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Madeline Raynor: Meet Larry and Arlene Dunn

[Editor: this piece was originally published December 6, 2013 on “Fearless and Loathing,” an independent Oberlin student blog later renamed “Disdainful Youth” which has sadly suspended publication. We are reposting this here to ensure it does not disappear into oblivion.]

Larry and Arlene Dunn at The Local

The Internet is a crazy, overwhelming place, and Fearless and Loathing wholeheartedly participates in it. We’re a website, but we also use Facebook and Twitter, all formats in which information flies at you fast. We put out this information into the void to voice our opinions, to share, to relate; but how often do we actually achieve a connection with our fans and followers? As a writer, Arts and Entertainment Editor, and Social Media Manager at Fearless and Loathing, I tend to be hyper-aware of our online presence. Perhaps obsessively so.

Starting last semester, Larry and Arlene Dunn became one of our most prolific fans. Through their Twitter handle, @ICEfansArleneLD, and their similarly joint Facebook profile, they expressed their support through likes, comments, and retweets until I became intrigued. By then, I was so used to seeing notifications from them that I felt like they had always been there. But I knew nothing about them. Who were they? How did they find F+L? Whoever they were, they had an extremely active social media presence. A glance at their social media profiles indicated that they were an older married couple who were huge music fans and wrote for a number of music publications.

I began to put together bits and pieces of who our mysterious readers were. I learned by reviewing (read: stalking) their online relationship with us that they followed us on Twitter on February 15, 2013. They slowly started interacting with us and I followed them back a couple months later. They tweeted back:

One night in October I was feeling restless and yearned to uncover one of life’s mysteries. I decided to contact Larry and Arlene Dunn. I couldn’t find an email address, so I didn’t know how to get in touch with them other than a Facebook message. The professional journalist in me was dying inside. I opened with: “Hi, you don’t know me, but I’d like to know you!”

A week later, I met them on a Sunday at The Local. They were all smiles. They looked exactly like their Twitter picture. I explained my purpose while they ordered tea and coffee. I wanted to interview them about music, journalism, social media, their Oberlin connection, and how they had become the enigmatic online royalty of Oberlin, Ohio (I didn’t say that last part). I noticed Arlene had brought a pad and pencil, as if they were ready to interview me. Like true journalists, they were always at the ready. I explained that I was going to double record the interview on my phone and my laptop. I don’t have a recorder. (I know, I know.) “Is it too loud in here?” “Did you test the recording?” They were full of well meaning journalistic concern.

Larry was born in Detroit on April 20, 1949. Arlene was born in Boston on June 17, 1942. Arlene grew up in a middle class family in a Jewish neighborhood. She went to a public, all girls prep school, and then graduated from Brandeis University with a degree in math. Larry grew up in suburban Detroit in a Catholic neighborhood and went to a city-wide Jesuit prep school.

College was eye-opening for Arlene. “I got to understand that there was a big wide world out there beyond my Jewish enclave,” she said. “I became very politicized.” Upon graduating, she moved to New York and started to volunteer in the New York office of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Arlene ended up going Arkansas to work for SNCC in 1964 and worked there for 15 months, until she decided her time there was up. “I left because I felt [SNCC] needed to be led by Black people, and that it wasn’t really right for me to be there.” She then returned to Boston and became part of a group called People Against Racism (PAR), which was predominantly made up of white allies who had spent time in the South. In 1968 after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., PAR became more prominent. Arlene moved to Detroit to help PAR form a national organization, and that’s when she met Larry.

At a certain point Arlene interjected into her account. “I have no idea how much of this history you know,” and when I shrugged sheepishly, she said forgivingly, “One of the things I like to do actually is talk to young people and youth groups about my involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, first of all, to give them a little history, second, a little personal history, and third, and most importantly in my view, is to get some activism going again to get some people inspired to fulfill their dreams for making this country a better place to live.”

Larry graduated high school in 1967 and went to the University of Dayton. He only lasted a semester, unsatisfied with the conservative environment and repressed political culture. “Oberlin would have been a perfect place for me to go, where activism was encouraged, not just tolerated,” he said. “At Dayton, it bordered on illegal.” He dropped out and moved back to Detroit, “more interested in being an activist than a student.” Larry returned to Detroit and helped found Yipfugs (Youth for Peace Freedom and Justice), a young people’s anti-war organization. Larry’s organization became allied with Arlene’s organization, PAR.

At this point, Larry and Arlene were in the same place at the same time. They met at a party and made an instant connection. 

Larry would hang out in Arlene’s office at PAR and throw darts at a Lyndon Johnson dartboard and talk about war, race, imperialism, and gender equality. Larry believed that men and women were equal—a rare belief for men in the ‘60s. According to Larry, “At that point we probably thought we were plotting to overthrow the government.”

Their friendship soon became a romance. Larry moved out of his house after his father got angry over some pro-Communist leaflets. He moved into Arlene’s apartment, which had become a refuge for other activists who were facing similar problems at home. Soon began a romantic relationship that surprised both of them. Arlene is seven years older than Larry, and at that time she was 26 and he was 19. Arlene’s thought process was along the lines of “This was just going to be some kind of little fling. No future in this.” That wasn’t the case. “45 years later here we are.”

In August 1969, Larry and Arlene got married in front of their community. The wedding was meant to be outdoors, but bad weather drove it inside to a movement church basement in Detroit. Of course, no one can really describe it better than they can, being the writers that lived it. They wrote this down, like many other events in their life, for posterity.

Picture the atmosphere: “Arlene made matching dashikis—brightly colored and ornately patterned, modeled after African ceremonial robes.” The guests were “hundreds of young radicals in their finest hippy garb, along with pockets of straights— notably Arlene’s mother Goldie and stepfather Al, [Larry’s] parents, some relatives and neighbors. The hippies reeked of pot smoke, the straights of Chanel #5 and Old Spice. Rising above the noise and intermingling scents, our favorite local rock band was jamming Come on Baby Light My Fire and Sunshine of Your Love.”

Picture the ceremony: “The vow [was] an original, so perfect for its time, hand-lettered in calligraphy on a scroll made from a window shade.”

The 23rd Day of Leo, 1969 Because of the way we love each other, we, Arlene and LD, have decided to live our lives together. And we declare that we will act not only as individuals, but also as a unit until that union inhibits our growth rather than stimulates it.

“Everyone gathers in a circle, sitting on the floor. Arlene hands out wild flowers—for Peace. Larry hands out peaches—for Sustenance. We jointly recite our vow, as a promise to all assembled, with no official witness for the state. We conclude with a massive group hug, readily given. And everyone signs our wedding scroll in witness. The celebration was a potluck supper, featuring hot dogs, followed later in the evening (for the hippies only) by an endless night of partying and carrying on in all the special manners the ‘60s had to offer.”

They weren’t legally married that day. “We had decided that what really mattered to us, and, we thought should really be what matters at all, was to stand up in front of our community and announce our love and commitment to each other. So we did just that. And to hell with the state. It was none of their business, so we burned the marriage license! This pesky legal detail we finally did take care of several months later with a few signatures on a newly registered license.”

After years in the civil rights and anti-war movements, Larry and Arlene started to become disillusioned, both with the conflict over violent vs. nonviolent protest and the issues of women’s liberation that were going unaddressed within PAR. These problems and others ultimately broke PAR up.

From there, Larry and Arlene wanted to “live in the country and be as self sustaining as possible and try to go back to the ideas [of the movement] on a small scale.” They were in a food co-op in Detroit, part of a statewide federation of food co-ops. “We felt a real sense of empowerment through this organization that we could create something alternative to mainstream America.”

Larry and Arlene Dunn on Maple Ridge Farm in Ferry, Michigan, 1973

For a few years, they moved around a lot. They lived in Washington D.C., California, and Arkansas before moving to Chicago in 1980, where Larry graduated from Elmhurst College with a degree in computer science. They bought a 20-acre farm in Indiana for a weekend getaway and ended up moving there in 1990. They named it Acorn Ridge Gardens.

Their interest in Oberlin is inextricably linked to how they became music journalists. They had both loved music all their lives. They listened to the popular music of the day. When Arlene was a teenager it was rhythm and blues, for Larry it was rock and roll. Next came folk, which was deeply embedded in the protest movement. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, etc. Next came jazz, and classical followed. They slowly began to discover the genre of contemporary classical music that was being written at this moment. Kronos Quartet was the gateway, then Philip Glass, then eighth blackbird, which they learned was formed at Oberlin College.

They knew about Oberlin from the political scene, but soon learned about the Conservatory as well. Upon learning that the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) was also formed here, they thought, “there’s something interesting over there at Oberlin.” At the same time they started seeing Kendal advertisements in the back of The New Yorker: “a new kind of retirement living, 400 free concerts a year.” It was tempting. Their farm in Indiana was getting harder and harder to take care of.

They first came to visit Kendal about two and a half years ago. They were enchanted, despite the fact that they came to Oberlin during final exam week, not a very cheery time. Needless to say, there were no concerts going on. They decided to visit again to do some recon of the events, particularly to make sure the concerts were up to snuff.

They visited again over Winter Term in 2012, which coincided with a program new to Oberlin: The Rubin Institute for Music Criticism. Four prestigious concerts. One week. A meeting of the greatest music critics working today. There was also an audience critic competition: audience members could write reviews to compete for a $1,000 prize. “We thought: we’re going over there, we have nothing else to do, let’s see if we can figure out how to write about music.” They didn’t win, but they did find out that they loved music criticism.

They were loyal followers of ICE. At one workshop in Chicago, they introduced themselves to Claire Chase ‘01,the founder and Artistic Director of ICE who also spoke at the Rubin Institute. They told her they were writing reviews in Oberlin, and she immediately recruited them to write for ICE’s blog. Their reviews were very well received. “Every time we went to an ICE concert, they were running up and hugging us, saying how glad they were that we were doing this.” Eventually, there weren’t enough ICE concerts to satisfy their desire to write. 

After they conquered online music criticism, they tackled social media. “When we started writing, we had no interest in social media. When we wrote for ICE, the social media editor would have to send us an email with a link to our article and a link to the tweet and Facebook post promoting it.” When they saw how useful social media could be in connection with blogging, they decided to jump in. They started a joint Twitter account and quickly accumulated a following of people who knew them from the ICE blog. Twitter, they discovered, could form a great community of people making noise about the things they love: in this case, contemporary classical music. A joint Facebook profile soon followed, because they wanted to reach the portion of their audience that wasn’t on Twitter. But they keep their Facebook profile strictly business: no selfies, no emojis, no mundane status updates. According to Larry: “I’m not trying to use it to run our social life.”

