WORT 89.9FM Madison
Interview about Eighth Blackbird's 9/26 and 9/27 concerts in Madison
Joining me by Zoom video conference is Matthew Duvall, who is one of the co-artistic directors of the Multiple Grammy Award-winning Chamber Ensemble 8th Blackbird. They are our neighbors here in the upper Midwest. They're based in Chicago, and they like the mobsters of York. They are coming up to Madison for a brief visit to our city, and it's really great to have them be performing twice at the UW-Madison on the 26th and 27th of September. And it's, once again, it's a great pleasure to have Matthew Duvall here with us. Matthew, thank you for joining us. - It is very fun to be here. I appreciate the invitation. - So let's just get started by talking about the concert. You will be playing in the Union Theater, and then in the Hamil Music Center, first by yourselves and then with the UW-Madison Wind Ensemble. Talk to us about the programs and what we could expect. - Sure, they built a nice schedule for us while we're there, and we have the opportunity to perform two times instead of once, which will be very, very fun, and they're different programs. Thursday, September 26th will be performing on the classical series, University of Wisconsin-Madison, that will be a solo recital performed by 8th Blackbird. We'll talk more about what 8th Blackbird is and what we do in a few minutes. But that'll be just the ensemble performing by itself, and we have a nice program picked out for the evening, a couple of new things, I think, as well. One new thing for us and some new things for the audience as well. And then the next night, Friday, September 27th, will be really fun. We're performing a concerto with the University of Wisconsin Wind Ensemble. And that performance is at the Mead-Witter Foundation concert hall at the Hamo Music Center. - Could you talk more about the concerto? What is this concerto for your specific combination of instruments on Wind Ensemble? And how would you manage to get that written? - So yes, this is a concerto for chamber ensemble and Wind Ensemble. So instead of one soloist being in front of the Wind Ensemble or the larger ensemble, there's a sextet. 8th Blackbird will be up there. It's an extraordinary creation. It is more than just happy. It's really quite a phenomenon. The composer is Viet Kwong. 8th Blackbird has a nice history with Viet. Love to chat about that a little bit. It's very fun. Some years ago, this was just before COVID, 20 pre-COVID, something the US Navy Band contacted us and said we would like to commission a concerto for 8th Blackbird with US Navy Band. What do you think and what ideas do you have for who we should commission? And we thought that is really great. We had for many years, felt like collaborations with the band world and the Wind Ensembles was really an overlooked opportunity. And we had struggled, unfortunately, to find support for that concept. It was something that felt like it was a reach for people and supporters, foundations, so on. I think that there's a headspace where you think the orchestra is the point of arrival. You want an orchestra concerto, orchestra, so band. A good question mark. But it's a different world. The music and the ensemble work feels different. And there's so many musicians involved in bands around the whole country. It's really quite a large phenomenon. It's something we weren't tapped into at all. And so this phone call from the US Navy Band was just extraordinary. And then, of course, the Navy Band calls you. And that's the Armed Forces bands play full-time constantly. They're some of the best ensembles in the world. So incredible opportunity. So, of course, we said that's incredibly exciting. Give us a few minutes to think about it. And we came back with a few composers to recommend to Captain Ken, who was the conductor who contacted us. And at the top of our list was composer named Viet Kwong, very young, still younger at that time. We had met Viet through an immersive professional development program that we run called the Black Recreative Lab. In the first year of that program, 2017, Viet came. He was part of our first cohort of young professionals. We met him at that time, and we were really quite amazed. By him, and so we kept him in mind, and we were already playing a quartet of his, which will be on the Thursday program in Madison coincidentally. Well, not so coincidentally, but because we love the piece. So this whole thing slowly unfolded, pre and then post COVID, we premiered it with the Navy Band, and it's been kind of a runaway hit for us. It's around 20 minutes, and it's a real roof raiser. It's incredibly fun for the audience and for us. But one of the wonderful things, playing with the US Navy Band was so thrilling for us. One of the things that is so great about playing this in university settings is how completely psyched the students get in the course of working on the piece together and playing it, like Viet pushes all of these emotional buttons to get everybody super pumped up. I mean, it's like the climax of an action movie. It's so great. It's such an incredible success story. And so it will, I promise, is gonna be a blast. - Have you played this much in public before? - We have, I don't have the exact number, but we've