice and written in a style Samuel Barber would approve. It exudes loving nostalgia, and Bobbi Wilsyn, singing it, added a touch of dignity.

Ted Shen, Chicago Tribune, January 23, 1999

CLARINETISTS HELP CUBE CELEBRATE IN STYLE

If the animal world can give us a pride of lions and a gaggle of geese, then surely the musical world is entitled to its own collective nouns. A brace of bassoonists. Or a clutch of clarinetists.

As a matter of fact, a clutch of clarinetists was exactly what filled the small stage of the Arts Club of Chicago Monday to help the contemporary music ensemble CUBE celebrate its 10th anniversary season. "Clarinet Summit," indeed: CUBE's artistic directors, Patricia Morehead and Janice Misurell-Mitchell, managed to corral no fewer than nine clarinetists, plus an equal number of assisting musicians from its own ranks and from local professional ranks.

The cream of the clarinet crop was there, including Larry Combs, John Bruce Yeh and J. Lawrie Bloom of the Chicago Symphony's woodwind section; Julie DeRoche of the DePaul University faculty; Douglas Ewart and Mwata Bowden of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians; Richard Nunemaker of the Houston Symphony; David Keberle from the University of Pittsburgh; and Christine Vohs of the Chicago Chamber Music Collective.

CUBE put all this clarinet talent to productive use in a generous program typical of the group's intrepid sensibility. Two compositional streams were represented. The first was chamber works for multiple clarinets and other instruments that exploit the "new virtuosity" of late 20th Century music. The second was so-called "Third Stream" pieces that combine elements of serious new music and jazz. If the 10 works were hardly uniform in quality, at least there was enough stylistic variety to prevent aural monotony from setting in. And the performances were as capable and dedicated as any the CUBEsters have given us over the past decade.

Keberle and Morehead were responsible for the concert's world premieres. His "Clariphonic Rapture," for nine clarinets with percussion, made a pleasingly sonorous if bland impression. Her solo clarinet piece, "Jezebels," written for and played by Keberle as he moved from the back to the front of the auditorium, turned out to be a lively lexicon of new-old woodwind techniques, laced with jazz licks: Giacinto Scelsi meets Benny Goodman, as a friend observed.

Other Chicago composers represented were Howard Sandroff with his imaginative love song to his wife, "La Joie," smoothly delivered by Combs, Yeh and DeRoche; and Shulamit Ran with her formally clear-cut "Private Game," for clarinet (Bloom) and cello (William Cernota). The Bowden and Ewart pieces reflected the raucous energy of the urban black experience.

Also on the bill were the grandfather moderns Elliott Carter and Stefan Wolpe. The latter's "To the Dancemaster," sung by the wondrous soprano Barbara Ann Martin, moved to the catchy klezmer rhythms of Vohs' clarinet and Philip Morehead's piano.

Good show and happy 10th anniversary, CUBE!

John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune, May 6, 1998

"New-music's CUBE a fine companion to Rothko show The performance [of Earle Brown's December 1952] by a CUBE sextet was sly and spirited, ending with [Barbara Ann] Martin and Janice Misurell-Mitchell carrying on like a pair of taunting macaws." Ted Shen, Chicago Tribune, April, 1996.

"Winking at humor: CUBE's avant-gardism offers provocative musical enjoyment. Far too often modern music is regarded as serious fare that intimidates through its intellectual and emotional demands. But, as the experiment-minded local music collective CUBE suggested in a chamber concert Sunday afternoon at Smart Museum, a healthy portion of the musical ideas of our time is meant to be provocative fun." Ted Shen, Chicago Tribune, June, 1995.

"In many ways this multifarious concert encapsulates the performance ethos of CUBE, one of the city's leading new-music presenters. Titled "American Experimentalism: Ives to Oliveros," it surveys and celebrates the results of diverse impulses and influences that have shaped the musical vanguard in this country since the turn of the century." Ted Shen, Chicago Tribune, April, 1993.

"CUBE's concert...was a pleasure... [Their] straightforward performance style was a good one. There was a sense of welcome for the merely curious as well as new-music aficionados..." Wynne Delacoma, Chicago Sun-Times, about "Musica Europa" at Café Voltaire, May, 1992

"As part of the New Music Chicago Festival, CUBE, the freewheeling and ever-so-busy collective, offered a long program in the funky basement of Cafe Voltaire," Ted Shen, The Reader, about "Musica Europe," May 1992.

"CUBE may just Þt into a round hole", headline from June Sawyers,' "After Hours", Chicago Tribune, preview of "Musica Europa," May, 1992.

"The salute at the Arts Club was organized by the new-music collective CUBE... In a show of solidarity, a sizable contingent of area musicians packed the hall..." Ted Shen, The Reader, in a review of "Three Professors," February, 1992.

"Chicago's most exciting new music ensemble," Ted Shen, Chicago magazine, preview of the "360 Concert", February, 1992.

"...one of Chicago's liveliest avant garde ensembles," Wynne Delacoma, Chicago Sun-Times, in a preview of "Common Space, Uncommon Time," May, 1991 at Southend Music Works.

"...[a] stimulating evening...," Ted Shen, The Reader, in a review of "Naked Neon," April, 1991.

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