Their fame was spreading throughout the contemporary music community. They saw an update on Twitter from Thomas Deneuville, the Editor in Chief of I Care If You Listen (ICIYL), an online magazine on contemporary classical music, advertising that they were looking for more writers. Most of the writers were composers and the others had a solid background in music, but they figured it couldn’t hurt to ask. Larry inquired, and Deneuville responded almost immediately, and said “Larry, I know exactly who you are, I love your work, and I would be honored if you would write for us.” It turns out he knew them from their work on the ICE blog.

Larry and Arlene making some noise.

They started writing for ICIYL in July 2012 and quickly rose in the ranks. In October they became the contributing editors in charge of concert reviews, a weighty responsibility. The same month, with their newfound audience in mind, they tweeted about coming for another visit to Oberlin, and learned that they had attracted the attention of Ma’ayan Plaut and Will Roane, the social media coordinators for the College and Conservatory, respectively. The four met and became friends. It was a meeting of social media royalty.

They seemed cool, calm, and collected about the burden of representing a minority of adults with technology expertise. Larry has a background in computer science, so “there’s not as much of mystery as people our age might have. The basics of Twitter are not that hard to learn. All it took was the motivation and reason to do it.” There you have it. Social media is inherently user friendly.

When their jobs aren’t keeping them busy, you can be sure they’re going to at least three concerts a week in Oberlin. Then add schoolwork on top of that: both are auditing classes. Arlene is taking Introduction to African American Music and Larry is taking Music Criticism. Arlene’s professor set up a hashtag on Twitter for the class, and in a room full of college students, Arlene is the one who tweets the most.

We parted because they were going to a concert soon, and had homework to do later. But even facing the drudgery of late Sunday homework cramming, they were content. “We came to Oberlin to be busy.” Larry and Arlene are certainly on their way to being as busy as the average Oberlin College student. Say hi if you see them in the audience at Warner Concert Hall or in the crowd at the ‘Sco. And of course, follow them on Twitter.

Further reading: Follow Larry and Arlene on Twitter Read their personal blog, Acornometrics The International Contemporary Ensemble blog I Care If You Listen

[acornometrics]

5 Preguntas a Maestro Guido Lopéz Gavilán (Cuban composer and conductor)

[Editor: In mid-November 2015, the American Composers Forum will lead an artist delegation of 15 composers and musicians  to the 28th annual Havana Festival of Contemporary Music at the invitation of festival director Guido Lopéz Gavilán, one of Cuba’s most celebrated composers and conductors.  We recruited LA-based composer Sage Lewis to interview Maestro Lopéz Gavilán to learn more. Lewis is a frequent visitor to Cuba, who for over 15 years has worked with Cuban and American artists to co-create multimedia productions using music, art, film, and theater. The interview is presented here in its original Spanish language version. An English language translation, 5 Questions to Guido Lopéz Gavilán (composer), is featured on I CARE IF YOU LISTEN.]

¿Qué es la historia del Festival de Música Contemporánea? ¿Cómo funciona, quién presenta música, qué pública viene a escuchar, y qué son las cosas más interesantes que van a suceder este año? Qué espera usted con esta gran delegación de American Composers Forum en este Festival de Música Contemporánea?

El Festival fue fundado en 1984 por iniciativa de la Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba y desde entonces se ha celebrado anualmente, con excepción del año 1992 cuando la difícil situación económica que afrontó el país impidió realizarlo.

Entre sus iniciadores se encuentran los compositores Harold Gramatges, Carlos Fariñas, Leo Brouwer. Juan Blanco y Roberto Valera, conjuntamente con los intérpretes Evelio y Cecilio Tieles. Desde 1993 es presidido por el compositor y director orquestal Guido López Gavilán .

Este evento se ha caracterizado por la amplitud de sus selecciones musicales en las que se incluyen distintas generaciones de compositores cubanos, además de los mas reconocidos creadores internacionales de los siglos XX y XXI, En cada edición pueden escucharse numerosos estrenos mundiales y decenas de estrenos en Cuba interpretados por nuestros mas destacados músicos, así como por excelentes artistas de muy diversos paises, Las conferencias, clases magistrales, conversatorios y encuentros teóricos complementan estos días de intenso intercambio musical.  

Ya es costumbre que en nuestros festivales se cuente con la participación de la Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional, con los principales coros del país y con los mas destacados solistas y agrupaciones de cámara. La música electroacústica tiene también su espacio en estos eventos.  

Durante estos años ha sido un orgullo haber contado con la presencia de compositores tan prestigiosos como Krzsystof Penderecki, Luigi Nono, Hans Werner Henze, Tadeuz Baird, Sten Hanson, Gerardo Gandini, Marlos Nobre, Ramón Barce entre otros muchos que nos han honrado con su presencia.  

La participación de una representación de American Composers Forum en este festival ha despertado gran interés en el público y en los músicos cubanos. Deseamos escuchar sus obras, compartir con ellos y estrechar nuestra amistad.   ¿Qué espera usted para la música contemporánea en Cuba y los Estados Unidos con el avanzamiento de las relaciones de nuestros gobiernos? ¿Qué son los deseos más grande de la comunidad de música contemporánea al respeto de las nuevas opertunidades que son recientamente posibles entre nosotros?

No obstante las restricciones que han dificultado los viajes de artistas norteamericanos, frecuentemente hemos disfrutado de la presencia en nuestro festival de excelentes músicos provenientes de Estados Unidos. Ellos siempre han recibido una calurosa acogida por parte del público cubano.

La situación actual promete propiciar un mayor auge del intercambio entre nuestros pueblos. Tenemos el deseo de que esta nueva etapa facilite no solo el conocimiento de las obras musicales, sino también el de los creadores e intérpretes de ambos países a fin de que puedan surgir iniciativas dirigidas a lograr una mayor cooperación..

En los Estados Unidos se escucha frequentamente que la música es la sangre y la vida de la cultura Cubana. Desde la perspectiva de un artista musical, qué significa la música a su cultura? Muchos generos de música y danza han nacido en esta islita durante los siglos 19 y 20. ¿Qué son las inovaciones actuales y para dónde va la música cubana ahora?

Efectivamente, la música ha jugado un papel protagónico en la formación de la nacionalidad cubana. Aquí se ha producido una fusión de elementos musicales -originados principalmente en el continente africano y en el continente europeo- que ha dado lugar a una música  de gran riqueza y con características muy propias.

También es necesario señalar la notable presencia de elementos musicales norteamericanos en distintos géneros de la música cubana y viceversa; la presencia de nuestros ritmos en importantes géneros nortemericanos,sobre todo durante la primera mitad del siglo XX.

La música cubana cuenta con magníficos exponentes de nuestros géneros tradicionales y tambi'en de los actuales. Uno de los mas brillantes ejemplos es justamente el jazz; a cada instante surge un excelente jazzista, tanto en el piano, como en la trompeta, el saxofón, la guitarra o en la percusión.

Es también frecuente hallar elementos jazzísticos en las composiciones corales y de cámara de las generaciones mas recientes.

La formación de excelentes músicos egresados de nuestras escuelas de arte garantiza un alto nivel para el futuro musical cubano.Es necesario lograr una mejor y mayor difusión de la música que posee altos niveles artísticos, pues es habitual que por diferentes medios se divulgue basicamente aquella música que responde a patrones superficiales.  

Nos encantaría saber más sobre su propio estética como compositor. Usted se ha dedicado a componer música de orquesta, música de coro, música de cámara, con muchas influencias musicales de afuera y de adentro de su país. ¿Específicamente, qué explora e investiga usted en su música hoy y qué tipo de obras está usted componiendo ahora?

Como la mayor parte de los compositores abordo en mis obras diferentes facetas, pero puedo decir que en mi música con frecuencia es posible hallar elementos provenientes de la música popular cubana elaborados con recursos propios de las música contemporánea, tales como poliarmonía, aleatorismo y efectos no convencionales, en los que está presente habitualmente una dósis de broma y de alegría. Esto no quiere decir que deje de transmitir solemnidad, lirismo o culminaciones dramáticas según lo requiera el mensaje sonoro.  

En la actualidad estoy trabajando en una ¨ópera de cámara¨ que tiene como centro al gran compositor cubano Alejandro García Caturla¨, quien fuera asesinado en 1940 cuando contaba solo con 34 años de edad. Soy  también el autor del argumento, en el que abordo algunos rasgos de la existencia de García Caturla, sus convicciones, sus conflictos y sus diálogos con la vida y con la muerte. Confío en que pueda terminarla proximamente para estrenarla en el 2016.     

¿Quienes son otros compositores cubanos interesantes que usted le gusta a lo mejor no conocemos bien todavía en los Estados Unidos por el aislamiento de cultura que ha existido entre nosotros por tantos años?

Afortunadamente, podemos contar con varias generaciones de compositores cubanos que se encuentran en plena actividad. Cada año son estrenadas en el Festival de La Habana numerosas obras de decenas de creadores. Algunos de larga y prestigiosa trayectoria (como el maestro Alfredo Diez Nieto quien el próximo mes de Diciemobre cumplirá 97 años de edad) y otros como José Víctor Gavilondo, Wilma Alba Cal, Ariannys Mariño, Ernesto Oliva, Víctor Pelegrín, Javier Iha, Maureen Reyes, Jorge Denis (quienes tienen poco mas de 20 años).

Algunos de nuestros compositores de notable talento han obtenido becas o contratos en Universidades extranjeras, desde las cuales desarrollan su labor. Este es el caso de Louis Aguirre, Keyla Orozco, Ailem Carvajal, Evelin Ramón, Mónica O´Reilly (cuyas edades fluctúan entre los 30 y 40 años).

Otros de mayor edad, radican en Cuba donde desarrollan su labor creadora y además ejercen como profesores en diferentes niveles de nuestra enseñanza musical. Son los que han sembrado durante largos años y continúan trabajando para el futuro; Roberto Valera, Juan Piñera, Héctor Angulo, José Loyola, Jorge Garcíaporrúa, Jorge López Marín, Eduardo Martín, Beatriz Corona, siguiendo las pautas legadas por Carlos Fariñas, Harold Gramatges, Juan Blanco, Edgardo Martín.