probably played it about a dozen times. With the Navy Band a few times, and then around the country at some other universities. - Band music is funny because you're right. There are bands all over the country, and lots of people are going to band concerts. Here in Madison, we've got several band concerts that happen in parks over the summer, and yet there's also something about band music that scene from a certain perspective might feel insular to some people, or at least if your interpretive horizon is the orchestra, you know, that band might seem like a niche. - Okay. - So that feel like, is that, am I wrong, or is that-- - I think so. I think so. - Okay, good, I'm glad you're on. - I would offer that I think a lot more people have exposure in some touchpoint with band many more than they do with orchestras. Meaning like in elementary school, maybe they played an instrument for a little while. They were part of the elementary or high school band programs, and then you tack on the whole marching band phenomenon, and the wind and the brass experiences. And I feel like there's a lot of people who have some kind of a first degree of separation with a band experience of some kind. And then you go to college, or, you know, I don't know what, but like, somehow bands have not proliferated the way your orchestras happen. There's probably a litany of classical music history reasons for that, but in the States, especially, you know, the band world here is unlike anywhere else, globally, it's huge here. And I don't know, I feel like a lot of the audience, if they think back to go, oh yeah, I remember sort of like being at my high school band concert, or knowing people who were in it, or I played in the band when I was in school, but I haven't touched a clarinet since then, and so on. As my guess, we've had so many strong reactions from audience members, I feel like there has to be some, there's some place where they're finding personal relevance in it, not just it being something that they observed. - And of course, the part of the appeal of bands is the marching, right? - Yes, of course, yeah. - Is there any sort of movement on stage built into this piece, or is it... - No, no staging, no choreography, no. No, not in this one. It's really dynamic for us in the ensemble. And as the percussionist, I'm moving between a couple of different stations. I play my melodic instrument as a concert marimba. That's my premiere instrument, and then I move over to a drum set for certain sections and for the ending. Man, the other guys are lively and dynamic on stage, but there's no choreograph staging for this one. - Well, let's back up a bit. And for somebody who didn't know anything about "Ape Blackbird," tell us about your sex tent, and maybe some of the other projects that the organization is involved with. - "Ape Blackbird" is a classical chamber music ensemble. That's, I think, the starting point for an explanation of who we are and what we do. We have six instruments, piano and percussion, violin and cello, flute and clarinet. And among those six players, we, I feel like, we define chamber music generally as being usually one to a part, not performing in sections. And being an unconducted group. And so we play mostly notated music, mostly notated in the European tradition. And we went to conservatories and musicals, and we studied traditional, canonic material, like your great composers, Mozart and Beethoven and so on. So that's, I guess, jumping off point for an explanation. But "Ape Blackbird" really drifts between worlds. Our repertoire and our area of practice focuses on art being made today by living artists. And we center our work around that genre. So sometimes, often, a chamber music like ensemble like ours is referred to as a new music ensemble. I'm not particularly a fan of that moniker, but that's kind of a chamber music lingo for an ensemble that plays new compositions. We have always done a wide range of things. For the most of our first, we're approaching our 30th year. For most of our first 10 plus years, we really concentrated just on being the best chamber ensemble that we could be. And we tried to learn a lot of really hard pieces and play them really, really well. And all of that went pretty good. We made a career for ourselves. We started expanding into building productions for ourselves. So we are doing, we primarily have done and still do concerts, chamber music recitals, essentially, the sex tech gets on stage and plays music for a while for an audience. And that's what we're gonna do in Madison, and that's really great. Sometimes, we also, though, we do full evening-like theatrical productions. And that's not, we didn't suddenly become actors. We took chamber music and we expanded it into a fully produced genre, connected by production aesthetics, like audio and lighting and things that are very common in other arts arenas, like theater, but not so common in chamber music. But those things interested us, and we'd like the idea of creating something on a macro scale. Our concerts, having flow and a sense of over-arching shape is really important to us. We, I don't like going to a concert where somebody plays one thing, and then you kind of applaud and then you set that aside, and then you play the next thing, and