Creadores cubanos como Leo Brouwer, Aurelio de la Vega, Tania León, Sergio Fernández Barroso, Flores Chaviano, enriquecen nuestra música en el ámbito internacional, tanto desde Cuba como desde diferentes países.  

[acornometrics]

George Lewis: The Past is Prologue

Editor’s Note: This profile of composer and cultural philosopher George Lewis first appeared, in a slightly different form, as the cover story in Issue #10 of the I CARE IF YOU LISTEN Magazine (for iOS and Android devices). We are reposting it here with links to performances of George’s music and other materials. We are thrilled if this profile succeeds in bringing further much-deserved attention to George’s music. We appreciate, and concur, with Ensemble dal Niente conductor Michael Lewanski’s comment when the article first appeared: “George is one of the most unique and brilliant artists working today, and this article captures a bunch of things I love about him—the integrity of his artistry, his perpetual self-reinvention, and a certain contradictoriness that keeps him unpredictable all the time in the best possible way.”

George Lewis (photo: Emily Peregrine)

INTRODUCTION

George Lewis is a burly bear of a man with an infectious laugh that, like his music, is pure joy to hear. In a 40-plus-year career, so far, his many-faceted interests have led him to explore vast territory as a performer, improviser, composer, musicologist, writer, and cultural philosopher. His work in many realms has earned wide acclaim and awards such as a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002, an Alpert Award in the Arts in 1999, a U.S. Artists Walker Fellowship in 2011, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. Since moving to New York in 2004 to fill the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music chair at Columbia University, Lewis has concentrated his creative energies on composing fully-notated works for diverse ensembles that are delighting performers, critics, and audiences around the world. A long, fascinating path has led Lewis to this point in his career where he is producing a steady stream of commissioned works for prominent contemporary music organizations like International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Dal Niente, and Oberlin Conservatory Contemporary Music Ensemble. In his most ambitious work to date, Lewis and a team of collaborators are crafting the experimental opera Afterword, to be premiered at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago in 2015. Get ready for an opera unlike any the world has experienced so far. 

BACKGROUND

Although Lewis’ music has its genesis on the hard-knocks South Side of Chicago, he had the good fortune to attend the University of Chicago Laboratory School, where his interests in music (trombone), philosophy, and many other topics were encouraged and nurtured. In 1970 he headed for Yale University, intending to major first in political science, then in music. A chance encounter in the summer following his second year at Yale changed his course, when he began a lifelong involvement with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), where he was attracted to its combination of fearless experimentation and artistic communitarianism. Lewis decided to take a year off school to work with AACM musicians and study composition at the AACM School with Muhal Richard Abrams. When he returned to Yale he dropped the music major to focus on philosophy, and turned to the study of musical improvisation from a phenomenological perspective. 

In the 1970s, Lewis was earning growing recognition as a trombonist and composer/improviser in ensembles with fellow AACM members Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, and Douglas Ewart. He was also branching out to work with other kindred spirits, like John Zorn, Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, and Fred Frith in New York and overseas. Sparked by an interest in the nascent use of interactive computer technology in music performance, Lewis moved to Paris in the 1980s to work at IRCAM, where he did groundbreaking development work that culminated in the Voyager music software system. An academic opportunity through contacts he made in Paris lured Lewis to the University of California, San Diego in the 1990s, where he cultivated his deepening interest in the musicology of experimental music. As the new millennium arrived, Lewis says, “the opportunity at Columbia in New York felt like going home.” And that homecoming has provided the impetus for this ongoing onslaught of new compositions. 

FOCUS ON NOTATED MUSIC

Growing interest in Lewis’ through-composed work was sparked by his North Star Boogaloo (1996), for percussion and fixed media, written at UCSD for Steven Schick, with a recorded spoken-word text by poet Quincy Troupe. It may be his most-performed work, Lewis says: “I get requests for the materials every year during recital season.” When he got to Columbia, he found it a conducive place for building on that platform. “I walked into a very supportive and encouraging environment with colleagues like Melissa Smey [Executive Director of the Arts Initiative and Miller Theatre] and Richard Carrick, who I knew at UCSD, and eager performers like Wet Ink Ensemble, who were mostly Columbia students at the time,” Lewis relates. He was also strongly energized by the weekly composition seminars on campus. By 2007-8, he realized that composing fully notated music is where he wanted to channel his creativity and see how far he could take that. “I realized that meant I had to develop a consistent practice,” Lewis says, ”one that enables adhering to schedules and keeping the works flowing.”  That started him researching the methodologies of other composers and retooling how he approaches his work. 

Percussionist Steven Schick (photo: Bill Dean)

In the process, Lewis has also reexamined his own musical aesthetic. “Works do come from places,” he says. “There’s a community of thought and culture behind every composition, and that is going to be audible in what you do.” Lewis describes his own cultural stance as cosmopolitan. As he puts it: “the past is prologue; where you’ve been is a prelude to where you’re headed.” And where he is headed is to be a conduit for the polyglot of influences he has experienced over the years—jazz, free jazz, improvisation, African American culture, visual art, western classical, avant garde, and contemporary music forms, and more—without limitations or genre pigeonholing. “The furthest thing from my mind is trying to simply translate something as complex and nebulous as the African American experience,” he says, “I’m just trying to make cool sounds.” Lewis’ insatiable appetite for uncovering new cultural threads to incorporate into his music can be heard in the “cool sounds” of his recent works, which bristle with raw energy in meticulously ordered chaos.

SURVEY OF RECENT WORKS

Lewis first connected with ICE when co-Artistic Director and clarinetist Joshua Rubin inquired about playing Shadowgraph, 5 (1977), which he had discovered on the original Black Saint recording George Lewis: Shadowgraph. “I sent Josh the score and ICE started playing it all over the world in spectacular fashion; they play it much better than we ever did,” Lewis enthuses. That budding relationship led to an ICE commission for a new work for sixteen players, The Will To Adorn (2011), which is named for a section of Zora Neale Hurston’s germinal 1934 Harlem Renaissance essay "Characteristics of Negro Expression." Hurston discusses the African American cultural tradition of adornment, which she characterizes as “decorating a decoration.” As ICE’s Rubin puts it, Lewis builds multiple layers “around solo lines that are literally adorned through ornamentation—inflections of the musical line that add motion, direction and complexity. An interesting anti-climax occurs mid-piece when the motion slows down enough, and the texture thins out enough to make the adornments themselves the prominent music, in a strange, bassy, burbling minimalism.”

The Will to Adorn was premiered by ICE, with Schick conducting, at a Miller Theater Composer Profile concert arranged by Smey in November 2011. Music critic Steve Smith, writing for the New York Times, called the work “a lavish charm bracelet of exuberant shades and explosive gestures. Absorbing in scope and expressive in detail, the piece offered compelling evidence of Mr. Lewis’s prodigious imagination and persuasive skill.” The work was subsequently given its European premiere in June 2014 at Southbank Centre by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, at the behest of resident composer Julian Anderson, who first met Lewis at IRCAM in the 1980s where they found a lot of interests in common. Anderson, in his program notes, describes the piece as “celebrating the colourful hats worn by African American women, and celebrating adornment and colour generally for their own sake, it is a joyous explosion of sound and energy that involves almost everyone in the ensemble all the time, yet has plenty of contrast and a wonderfully surprising narrative shape.”

2013-14 might be called Lewis’ “Ohio Period.” He was both Composer-in-Residence at Oberlin Conservatory and the featured composer at the 34th annual Bowling Green New Music Festival at the MidAmerican Center for Contemporary Music (MACCM) at Bowling Green State University, resulting in two commissions for large ensemble works. MACCM commissioned Lewis to write Assemblage (2013, for nine musicians) for Chicago-based Ensemble Dal Niente, the featured ensemble at the 2013 festival.

Lewis told Dal Niente conductor Michael Lewanski that Assemblage is a piece where "I encourage listeners to catch the bus and go along for the ride, unburdened by expectations of teleologies or global form." Indeed, this is a manic 16-minute thrill ride for the ears. According to Lewanski, it employs constant, unexpected shifts of tempo, timbre, and texture. He calls it “a delight to listen to. There is something about it that resembles our modern life -- a constant uncontextualized TV-channel-changing, as if the piece is looking at its phone and alternately checking its email, Facebook and text messages.” Fortunately, Assemblage should soon be available for all to hear on an upcoming Ensemble Dal Niente recording. 

George Lewis master class at Oberlin Conservatory with composition student Peter Kramer (photo: Larry Dunn)

Lewis spent fall 2013 and spring 2014 residencies at Oberlin Conservatory conducting master classes with composition students, improvising from his laptop with students in the Technology in Music and Related Arts (TIMARA) program, and lecturing on “The Train as Metaphor in African American Music and Art.” During that time, he also composed Flux (2014, for sixteen players), for the conservatory’s Contemporary Music Ensemble (CME) and dedicated it to the memory of Wendell Logan, a longtime Conservatory faculty member and founder of its Jazz Program. Flux is inspired by JamPact JelliTite (for Jamila), a 1988 painting by Jeff Donaldson (1932-2004), and is full of “jump cuts…a recursive sense of decorating a decoration predominates,” Lewis states in his program notes. “The work features a relentlessly high-contrast sensibility; even quiet, contemplative passages never really come to rest.” 

JamPact JelliTite (for Jamila), by Jeff Donaldson

According to Timothy Weiss, Director of Oberlin’s Contemporary Music Division and conductor of the CME, they do not require composers-in-residence to compose a new piece. But Weiss says that Lewis “being the remarkably prolific composer that he is, wanted us to play a new work during his time here. It was a great thrill for me and the performers to work on Flux with George and he was able to make a significant imprint on the shape and energy of the performance.”

Also in 2014, Lewis had his second piece for symphony orchestra, Memex, performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony and its Principal Guest Conductor Ilan Volkov, a longtime admirer of Lewis’ work. (His first, Virtual Concerto, was debuted a decade earlier by the American Composers Orchestra.) Symphony orchestra commissions are rare for most contemporary composers and can be a daunting challenge. For Lewis, it became a little easier when he realized “I could simplify the task by thinking of the orchestra as a giant multi-track synthesizer.” 