then you sort of set that aside in a sort of a sequence of kind of random things all in a row that doesn't interest me so much as a program that for some reason, there's a thread that runs through all the pieces and connects the music, or diversity of repertoire is wonderful, but I would say you also want things, not just maybe, there doesn't have to be a theme that runs through, but I like there being a sense of singularity. So if someone comes to one of our concerts, I don't really want, I don't prefer that they leave going, that one thing was interesting or whatever. I like them feel like they've been to a single event within which they can find points of interest or disinterest, not liking things as fine too. So we do concerts, we do our productions, our most recent production, as well as our most recent recording, released just in July is called Composition as Explanation. That's our most recent theatrical production and one that we're still actively booking. Very excited about that. And then we have our concertos, Viet Kwong's is one, a woman named Jennifer Higdon, wrote us a concerto as well. And we had a couple of other concertos written for us additionally, so we're slowly building that repertoire. And then there's side projects with guest artists. We've done work with performance, I mean, it's hard to just rattle off. There's so many recent ones that have been really great are playing with Bryce Desner, performance poet Jay Ivey, he's based in Chicago, we just want us a second Grammy, it's an incredibly interesting person. Will Oldham, who's kind of a punk folk, he's like our Bob Dylan kind of, his moniker is Bonnie Prince Billy, if you're not familiar, but he has a range of fairly interesting things and we've done some extremely interesting work as well as a recording with him. And then we're also branching out now into other initiatives and those things are actually becoming just as much a priority for the organization as the music performance itself is. And I guess this sort of reflects an expansion in eighth Blackbird for being a chamber ensemble to being an arts organization in a broader sense. And I mentioned the Blackbird Creative Lab briefly earlier and that really has become one of our biggest priorities as an arts organization. And now we're 30 years in and this is our opportunity to mentor emerging professionals working in the phase that we were in when we left Oberlin and we're starting to establish our careers. It's a very big project for us and we're very committed to it. - Thinking about that moment 30 years ago when you were starting out as a chamber ensemble, what's different about contemporary music now from the way things were then? - Yeah, a lot. - What for you has changed over that 30 years? - That is a wonderful question and it actually helps me elaborate a little bit more on how eighth Blackbird has changed over the years because those things have been concurrent. When we were forming classical chamber music ensemble, we're still struggling against very rigorous opinions about what was appropriate music or what constituted serious music. And there were some competing schools at that time. Some people were adherents of John Cage and his work, "Other's Pierre Boulez" or "Charles Warner" in New York. And these were very serious, sometimes serial composers with an adherence to certain theory, philosophies or certain modalities. Being a new music ensemble in that context sometimes was tricky because your critics were either traditional classic music lovers who didn't prefer your repertoire because it was new and not the repertoire that was traditional and what they're accustomed to. So they're your critics, but also new music people who are advocates for new music, but think the new music you're doing is wrong are also your critics. And it's like people had to choose sides. I don't know if you've heard of the people who would talk about uptown and downtown composers in New York. And uptown composers were kind of rigid and very like spectral composers or rigorous European traditions. And then the downtown composers were breaking out of rules and breaking the rules and they were bringing rock instruments into new music. Well, so 30 years later, I feel like the trends have been really great. What has happened in chamber music, I would say across the board, but also with those of us who prioritize, whose focus is playing the music of living composers of commissioning and working on new material, is that the idea of what is okay to and what isn't has become, get the good word I wanna think of, like mesh and things flow through it in either direction. - Wide open, is that what you're saying? - Yeah, sure, sure. I'll come back, I'll get my metaphor straight and come back later. Yeah, yeah. People move between genres, ring instruments from one type of music into another music, very freely. And just there's openness and support for trying things that just feels really differently than I did a couple of decades ago. So I think things are really interesting. They're also in a way more confusing, but I think that's kind of a happy chaos full of experimenting. When you go to listen to a new music ensemble now, someone playing chamber music, you don't really know what you're gonna get. It, the