The name Memex is drawn from a 1945 essay in The Atlantic by Vannevar Bush titled “As We May Think.” Bush imagines a technological breakthrough that prefigures the internet and the world wide web, a “memex,” a mechanical supplement to one’s own memory using inference and association to tap into vast reservoirs of stored knowledge. Lewis found in this a fruitful metaphor for his composing process, as he states in the program notes for the piece. “Engagements with musical structures that operate in the manner of the memex and the Web can present a fecund combination of indeterminacy, agency, memory, and the ineffable moment of choice, all of which link composition out of real time with listening in the moment.”

Memex was premiered in February 2014 at City Halls in Glasgow, with subsequent global broadcast on BBC3’s Hear and Now program in April. The work explodes into a torrent of brilliant colors with the orchestra at full tilt, then unfurls into a maze to which there are as many solutions as there are listeners. Memex was given its second performance in November 2014 by the Radio Symphony Stuttgart, conducted by maestro Volkov. 

AFTERWORD: THE OPERA

Since 2013, Lewis and his collaborators, director Sean Griffin and media/theater artist Catherine Sullivan, have been developing an expansive experimental opera called Afterword. The title comes from the concluding chapter of Lewis’ definitive history of the AACM, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (2008). In the book’s “Afterword” chapter, Lewis stages a virtual, cross-generational, time-bending meeting of AACM members past and present to summarize the major themes of the work in high relief. This meeting of AACM luminaries, some of whom never met in real life, is drawn from more than 90 interviews Lewis conducted during his research and is the jumping-off point for the opera’s libretto. 

Catherine Sullivan and Sean Griffin

Sullivan and Griffin have worked together for over 15 years, “creating historically minded, personally voiced performances in immersive theatrical environments that deploy unexpected turns of logic, deconstructed modes of behavior, and a very tangible and essential sense of ensemble that grows out of an iterative development process based in improvisation,” according to Lewis. The team has combined forces to workshop the opera in a University of Chicago course titled “Improvisational Dramaturgy,” sponsored by an Andrew Mellon Fellowship for Arts Practice and Scholarship through the University’s Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry.

While nominally an opera, Afterword is breaking with opera conventions in multiple dimensions. The performances will combine “pre-structured music, text, scenes, sets, and movement in juxtaposition with analogous elements improvised in real time,” Lewis says. The singers will each fill multiple roles and be called upon to perform notated and improvised music and spoken texts, all while acting and moving to create and transform the stage sets and their own stage personae. The stage settings will consist of objects and images from public and personal collections and archives. When fully realized, Afterword will include both a staged concert presentation and a multimedia installation selected from the music and photographic/video images used in the production. 

Afterword will be presented in a one-act preview version at Roulette in Brooklyn, May 22-23, 2015, performed by an ICE chamber ensemble and four to six singers (still to be chosen). The multimedia installation will debut in the MCA Chicago exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of the AACM: The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to the Present, curated by Dieter Roelstraete and Naomi Beckwith. The full opera staging will be premiered at the MCA Edlis Neeson Theater in October 2015, with support from the MAP Fund and the Mellon Foundation. Beyond the opera, per se, Lewis is deeply involved in other aspects of The Freedom Principle exhibition. The show is presenting “Rio Negro, a sound and sculptural/instrument installation in collaboration with fellow AACM member Douglas Ewart,” according to Beckwith, the Marilyn and Larry Fields Curator at MCA. First shown in 1992, Rio Negro combines bamboo sculptures with advanced robotics that animate them. “Lewis has done extensive work on the intersection of music and art, making what he terms ‘interart’ analyses of the AACM and visual art collectives such as Africobra.” As a result, she says he “elucidates important parallels in the structure of these groups, pioneering much-needed terms like ‘collective orientation’ and ‘multidominance’ that allow for conceptual and cultural analysis of the visual art movements that run parallel to the AACM's history.” The Freedom Principle exhibit will open on July 11, 2015 and run until November 22. 

EPILOGUE . . . PROLOGUE

Lewis’ deep immersion in his compositional practice is not deterring him from his other myriad pursuits. He continues teaching musicology classes, working one-on-one with composition students, and writing scholarly articles about many cultural topics. Another multi-year project concluding in early 2015 is the publication of The Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies, which Lewis is co-editing with Cornell musicologist Benjamin Piekut. A massive undertaking in two volumes, the Handbook examines the use of improvisational structures and techniques in a broad range of human activities as diverse as music, theology, critical theory, philosophy, city planning, and organizations. 

Despite his many accomplishments in a range of artistic and academic fields, what stands out most about George Lewis is his enormous generosity of spirit. Speaking for his ICE colleagues, Rubin says, “to have been able to collaborate with, talk with, and be mentored by George on so many levels has been an honor; his music and his writings have changed the direction of my musical life.” With eager collaborators like that, never fear, we are sure to be hearing a lot more of Lewis’ music. The commission requests keep flowing in, and, he says, “at this point, I’m not turning down any opportunity to make more cool music.” 

George Lewis improvising with Oberlin TIMARA students (photo: Larry Dunn)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are deeply indebted to George himself for the countless hours he spent talking with us and the mountain of source materials he provided. We are also grateful to others who contributed their insight: Tim Weiss of Oberlin Conservatory, Michael Lewanski of Ensemble Dal Niente, Joshua Rubin of International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), and Naomi Beckwith and Peter Taub of Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; plus some pithy remarks in print from Steve Smith in the New York Times and from composer Julian Anderson.

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2014: consolidation and retrenchment

As 2013 turned into 2014 we asked ourselves, just what was it we were trying to do with our online commentaries on contemporary music and other matters. We recognized that what we were doing was engaging intentionally with contemporary culture, music in particular, and sharing our experiences and reactions with a growing online community.  While that has remained our intention through 2014, it has been a year of consolidation and retrenchment in our output  posted on the ICEblog, I CARE IF YOU LISTEN, or here on Acornometrics. To quantify, we posted 45 articles online in 2012 and 47 in 2013, but our posts in 2014 numbered only 21. 

Well, why is that? It's not entirely clear to us, in the sense that we didn't plan it to turn out this way. But there are a number of factors that surely contributed. One change was that we dedicated ourselves to developing two in-depth profile articles for the I CARE IF YOU LISTEN Magazine (for Android and iOS devices). These articles required much more time to research, write, and refine than our typical blog posts, and they diverted a lot of the attention we might have invested in other articles. But they were invigorating to write and we are glad we did them. Our profile  Trepanning Trio: In Relentless Pursuit of a Sound (reposted here on Acornometrics) in Issue #6 covered the 20-year development of this iconic Cleveland new music ensemble. Our profile George Lewis: The Past is Prologue, in the current Issue #10, presents an in-depth look at George's recent flood of fascinating notated music for ensembles. We worked on this article for months, spending many hours talking with George and others, researching, and intently listening to his music live and in recordings. It was a huge effort to distill all this material down into the finished piece. 

We have also come to realize an unintended, though not entirely unpleasant, side effect of our moving to Oberlin. There are too many concerts and not enough time. Back in our hermit days in Indiana, we would make a cultural pilgrimage to Chicago (or elsewhere) every 2 or 3 weeks on average. That schedule allowed us to immerse ourselves deeply into music performances we heard, often preparing ahead with research and listening, always reflecting thoroughly afterwards. As a result we had a lot of breathing room in which to craft our written reactions. And we wrote about a high percentage of the events we attended. Now, we rarely go a week without attending at least  2 or 3 performances. That concentration is exhilarating, but it also uses up a lot of resources we might otherwise put to use in writing. One solution, of course, would be to attend fewer performances. But that doesn't feel like the right option. 

Another development capturing our time is our involvement in helping to found and lead the Oberlin Community Benefits Coalition, a grass-roots initiative to help make Oberlin and the surrounding area a place of more equitable opportunity and prosperity for all. And maybe, just maybe, we're getting older. Well of course we are, but we hope that isn't now and doesn't soon slow us down.  

So how do we expect this #ICEfansArleneLD enterprise will evolve in 2015? Frankly, we're not sure what to expect. As the year begins we are getting excited to attend the New Music Gathering in San Francisco in the middle of January. Who knows what will happen there, or what fruit it may yield? It's the first event of its kind. We are also committed to go to the Ojai Festival (where Steve Schick is this year's Music Director and ICE is a featured ensemble) for the first time in June. And there is there is that guaranteed firehose of concerts and recitals in Oberlin and nearby Cleveland. What we do know is that we will continue to engage as deeply as we can and write about it when we are able. Stay with us; it's sure to be a wild ride. 

Here is our full 2014 index of online articles.

about us

In April we were featured in the New York Times in an article about folks retiring to college towns: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/05/your-money/college-retirement-communities-expected-to-grow.html?_r=1

Also in April, we were guests on the new music webcast SoundNotion.TV, hosted by composers Dave MacDonald. Patrick Gullo, Sam Merciers, and Nate Bliton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwg_DSPbSa4&feature=youtu.be

In October, we were interviewed by Peter Comings for his Oh Oberlin Podcast project: http://ohoberlin.wordpress.com/2014/10/03/arlene-and-larry-dunn/

on ICEblog

In April, we spent three days sitting in a room with Alvin Lucier and ICE at MCA Chicago: http://iceorg.org/blog/post/sitting-in-a-room-with-alvin-lucier

In June, we wrapped up our project tracking composer Daniel R. Dehaan's ICElab experience at the Chicago premiere of his Trompe l’Corps at Constellation: http://iceorg.org/blog/post/icelab-confidential-dehaans-sensory-illusions-permeate-constellation

In October, we waxed poetic in reaction to Claire Chase's Density 2036 part ii: http://iceorg.org/blog/post/density-haiku-meditations-on-breath

in I CARE IF YOU LISTEN Magazine

In April our profile of Trepanning Trio appeared in Issue #6: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2014/04/exclusive-david-lang-interview-issue-6/#more-13770

Our profile of George Lewis, is the cover story in the current Issue #10: http://magazine.icareifyoulisten.com/current-issue/issue-10-george-lewis-past-prologue/

on I CARE IF YOU LISTEN blog

In January, we wrote about the 2013 Uncaged Toy Piano Festival: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2014/01/uncaged-toy-piano-festival-extravaganza-full-of-premieres/

In February we posed 5 questions to Dwight Currie, Associate Director for Museum Programs at The Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida about an exhibition and performances by artist/composer R. Luke DuBois: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2014/02/5-questions-to-dwight-currie-curator-ringling-museum-sarasota/