possibilities are really wide and what is a chamber music ensemble now? Because, I mean, a rock band has always been a chamber music ensemble, we just haven't felt like we can call it that, you know? But now, you bring a rock band into a concert hall and it's completely fine, no. So that's great. We, in Blackbird, one of the funnest things for us is that what we do never gets boring because it's really never the same. When we pick a new composition, the instrumentations are different, the influences are different, the composers history and experience are different, they're writing stylists different, the instruments they like us to play vary. When we get on stage for a concert, we don't just, you know, we don't come out with just, I don't know, the same things every night. Violin doubles on viola, cello will play something else if the composer wants them to, an accordion or a guitar. The flute is included, everybody's open to doing anything that a composition might require that is within our ability to actually, to either play or to learn. And we're completely open to, oh, I'm not a cellist, but I can play the open strings on a cello if we're playing a drum, then I'll do that on stage and that's completely fine. I don't have to be a lifelong cellist in order to do that successfully. That's another thing that we're not hung up so much on anymore is virtuosity and that's nice too. Making good sounds together and yeah, virtuosity comes out of our practice and that's expected and totally fine and we love that. But if you're making good musical choices, the purpose of getting on site doesn't have to be virtuosity anymore. I feel like we're further at least away from the age of, I don't know, a list or, you know, this is still expected of some concerto soloists these days where you just walk on stage and if the audience doesn't hear as many notes as possible then they're disappointed, you know. And a lot of notes is fun, but that's not, you know, that's not the only thing. And it's not what makes an interesting night for me. If you're just joining us, my guest is Matthew Duvall, one of two co-artistic directors of 8th Blackbird, Chamber Ensemble in Chicago and they will be performing at the Union Theatre and at the Hammel Music Center on the 26th and 27th of September. Could you talk a little more about this composition as explanation brought up? - Yeah, yeah, David Lang came to us with a commission opportunity and an idea. The Arts Club of Chicago was approaching an anniversary and they asked David Lang to write something to commemorate the occasion and to write something for us, how wonderful. And he came up with this idea because the Arts Club in Chicago has been a place where arts are lectured upon and sure presented, but there's also lots of panels and discussion and it's a place, it's a place for thought, not just performance. So he looked back in their archives and found that Gertrude Stein had lectured there in the early 1900s, the day escapes me at the moment and he thought that was fascinating. So while he did not choose to set what she lectured on at that time at the Arts Club, he did fixate on Gertrude Stein because she had presented at the Arts Club and he chose instead to explore a work of hers, an essay called Composition as Explanation. And this essay is, it's fascinating because she's writing about how to experience art, but the way she is writing about it is itself artistic, which is a brilliant way to go about it. David loved that idea and the way that she wrote. It's not written in a way that is, she did not write it to be articulate and clear. She wrote it to force the reader to have to think and really pay attention and riddle out what she meant. So because it is not literal and spoon-fed and obvious, it makes wonderful content for setting because there's so many twists and turns and perplexities in it and it makes the listener really go, what did I hear? What did they say? Does that make sense? So he set that text in a variety of ways across 11 movements for theatrical production, eight black reproduced called Composition as Explanation. It was directed by a woman named Ann Bogart, who has an extraordinary history, primarily in New York. And it's a straight shot, about 70 minutes and a really, really fascinating evening. We've performed a few runs of it and we're hoping to book it when you're intending to do another run in Chicago at the Athenaeum Theatre in Spring '25, just around the corner, actually. So come on down for that. One of the great things is that the text that David sets in the show is not the entire essay. He picks out sections, but those sections are repeated throughout the evening. So the audience has a chance to hear them enough, to start to go, oh, aha, I understand what it means, I understand what it means, but it's not repetitive seeming because the way it is used musically and in the way that we speak and the way we act and sing and move around a stage varies constantly. So that's actually quite extraordinary to hear text in one setting and then here come back later and you go, wait, oh, that's the same text, I can't even believe it because the musical setting is so completely different. There's a lot of illusion in that, I think, on David's, David Lang's part. - And this