Also in February, we wrote about an Imani Winds concert with guest pianist Gilbert Kalish in Oberlin: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2014/02/imani-winds-gilbert-kalish-warm-up-winter-oberlin/

In March we interviewed bassoonist Dana Jessen on the eve of the release of the recording of composer Michael Gordon's Rushes for seven bassoons: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2014/03/5-questions-to-dana-jessen-bassoonist-improviser-entrepreneur/

Sticking with our bassoon obsession, in May we interviewed bassoonist, composer, author, and arts entrepreneur Jamie Leigh Sampson about her new book Contemporary Techniques for the Bassoon: Multiphonics: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2014/05/5-questions-to-jamie-leigh-sampson-bassoonist-composer-author/

In September, we interviewed singer, composer, producer Nick Hallett: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2014/09/5-questions-nick-hallett/

In October, we interviewed visual and sonic artist Matthew Gallagher: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2014/10/5-questions-matthew-gallagher/

In December we interviewed composer Daniel Felsenfeld about the New Music Gathering: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2014/12/5-questions-daniel-felsenfeld-new-music-gathering/

on Acornometrics

In March we reblogged our neighbor John Elder's piece about when Martin Luther King met James Lawson at Oberlin College, in advance of Lawson's campus residency: http://acornometrics.tumblr.com/post/78448365411/when-martin-luther-king-met-james-lawson-in

In April we wrote about violist Carrie Frey’s spellbinding recital at Oberln Conservatory: http://acornometrics.tumblr.com/post/83977638694/violist-carrie-freys-recital-spins-a-spellbinding

In May, we re-posted our profile of Trepanning Trio: http://acornometrics.tumblr.com/post/84826191833/trepanning-trio-in-relentless-pursuit-of-a-sound

In June, we wrote about the Traffic Jam Fugue we composed for some 2nd-grade musicians, at the instigation of composer Danny Clay:  http://acornometrics.tumblr.com/post/89572765808/the-urge-to-compose-a-traffic-jam-fugue

In September, we wrote about eighth blackbird's premiere of composer Amy Beth Kirsten’s commedia dell’arte dreamscape Colombine’s Paradise Theatre at MCA Chicago: http://acornometrics.tumblr.com/post/97700903183/eighth-blackbird-confronts-composer-amy-beth

In December we posted our recipes for Vegan Cassoulet: http://acornometrics.tumblr.com/post/106233812623/grace-your-holiday-table-with-vegan-cassoulet

Also in December  we wrote about the Oberlin Community Benefits Coalition: http://acornometrics.tumblr.com/post/106547057868/oberlin-community-benefits-coalition

And, wrapping up our year-end flurry, we started the serialization of Dirty Wars and Democracy: From the Journal of Isabel Juarez Morel, Arlene's short story in the form of journal entries which she wrote for a class she audited at Oberlin College: http://acornometrics.tumblr.com/post/106715245073/dirty-wars-and-democracy-from-the-journal-of

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Oberlin Community Benefits Coalition

In March of 2014 we joined with a handful of other Oberlin area residents to form the Oberlin Community Benefits Coalition (OCBC), which has really ramped up our social activism here. As much as there is to love about Oberlin, and there is a lot, it is not a utopia. We have plenty of poverty, inequality, and deficits in social justice for some members of the communiy to keep us busy for years to come. The OCBC aims to propel Oberlin and the surrounding area into becoming a place of equitable opportunity and prosperity for all. 

OCBC steering committee meeting (photo: Effie Kline-Salamon)

Community Benefits Agreements (and other related instruments) are being used by communities of varying size around the country to ensure that major economic development projects accrue significant, tangible economic and other benefits to the entirety of the community. The precipitating opportunity that led to the founding of the OCBC is a plan by the Oberlin City Schools to build a new unified pre-K-throuhg-12 campus to replace four aging, outmoded buildings. Our engagement with the school board is ongoing, and has many hopeful signs of succeeding. Though surely there are many hazards in the road ahead. We plan to engage with all of our anchor institutions -- The City of Oberlin Oberlin City Schools, Oberlin College and Conservatory, Mercy Allen Hospital, and Kendal at Oberlin -- to secure CBAs for all  upcoming development projects. 

Here is an extract from the OCBC one-pager we are using to recruit organizations and individuals to join our coalition and to introduce ourselves to our local anchor institutions. 

Oberlin Community Benefits Coalition

The Oberlin Community Benefits Coalition (OCBC) is a confederation of organizations and individuals involved in the Oberlin, Lorain County, and Northeast Ohio community which partners with businesses and institutions to create a culture of shared prosperity and responsibility that balances equity, economy and environment.

OCBC Objectives

We are working to partner with our local anchor institutions—City of Oberlin, Oberlin College, Oberlin City Schools, Kendal at Oberlin, Mercy Allen Hospital—to pioneer a new normal for conducting business. Our primary objective is to develop a Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) for every significant economic development project in our community. A CBA is a legally binding pact between the community and a developer which assures that tangible, measurable economic and quality-of-life benefits from the project accrue to all segments of the community.

Key provisions of CBAs we are seeking include:

Local hiring, at prevailing wage, representing the diversity of the community and focusing on the disadvantaged, unemployed, and underemployed

Training and mentoring to build the local workforce and create job ladders for lasting careers

Contracting of local businesses, minority-owned businesses, and woman-owned businesses for all phases from design through construction

Local purchasing of materials and services

Fair treatment for workers and residents displaced by development

Benefits of CBAs For Our Community

Support for Oberlin’s commitment to a locally sustainable economy

Unlock job training dollars to expand local workforce

Create good jobs at livable wages for local residents

Reduce local poverty, raise the standard of living, and broaden the tax base

Generate new business for local contractors and suppliers and stimulates creation of new businesses.

Keeps tax/development dollars circulating in the community, providing multiplier effects

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Grace Your Holiday Table with Vegan Cassoulet

Wait, isn't cassoulet full of duck confit and all kinds of pork and sausages? Well yes, but . . . what it really is, more abstractly, is a garlicky bean stew full of "chunks of things" and I couldn't see why those chunks couldn't be veggies. The results turned out to be totally yummy. This isn’t a precise recipe, more like a “plan of attack” because the best cassoulets are a reflection of the chef who is preparing it. 

Ingredients

1 lb white bean (we prefer cannellini), rinsed, picked-over, and soaked overnight

1 shallot, studded with about 6 to 8 cloves

5 cloves garlic (peeled, whole, not chopped)

1/4 teaspoon salt 

fresh cracked white pepper

Mirepoix: diced shallots, carrots, garlic

2 Tablespoons olive oil

1/4 c diced sun-dried tomatoes (vegan bacon)

1 Tablespoon of harissa (Tunisian chili paste)

1 Tablespoon diced preserved lemon (or the zest of one fresh lemon)

1/2 c white wine

Thyme (several fresh sprigs or 1 teaspoon dried)

1 quart of vegetable broth (may need more)

1 lb brussels sprouts, oven-roasted with a handful of fennel seed. 

1 lb butternut squash cubes (about equal size to 1/2 brussels sprout) oven-roasted

1 lb of pearl onions, blanched and pealed

Salt and fresh cracked pepper to taste

1/2 cup chopped parsley at end

1 cup of panko or other breadcrumbs, moistened with olive oil 

Salt and fresh cracked pepper

Cook the Beans

Drain the soaking liquid, rinse the beans, and put them in large heavy sauce pan with enough water to cover by an inch or two. Add the clove-studded shallot and garlic cloves and seasonings. Bring to a boil and reduce heat to a slow simmer. Cover and cook until beans are just tender. This should take at least 30 minutes and possibly 45 minutes (depending on the type and age of the beans, etc.). Remove and discard the shallot. Remove the garlic cloves, mash them into a paste, and stir that paste into the beans. Set beans aside. 

Assemble and Cook the Cassoulet

In a 5-quart Dutch oven (that can go from stove-top to oven) heat the olive oil on medium-high heat. Add the mirepoix and sauté, season with salt and pepper. Add the sundried tomato and preserved lemon, and harissa. Deglaze the pan with the white wine. Add the cooked beans, thyme, and vegetable broth and bring the mixture to a boil. Reduce heat to a simmer and add the brussels sprouts, squash cubes, and pearl onions. Add more stock (or water) if needed. Consistency should be like stew, flowing, but thicker than soup. Simmer for about 20 minutes to meld flavors. Adjust salt and pepper to taste. Turn off heat and add chopped parsley. CAN BE MADE AHEAD TO THIS POINT AND EVEN REFRIGERATED AND FINISHED A DAY OR TWO LATER 

Finish the Cassoulet in the Oven

If you have prepared ahead of time, bring the stew back to room temperature. If it has thickened too much, add more stock (or water) to bring back to stew consistency. 

Pre-heat the oven to 375 F. Bring the stew back to serving temperature on the stove-top. Check and adjust for salt and pepper. 

Spread the moistened bread crumbs in a generous layer over top of rewarmed stew and bake until the crumbs are nicely browned and stew is bubbly. 

Serve with crusty bread or brown rice and sautéed greens or salad on the side. 

Wine pairing: a fruity dry red wine from Southern France, Italy, or Spain 

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eighth blackbird confronts composer Amy Beth Kirsten’s commedia dell’arte demons

eighth blackbird: Heart and Breath, MCA Chicago. September 12, 2014. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.

Chicago’s multi-grammy-award-winning new music sextet eighth blackbird stretched the boundaries of musical performance practice once again in their presentation of composer Amy Beth Kirsten’s commedia dell’arte dreamscape Colombine’s Paradise Theatre. The centerpiece of a concert titled “Heart and Breath” at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago on September 12, 2014, the ‘birds performance was both heart-arresting and breathtaking. 

For this project, nearly two years in the making, Kirsten borrowed from the classic 16th and 17th century Italian art form and adapted Isabella Andreini poetry from 1601. Mining both her early work as a singer and songwriter and her more recent focus on contemporary composition, she has crafted music that commands a visceral commitment from the ‘birds beyond simply playing their instruments with every virtuosic technique in their substantial reservoir. This work requires them to fearlessly extend their musicality into singing, mannered speaking (even breathing), acting, and precisely choreographed movement about the stage, often in costumes and masks. In choosing the characters for her commedia, Kirsten professed a life-long fascination with the iconic love triangle of Colombine, Harlequin, and Pierrot. They captured her fancy and haunted her dreams as a child, as if Jungian archetypes of good and evil, darkness and light. Colombine is Kirsten’s childhood dream-world doppelgänger, with Pierrot drawing her towards Apollonian enlightenment, while Harlequin tempts her towards Dionysian darkness and carnality.

Michael Maccaferri, Tim Munro, and Yvonne Lam of eighth blackbird in Heart and Breath, MCA Chicago. September 12, 2014. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago.

From the opening section, captioned “death sweet breath,” we know the players are inhabiting that porous border region between awake and dreaming. Structures at the edges of the stage are draped in diaphanous sheets of cloth in Harlequin’s signature pattern. The lights come up to find Colombine (pianist Lisa Kaplan) collapsed and asleep in a heap on the floor. Spectral figures lurk about the edges of the scene. Colombine awakes to her dream with a start, and repeatedly sighs a loud “Oh!” followed by deep audible breaths. Harbinger (cellist Nicholas Photinos) enters and plays a cello solo, setting the scene. The three-bodied Harlequin (flutist Tim Munro, violinist/violist Yvonne Lam, and clarinetist Michael Maccaferri) enters, ritually donning their costumes and masks to play their parts in the dream, and join in the musical thread begun by Harbinger. Munro take the Harlequin lead playing an idyll of seduction on his flute while simultaneously singing “...I alone can know my Colombine again. Let me eat her Reason: let me swallow every light that blinds her...” Meanwhile, at the edge of Colombine’s consciousness, Pierrot (percussionist Matthew Duvall) has entered and pulled one of the set drapes to reveal a cornucopia of instruments, representing the vast wealth of knowledge he can impart. Colombine intently listens to Pierrot’s rhythmic playing, trying to resist Harlequin's charms. 

In the second section, Pierrot hangs the moon for Colombine, in the form of a glowing bass drum, to brighten her dark dreamscape. But she resists his influence, and sings “my charming murderer,” remembering Harlequin: “...a delirium more handsome than ever turns his gaze on me...” The highlight of the third section is a frantic piano duet featuring Harlequin (with Yvonne Lam in that guise) as a puppet master to Colombine, forcing her to revel in a carnal keyboard fantasy. The fourth section features an exhausted Pierrot crawling across the stage, drumming the floor and other implements being carried along for him.  

Tim Munro as Harlequin and Matt Duvall as Pierrot vie for the attention of Lisa Kaplan's Colombine. Photo credit: eighth blackbird

In the finale, captioned “she comes undone,” the characters ritually doff their costumes for the final time, dropping them at their feet as if their characters have now vanished. Next, they pull down the all the set draping, leaving a bare unadorned stage. All but Colombine and Harbinger exit, and they play a final piano and cello duet. The artifice and Colombine’s dream are over. She returns to the waking world knowing that her dreamworld companions are sure to return. 

The sense of a waking/dreamland netherworld is sustained throughout the work by the repeated use of a sleeping Colombine to start new scenes and the ritual donning and doffing of costumes and masks. In the final analysis, it is impossible to separate the elements of music, performance, stagecraft, and artifice; Colombine’s Paradise Theatre is all of a piece. And that is what makes it such an enthralling experience. None of Kirsten’s creation or the ‘birds performance would be possible without the brilliant stage direction and choreography of Mark DeChiazza, sound design and production by Ryan Ingebritsen, lighting design by Mary Ellen Stebbins, and costume design by Sylvianne Shurman. 

“Heart and Breath” began with a mashup of old and new music massaged into a convincing four-movement prelude that set the stage musically for Colombine’s Paradise Theatre and prefigured some its thematic material. This prelude consisted of Duo for Heart and Breath (2012) by Richard Reed Parry (Arcade Fire), Lamento della ninfa (1638) by Claudio Monteverdi (arranged by Munro), Moro, lasso, al mio duolo (1611) by Carlo Gesualdo (also arranged by Munro), and Babys (2009) by Bon Iver (arranged by Kaplan). 

“Heart and Breath” was first performed in the fall of 2103 at University of Richmond and at the Atlas theater in Washington, D.C. New Yorkers get their first chance to see and hear this production on Thursday, September 18, 2014, at Miller Theater, Columbia University. 

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The Urge to Compose . . . a Traffic Jam Fugue

In the spring of 2014, composer/educator Danny Clay faced a dilemma. He had asked his elementary school music classes in grades 1 through 5 to create their own sound key/music notation systems comprised solely of sound-making objects they could find around the classroom. Each class constructed their own systems and began to compose and play music employing them.

Composer and music educator Danny Clay

Danny was quite impressed with the results, but the kids had reservations. "This is not real music," some of them complained. "Why is that?" Danny asked. "If this was real music, real composers would be using our notation to write music" was a common reply. So Danny set out to recruit his real composer friends to write real music using his young students' notation systems. The resulting activity recently spurred Danny to launch Project Object - Netlabel on SoundCloud and on Facebook.

When Danny posted Facebook and Twitter appeals to composers to help  his kid musicians believe in what they were doing, we got pulled into the vortex. We commented on Danny's posts how much we loved what he and his students were doing. He responded "Why don't you try it too?" The next thing we know, we had the 2nd-graders' sound key in hand and instructions form Danny to "let our imaginations run wild!"

Danny Clay's 2nd-graders' sound key/notation system

Being industrious sorts, we set about trying to figure out how we could compose music from these elements. Fortunately, our old friend John Cage, whose 100th birthday anniversary inspired this blog in the first place, instigated the thinking that got us going: chance procedures. And before too long, voila! We had created Did you catch the license plate on that fugue?

The title page from our composition score

Our process notes from the score tell the tale pretty well: 

The Journey from Sounds to Music

Composer and elementary school music teacher Danny Clay asked us to compose a piece of music using a sound/notation system invented by his students, for them to play. He sent us his 2nd-graders’ sound key. 

There are 12 musicians in Danny’s 2nd-grade class, organized into four groups of three. We decided to write a fugue, because it would be fun to play and to hear, a four-part invention, where each part is performed by a group of 3 players. We think of each musician like a percussionist, in that each player has the full battery of all six instruments available to him/her. Everyone in the group plays each sound in each cell as directed by the score.

Inspired by our art-hero John Cage, we used chance procedures to develop the fugue. We thought of music needing to deal with sounds (a given, from the 2nd grade sound key), time (by stringing sounds together in a defined order), rhythm, and volume or dynamics So we rolled the dice to: 

assign each sound (or note) in the key a sequence number

assign and order groups of three notes into four sound “cells” which gave us an ordered progression 12 notes/sounds long, arranged in four cells (or measures) of three notes each

determine the dynamics of each sound to be played, either loud or soft.

determine for each of the notes, how many times it would be played within the cell, 1, 2, or 4 times (resulting in each cell containing 12 beats). 

We then determined the flow of the first line would consist of playing the four cells in the determined order, then playing the four cells again with the order of notes in each cell reversed, then playing the four cells again in the original order. 

To create the fugue effect, we offset line 2 from line one by shifting one cell to the right and wrapping the last cell of line 1 around to the beginning of line 2. We continued the shifting and wrapping one cell each time to create lines 3 and 4. 

These four lines of music looked like four lanes of traffic, making us think of the cells as cars. That gave rise to the title Did you catch the license plate on that fugue . . . a Traffic Jam Fugue. As we prepared the individual performance scores for each part, we realized that the fugal structure of the work is not readily apparent. So we decided to portray the full score, all four lines together, using the four toy cars of different colors (assigned by chance) to represent the cells. This enables the performers to visualize the shifting and wrapping structure of the whole piece. 

We hope this composition brings the 2nd Grade Musicians of Zion Lutheran School much fun and enjoyment as they learn to play a piece written in the sound/notation system they themselves invented. 

Arlene and Larry Dunn 

Oberlin, Oho

April 8, 2014

Here, are the other key elements of the score, the matching of car colors to the music cells and the four parts of the fugue, A, B, C, and D. 

All that remained was to hear our work come alive in the hands of the 2nd-grade musicians. And that happened this week when Danny created the Project Object sites and posted our piece for all to hear. 

Danny asked us for our reaction upon hearing the work played for the first time. Here's what we told him:

Composing Did you catch the license plate on that fugue? - A Traffic Jam Fugue was a thrill ride every step of the way. But nothing could have prepared us for the rush of first hearing it realized in sound by the very 2nd-graders who invented the sound key/notation system we used. The version they have recorded so far is a two-part invention; the four-part invention is yet to come as they continue to work on the score. Nonetheless, their performance somehow subtly soothes with its relatively quiet dynamics, yet almost overwhelms with its complex textures. They play with a free, manic energy and a diligent seriousness of purpose. Perhaps only 2nd-graders could bring such a deep commitment to realizing the possibilities in this score. We can’t wait to hear more.

And apparently  Danny and the kid musicians are enjoying playing this piece as much as we enjoyed making it. 

Thank you notes from Danny and the 2nd-graders

So, without further ado, go listen to the piece on SoundCloud. Enjoy!

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Trepanning Trio: In Relentless Pursuit of a Sound [re-post]

[This article originally appeared in a somewhat different form in Issue #6 of I CARE IF YOU LISTEN Magazine in April of 2014.]

INTRODUCTION

Cleveland-based Trepanning Trio is not a three-person neurosurgical team that will drill a burr hole into your skull to expose the dura mater. In fact, they are not a trio at all, but a flexible contemporary music ensemble that varies its size to fit the occasion. However, they do indeed make music that drills its way straight into your skull. The brainchild of bassist, composer, and bandleader David Mansbach, Trepanning has crafted its style around a core aesthetic of spontaneous creativity drawing on the deep musical reservoirs of the players. As Mansbach puts it, rather demurely, ”we make pretty instrumental music using classical, traditional, and handmade instruments.” The result is an intoxicating sound alchemy that has germinated over the past twenty years. Mansbach’s passionate quest for this musical soundscape exceeded his capabilities to realize on his own. With the help of other musicians and advancing technology, slowly that sound emerged. And as it evolved, it attracted more musicians who wanted to be a part of it. Today Trepanning Trio has fourteen members who regularly participate in rehearsals, concerts, and recording sessions. 