is also recorded, right? - Yeah, we did a fun thing with that that we'd never done before. We released the recording on July 12th, but we released two versions of it. So if you go on Spotify or whatever your platform is and type in composition as explanation and click on albums, you'll get two results. And one of them says artist cut. So one version is the complete stage edition where you get all of the speaking and all of the texts is the complete show with all of the dialogue from beginning to end. And the artist cut really takes all of that out and is just the music. So it sort of depends what you want and what you're using it for. If you'd like to throw it on playlists, the artist cut is probably the better way to go 'cause it snaps right into the music. But if you want an understanding of what the show is or you wanna listen to the whole composition, then the full stage edition is the way to go. I just, it hasn't been released yet, but I was just reviewing the final cuts of a third version that's coming out that might replace the stage, the full stage edition, I'm not sure, but it's the at most version. And so it's spatial and that was amazing to hear because you really, I mean, I listened to that and you hear people from different distances and that technology is, it's almost, it's almost, it's almost, it's almost, it's eerie in a way how it tricks you into being in a space. So that at most version, it sounds like you're sitting in the theater and you hear things at different distances and different directions, it's really quite remarkable. Yeah, that hasn't been released yet though. - And is there any kind of video out there? - No video yet. We've documented the entire thing, we have really, really great footage, but we haven't edited together a full video cut yet and I would love to do that. There's a little bit of as a question of expense and doing it right, but I'm also not sure what we would do with it. I mean, you could just get permission to post it online and have it live there. I guess we're just not sure what we're gonna do with it quite yet, but we have the material to do it. - What other upcoming projects do you have going on? - Let's see, we have a new piece being written for us by Jonathan Bailey Holland. He's a very old friend, he and I went to high school together. That's pretty small world when you think about, you know, how we've both navigated careers and ended up in the same little pocket of the music world. He's a wonderful composer, extremely elegant music. He's a very professional administrator as well, in addition to his composition, he was just this past year appointed as the Dean of Music at Northwestern. So I was happy for that because that brought him to Chicago, so we're happy to have him here now. He's writing a piece for us and we should see the completed score for that at the end of 25. These projects take a long time to unfold. That's interesting that's coming up. I think we're gonna record, one of our next recordings will be an album completely of his work and I think we'll do that probably in spring 26. And then, oh, I was just corresponding earlier today with Gabriel Prokofiev and Gabriel Prokofiev is Sergei Prokofiev's grandson. And he's a composer and a house musician and a DJ. And he's done really interesting work. His most performed piece is a concerto for turntables and orchestra. And he is writing us a composition and not exactly sure what it's gonna be at, but it's so interesting that you ask me right now because in the email I just got, he had attached drafts of the movements. It's gonna be a number of them, eight or seven or nine or something. And he has sort of rough cuts of ideas. And so I'll be going into that score over the next, I told him when I replied to the email that this would take me a few weeks, probably until maybe early October to go through and work on his ideas. And the process of going back and forth like this with a composer is also kind of non-traditional very sadly, because it's kind of how pieces should really be developed because it gives the composer a constant flow of information about what it is they're working on as they go. So often composing is done in like this vacuum and the composer is expected to somehow be able to forecast, predict everything about the piece and deliver the final perfect version on the deadline date or whatever. And you can't know everything, you can't know every idea, you can't be exposed to every possibility if you're just composing in the silo. So that's not how Heath Blackburn likes to work it out. We really like a collaborative relationship. This is a wonderful example of that. So he sent me all of these rough drafts and I'll go through and I'll work on the parts the way he wrote them, but I will swap out instruments, I'll come up with different kind of materials and colors, ideas, and we'll go back and forth a little bit to try to figure out what the most exciting version of his ideas will be that we can figure out together. So this Prokofiev composition is in the works. We don't have a deadline set for that, which is actually really another really nice way to work 'cause the piece will be ready when it is ready. - Prokofiev, where is he active? - He's based in London. Yeah, and mostly in the UK. - Oh, that's