TREPANNING TRIO ORIGIN STORY

Trepanning Trio has its genesis in a song Mansbach wrote in 1994. A self-taught musician formally trained in visual arts, Mansbach’s mind teemed with musical ideas he tinkered with using an 8-track recorder. But his musical inadequacies hampered his progress. A breakthrough came in 1998 when violinist Peter Tyson Myers, a co-worker’s son, sought Mansbach’s assistance with his audition tape. In return, Myers offered to help Mansbach multi-track some of his early conceptions. “I couldn't write out the parts I wanted Peter to play, so I sang, or whistled them, phrase by phrase,” Mansbach recalls. “Fortunately, Ty has a great ear (and a lot of patience) and he played them all back for me on his violin, usually in one take.”

That started Mansbach down a path of realizing his musical conceptions in a very painterly-fashion, constructing the whole from a broad palette of sound materials. By 2001, his Infinite Number of Sounds Recording Company co-founder Brent Gummow, had helped him convert his analog recording setup to a digital recording/editing suite. Mansbach used his new toys to expand the instrumentation and make more complex arrangements. In the early years, Mansbach says “you might hear 20 or more instruments playing on a completed track, but I typically only had three musicians playing the individual parts, hence the name Trepanning Trio.” When this group started making a few live appearances with Mansbach as a quartet, the alliterative Trepanning Trio moniker had already struck a chord, so they stuck with it. Some of these early experimental recordings were released on Trepanning Trio’s first album I am a Crooked Arrow. 

The first incarnation of the present ensemble came in 2005, when Mansbach, percussionist Ron Tucker (of ensemble et al., and Mansbach’s former partner in the art-rock bands Ribcage Houdinis and Infinite Number of Sounds), percussionist Andrew Ludick, and bbob drake (a master of self-designed musical gadgets) started playing together. It was a very fertile time for development of the Trepanning sound. “We would fill a room with instruments—kidi drums, gankogui, mbira, double bass, vibraphone, pan tree, banjo, dulcimer, water jugs, harmonicas, stem glasses, melodicas—and improvise for hours.” They refined the most interesting ideas, recorded them, and these became the textural underpinnings for over a dozen songs.  

Over the next several years, Mansbach attracted more musicians of diverse backgrounds, like Jeremy Bleich, David Badagnani, Kris Morron, Dan Wenninger, and Clayton Vaughn, to help further explore and develop these sketches with an avalanche of new sounds and ideas. “These folks played some instruments that I had never heard of, much less written for,” says Mansbach. “I scheduled dozens of recording sessions, mixing and matching different combinations of instruments. Some songs had over 100 tracks and I used a subtractive process to whittle each piece down and refine it into the form you hear on our recordings.”

All of this hard work came to the public earspace broadly in February, 2009, with the release of two albums, I am a Crooked Arrow, and The Man Killed the Bird…, on the Infinite Number of Sounds label. Most of the musicians who participated in the recordings, including Ron Tucker (who was in New york), Andy Ludick (who was in Kilkenny, Ireland), and Tyler Horter (from Cincinnati) gathered to perform at the CD release concert at Cleveland’s Beachland Tavern, the first time the completed songs had ever been performed live. That one-off performance took on a life of its own. To Mansbach’s surprise “musicians started contacting me to ask about joining the band. I invited most of them to rehearsals to see how they fit and many of them have become core members of the group.” As the band grew, the new members brought their own unique musical backgrounds, instruments, and ideas, adding further depth and complexities to the Trepanning sound and the compositional possibilities.

THAT TREPANNING SOUND

So what exactly is that Trepanning Trio sound? It’s complex, enigmatic, and multi-layered, with a meditative vibe. Mostly it lopes along at a casual tempo, in no hurry to get anywhere, leaving plenty of space for subtle nuance to emerge. It is rarely loud, yet it engulfs you. “We’re likely the quietest 14-member ensemble you will ever hear and that is one key to our music,” says Mansbach. 

To our ears, the Trepanning sound combines elements of classical chamber music, post-minimalism, jam-band grooving, free jazz improvisation, Appalachian folk tunes, North African and Middle Eastern modal drones, influences of China, India, and Southeast Asia, and no doubt other forms and traditions we do not recognize. And that is another key to their sound, the great wealth of musical experience contributed by each member of the group. “More importantly, there is a humbling musical thoughtfulness in each our players,” according to Mansbach, “they are, above all else, good listeners.” 

As a composer, Mansbach does not structure his works as complete schematics of every note to play throughout the piece. “My songs are quite simple,” he says. “I provide the musicians with the basic theme and a palette of colors. They make the paintings. I only write enough for the musicians to find their voices in the space and keep them out of each other’s way.” Once the players find that niche, they are free to play whatever they want, making each realization of a piece unique. “It isn’t my compositions that make Trepanning Trio interesting to listen to, it is the compelling complexity of hearing the spontaneous expression of creative minds exploring a maze of sound using an extraordinary assortment of musical instruments.”  

The Trepanning sound and their performance aesthetic are tightly connected to Mansbach’s training as a visual artist. “I have carried those lessons about working with the strengths of a medium to bring out its beauty into our music,” he says, Just as you can create medium-specific beauty with graphite, oils, clay, watercolor, or glass, you can bring that same thinking to making beautiful sounds. “It is a great joy for us to work with exotic and hand-made instruments, discovering their unique textures and tones.” 

THE TREPANNING PLAYERS 

Mansbach’s delight in discovery of uniqueness is not limited to the array of instruments. The eighteen or so musicians who have contributed significantly over the years are the very thread from which the Trepanning Trio tapestry is woven. “These amazing musicians are each unique,” says Mansbach, “not only in their choice of instruments, but in the way they respond to new material and ideas, and their ability to bring fresh improvisational elements to each interpretation.” A profile of four current members reveals a snapshot of the resources the ensemble draws upon. 

David Badagnani holds an Masters degree in ethnomusicology from Kent State University where he also pursued doctoral studies, and he taught courses there from 1994 to 2010. He plays reed instruments—english horn, oboe, Chinese sheng—plus violin and various sizes of viola da gamba. He is a true internationalist, playing music from locations as far flung as Asia, Africa, Australia, and old-time America. When asked to describe the music of the Trepanning Trio, he says, “to me it often has the thoughtful introspective feeling of Renaissance consort music.”

Since 2008, Badagnani is co-founder/director of the Cleveland Chinese Music Ensemble. In addition to the sheng, he plays the Chinese suona, houguan, xun, yueqin, and yehu; the Vietnamese kèn; and he is a throat singer. According to Mansbach, “David can play any instrument, from any culture, in any key. And he can tell you about the people who play the instruments, what they like to eat, and how to cook it. I could study the music of this planet for 300 years and not ever know what David knows now.” 

Chris Auerbach-Brown, a conservatory-trained composer and Media Program Manager at Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, plays alto saxophone, melodica, musical saw, udu, and does throat singing and vocal harmonizing. As a working composer, he is a vital asset to the ensemble when they have new material to master and new parts need to be written out. “Chris AB has an unrivaled gift for melody,” Mansbach says. But, as a player, his formal training invigorates Auerbach-Brown by taking him out of his comfort zone. “I've been forced to open up my musical worldview considerably as a result,” he says, “often at rehearsal, I'll be handed an instrument to try on the spot and I love the challenge of making music on an instrument I'm not accustomed to playing.” 

Auerbach-Brown teaches music theory and composition at the Cleveland Music School Settlement, electronic music technology at Lakeland Community College, and courses on the connections between contemporary music and sound art with the visual arts at the Cleveland Institute of Art. 

Peggy Latkovich has a Master's in ethnomusicology from Kent State University and a passionate interest in ancient and non-Western music. Trained as a pianist, she plays accordion, glockenspiel, banjo, hang, various and sundry percussion, and, when there is one available, acoustic piano. “Dave has a strict no-electronic-instrument-unless-you-made-it-yourself policy, so I don't bring my other keyboards to gigs,” Latkovich says, “but I do bring along my toy piano, which I picked out of someone’s garbage. Who would throw out a mint condition toy piano? Some parent at the end of his/her rope, I guess.”

Latkovich plays in two English country dance bands (Toad in the Hole and Musidora). She is also studying composition with Auerbach-Brown and Trepanning Trio is working some of her latest creations into the repertoire. 

Brad Bolton is a self-taught musician and recording engineer who can, and does, play just about anything—guitar, godbass, turkey-baster whistle, musical saw, a blue ukulele, and a suitcase full of animal calls and squeak toys. The godbass, which Bolton made by hand, is one long string supported on a steel plate, played by bowing or plucking the string and striking the plate. “I can produce a surprising variety of sounds from deep low notes to high pitched whale-like calls,” he says. But it’s not just Bolton’s playing that matters to the group. According to Mansbach, “In large part, it is Brad's spirit and humor that makes Trepanning Trio special. He’s been on stage with Simon and Garfunkel, the Diamonds, the Drifters, and The Ink Spots.” Bolton is also mastering live recordings for Trepanning Trio’s upcoming releases.

COMING ATTRACTIONS

Following up their third CD, Auspicious Threes (2012), Trepanning Trio is about to release a new album, Naked as Needles, that showcases their music in new ways. Dawn in an Open Field Part 1, featuring bbob drake, (handmade electronic and acoustic instruments), Brad Bolton (godbass, animal calls, pigglesworth, etc.), David Mansbach (bouble bass, pan tree), Jeff Schuler (violin), and Peggy Latkovich (accordion, glockenspiel), is illustrative of the change in perspective.

Unlike the previous releases, which were meticulously crafted in the studio using the sculptural, experimental processes they’ve developed over the last twenty years, Dawn in an Open Field and all the new tracks are live recordings of truly free improvisation. According to Mansbach, “the spirit of the music is the same as what you have heard live and on our previous recordings. It still has that pretty Trepanning sound, it's still (mostly) quiet. The difference is that what you hear is unedited, spontaneous interaction.” Naked as Needles was released on the Infinite Number of Sounds label on April 8, 2014. 

[Photos by Larry Dunn, other than Naked as Needles cover shot courtesy of Infinite Number of Sounds]

Arlene and Larry Dunn are pure amateurs of contemporary music who live in Oberlin, Ohio. They write about music for I CARE IF YOU LISTEN and the International Contemporary Ensemble’s ICEblog. Follow them on Twitter at @ICEfansArleneLD.