fascinating. - Yeah, yeah, he's very interesting. And it's so fun how he does divide his career between being a professional DJ and then also composing. So that's pretty neat. But there's a couple of things we have in the works. Oh, back to the Blackbird Creative Lab. We do that on a multi-year cycle. This will take us down a whole another tangential road. So I'll just skip ahead to the part that's current. We're producing a lot of work in the next 18 months that'll feature performances in repertoire created by the alumni who have passed through our program and it's prior for iterations. So we teach the program in Wisconsin actually at the Berkeley's Observatory at the end of May, early June. But this next year we won't be hosting the same program we usually do. We are instead focusing on professional performances with all the people who have been part of the program. A really, really key piece of that as an extraordinary development. We're going to be working in an exceptional relationship with the Athenaeum Center for Thought and Culture in Chicago. Developing some work and partnering with them on bookings and performing. That they have made an extraordinary shift toward being a place, they seek to be a place where artists created not just presented. And this is a recent shift for them but they've created a mission to which this is central and be very interesting to see how that develops. I mean, how that benefits Chicago and the arts in Chicago in the years to come. - Well, Matthew Duvall, I feel like I could go on forever here. But maybe I will just ask, is there anything else that you would like to highlight as listeners get ready for your concerts late in September? - Well, let's see, we're working backward. The Concerto on Friday the 27th is just going to be a party. The band is going to play a program and anybody who's fans of the University of Wisconsin win ensemble should be there anyway. If Blackbird is going to play the Concerto with the band that evening and I don't recall where they're putting that on the program but we're looking forward to working and performing with that ensemble very much. And then the night before September 26th at 7.30 PM, we're on the annual classical series and we'll be playing a program of seven or eight or nine pieces. I don't exactly remember off the top of my head. But it's a combination of things that have been written for us over the years, mostly things that have been written for the ensemble. Let me think if there's any exceptions to that. One, one exception. The rest of the piece was created through 8th Blackbird. The Ari Sussman was as a composer and he was one of our Lab Fellows. Nico Mule has been a friend of the ensembles for many years and he wrote us a piece called "Double Speak", Amy Beth Kirsten was commissioned by 8th Blackbird many years ago to create another one of our theatrical productions called "My Colobines Paradise Theater" and we're extracting one of the songs from that called "My Charming Murderer", myself and my other founding, Cola Elisa Kaplan will be performing that as a duo. Viet Kwong, who wrote "The Concerto" we're playing on Friday night, wrote another piece called "Electric Aroma". He wrote that for the Blackbird Creative Lab for a quartet that included a saxophone and we made Viet created a version for us that included flute instead of saxophone and it's an incredibly fun quartet so we'll be hearing a little bit more of Viet's music which I think is a nice preface to "The Concerto" the next night. Joan Tower, incredibly esteemed American composer, we're very lucky to have had her write us a new sex set a couple of years ago and we'll be performing that. That's gonna be our closer on the concert. We're gonna pull one movement from composition as explanation under the program. It's the eighth movement, it's called "Intertext". That's just a few minutes long but we thought it would be nice to bring something from that show onto our live concerts and then we have a new addition to the program that was suggested by our violinist, Mayani De Silva and it's called "Storm Drain" by a New York based composer and clarinetist named Ken Thompson and that is a duo for violin and bass clarinet and they do, the violinist is looping parts and so stacking up versions of herself that she plays along with. They were excited about playing that and it sounded like a great thing to program so we stuck it in there and it found a nice program for every nice, we found a nice program order for everything the whole concert should flow very smoothly. We don't like to take intermissions and so it'll just be a straight shot for about 70 minutes or so. Yeah, yeah, we're gonna have a fun night. We have a good time on stage. We like playing together. It's really nice. - Well, Matthew De Silva, thank you so much for joining us on WORT. It's great to talk to you and we'll all be looking forward to the concert. - We are really looking forward to coming to Madison so this invitation was wonderful to receive and I've had a great time talking with you.
Interview by WORT's Peter Haney with Matthew Duvall of Eighth Blackbird, on the ensemble's upcoming performance in Madison and 30 years playing new classical music. The interview aired on WORT, 89.9-FM, Madison on 9/17/2024.