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Violist Carrie Frey’s Recital Spins a Spellbinding Web

Violist Carrie Frey, a graduating senior at Oberlin Conservatory, is consistently one of the most intrepid musicians on a campus full of envelope-busters. She is a member Chartreuse (sometimes a string trio, sometimes a quartet), the jazz-classical fusion sextet deturtle, the new music collective Semble N, and she conceived and organized the annual In C(hristmas) mashup of her own minimalist arrangements of familiar holiday tunes. So it came as no surprise that her senior recital on April 19, 2014, in Kulas Recital Hall, was a smart reimagining of the concept.

Spun from the thinnest threads of material, Frey used the world premiere of Daniel Tacke’s die Kürze as a gossamer wrapping around two more traditional works. Tacke, a 2006 Oberlin graduate who completed his doctorate at UC San Diego in 2012, traffics in  compositions of slight fragments, distinctive gestures, and spare sound. Frey broke up the 21 short segments of die Kürze into three sections and played them as an overture, interlude, and coda to her performance. The opening section set the mood as segments i through vii were mere wisps of sounds on a ground of silence. 

Frey’s most standard repertoire selection was Brahms’ Two Songs, Op. 91, for which she was joined by mezzo-soprano Natasha Thweat and pianist Silei Ge. Brahms wrote these for violinist Joseph Joachim and his wife mezzo-soprano Amalie Schneeweiss, in hopes of injecting some domestic tranquility into their stormy marriage which suffered from Joachim’s jealous delusions. The trio deftly brought forth the alto clef’s warm sonorities of home and hearth. Segments viii through xiii of Tacke’s die Kürze returned as an intermezzo, bringing more of that precise, but ghostly soundscape. Most striking was xiii in which Frey played no sounds, just slowly raised her eyes up to the heavens. 

Composer and violist Atar Arad’s Sonata for solo viola (1992), while certainly more mainstream than die Kürze, demands thorough command of technique. Frey navigated the tortuous course of left hand pizzicatos while simultaneously bowing and frightfully rapid runs up an down the fingerboard without seeming to break a sweat. 

Frey’s clever packaging of her recital came to a close with the final section of die Kürze, segments xiv through xxi. Employed in this manner, die Kürze was more something to inhabit than a work to simply play. Frey’s every gesture and motion felt as if part of a meticulously choreographed meditative state. Even her breathing and turning of the cards on which the score was printed were calculated, precise movements. The total effect was spellbinding, as a quiet surge of energy flowed from Frey and pervaded the entire hall. 

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When Martin Luther King Met James Lawson in Oberlin

Reverend James Lawson, the man Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called "the brain of the civil rights movement," is a visiting scholar this week at Oberlin College on "The Transformative Power of Nonviolent Conflict." In 1956-57 our Kendal at Oberlin neighbor John Elder and Lawson were first-year students at the Oberlin Graduate School of Theology when King made his first visit to speak at Oberlin. The rendezvous of King and Lawson that week changed history. Elder recently  related the story in the Oberlin Review and the Oberlin News Tribune. He has kindly given us permission to repost it here. 

Reverend James Lawson (photo credit: holmanumc.com)

James Lawson speaks at a public convocation tonight, Monday, March 3, 2014, at 7:30 PM at First Church Oberlin on "The Impact of Plantation Capitalism on Today's Human Rights."

When Martin Luther King Met James Lawson in Oberlin

by John Elder

Martin Luther King Jr. made several visits to Oberlin, but his first, in February 1957, proved momentous for the future of the Civil Rights Movement.

The 381-day Montgomery bus boycott, during which King began to make a name for himself in the movement, had just ended. King spoke at First Church on “Justice Without Violence” and “The New Negro in the South” and at a Finney Chapel assembly on “The Montgomery Story.” After one of these lectures, theologian Harvey Cox, then the YMCA-YWCA Secretary at Oberlin College, arranged for King to meet an African-American first-year student at the Oberlin Graduate School of Theology, James M. Lawson Jr.

Lawson, the son of a militantly anti-racist Methodist minister and his pacifist wife, had declared himself a conscientious objector at the age of 19 and was sentenced to federal prison. After his release in 1951, Lawson returned to his BA studies at Baldwin-Wallace College, but also spent time meeting with Methodist student groups, including at Oberlin, to talk about pacifism and non-violence.

Following graduation, Lawson traveled as a short-term Methodist missionary to India, where he continued his study of Gandhian non-violence. On his return in 1956, Lawson enrolled in the Oberlin “Theolog,” which at the time probably enrolled more black students than all other seminaries combined.

Among the courses Lawson took was “The Pacifism of the Early Church: Jesus through Constantine.” When Lawson and King met at the beginning of the second semester, King was so impressed by Lawson’s knowledge of the theory and practice of non-violence that he insisted Lawson must immediately go south to help the movement.

Lawson decided to transfer to Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, Tenn. The Fellowship of Reconciliation employed him as field secretary to teach local groups about Christian peacemaking and reconciliation in race relations. Soon Lawson was building the base for the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins of 1960. Central to this process were the workshops in non-violence Lawson offered in local churches and attended by students from the several historically-black academic institutions in the area, as well as Vanderbilt ministerial students.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (left), Rev. James Lawson (center) and others participated in the James Meredith March Against Fear (photo credit: Fred Griffith)

In Lawson’s workshops, participants explored the roots of segregation and how to apply the Gandhian theory of non-violence, blended together with Christian principles, in actions toward what Lawson called “constructive social change.” In the sit-ins Lawson was arrested along with many others who became leaders in the civil rights movement, including present Georgia Congressman John Lewis. The lunch counters were successfully desegregated, but because arrest violated Vanderbilt’s code of conduct. The racially conservative board of trust and the chancellor (ironically, himself a scholar of the New Testament) had an excuse for expelling Lawson. Many Vanderbilt faculty tendered their resignations in support of Lawson, and he was re-admitted, but decided instead to complete his studies at Boston University.

Julian Bond, then active in student protests, says, “Lawson was like a bad younger brother, pushing King to do more, to be more militant, to extend non-violence — just to do more… He envisioned a militant non-violence… You didn’t have to wait for the evil to come to you, you could go to the evil.”

King himself called Lawson “the greatest teacher of non-violence in America” and “the mind of the movement.”

In 1962, Lawson became pastor of Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis, where he continued his activism, most notably in the 1968 strike by black sanitation workers. Union leader Jerry Wurf recalled that the Memphis city leaders “feared Lawson for the most interesting of all reasons — he was a totally moral man, and totally moral men you can’t manipulate and you can’t buy and you can’t hustle.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rev. James M. Lawson, and Dr. H. Ralph Jackson at a Memphis press conference March 28, 1968 after a march in support of striking sanitation workers. (photo credit: Jack E. Cantrell, Memphis Press-Scimitar, courtesy University of Memphis Libraries)

Lawson persuaded King to go to Memphis to support the strikers, and it was there that King was assassinated on April 4, 1968. In 1974, Lawson accepted the position of senior pastor at Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles. Although retired from that ministry, he continues to be active as a teacher and in movements for labor rights, immigrant rights, civil rights and international peace.

In 2010, Oberlin College awarded James M. Lawson Jr. an honorary doctorate. He returns to Oberlin today for a week’s residence as distinguished visiting lecturer. At an Oberlin College convocation at 7:30 p.m., Monday, March 3, 2014, at First Church, where James Lawson and Martin Luther King had their initial meeting in 1957, he will speak on “The Impact of Plantation Capitalism on Today’s Human Rights.” The public is invited to hear this man of extraordinary integrity, wisdom, and vision for our time.

First Church Oberlin (photo credit: wikimedia)

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2013: The Year of Engaging Intentionally

One year ago, we said 2012 was an unexpected madcap year online. Now the bulk of our naïveté is exhausted. We can’t say our 2013 online “just happened.” Indeed, it was quite intentional. But what is it we are intending to do?

Larry and Arlene with Dan Dehaan (photo: courtesy of Susan Griggs)

Hmm, good question! We’ve talked a lot this year about what we do, why we do it, and what is the aesthetic point of view we bring to this activity. One thing we can say for sure is we are not critics in any classical sense of the term. We are neither academically qualified nor suitably inclined. That's not to say that criticism is not valuable and necessary. We think it is vitally important for artists to get the kind of feedback that savvy, knowledgable critics can provide. But that's not us.  

What are we doing? Here’s the deal: we love contemporary music. We crave the excitement of always being on the edge of our seats, never sure what we are going to hear next. So, we are enthusiasts. We seek to share that enthusiasm and the experience we have listening to new music. 

Our approach to writing about music is pretty simple: 

Open our ears, and our selves, to the experience of the music and let it wash over us.

Do our best to reveal that experience to others, as raw and honestly as possible. 

Write as artfully as we can, so it is enjoyable to read. 

That's it. We didn't design this aesthetic. It arose organically from what we are doing. Other than Claire Chase initially urging us to write for the ICEblog, we had no reason to think there was an audience for this. We built it and they came. We have created something of value that we don't entirely understand. But we sense that value is there, and so we have dedicated ourselves to keep doing it. 

Here are some 2013 numbers: 

We wrote and posted 47 articles this year (2 more than 2012)

We posted on five sites this year (two new, Cleveland Classical and Oberlin ConNotations)

We hooked up 612 new followers on Twitter and blasted out another 7,500 tweets. 

We made 238 new connections on Facebook

Of course we don't write only about contemporary music, and we do other things besides write. For example, we packed up our entire lives and moved to Oberlin in the middle of 2013 (there's an article about that indexed below). And we both have audited classes at Oberlin College and Conservatory this semester (which led to some of the writing you'll see indexed below).

We also found time to be significant contributors to Twitter Boot Camp (#TwitBootCamp) organized by our friend Ma'ayan Plaut, Manager, Social Strategy & Projects at Oberlin College (@plautmaayan). And our arrival in Oberlin caused a bit of an online stir. Madeline Raynor, Culture Editor for the independent Oberlin student blog Fearless and Loathing (@titledivine), wrote a flattering portrait of us in November (http://disdainfulyouth.com/2015/09/01/meet-larry-and-arlene-dunn-2/).

Here is the full index to our 2013 posts. 

ICEblog [12 posts]

An ICE octet mashed up the music of Franz Schubert and George Lewis at Chicago Cultural Center: http://iceorg.org/blog/post/ice-at-preston-bradley-hall-two-centuries-two-composers-eight-musicians

ICE Solo(4) featured Rebekah Heller at Corbett and Dempsey gallery in Chicaog: http://iceorg.org/blog/post/ice-solo4-confrontation-and-introspection

ICE solo(5) featured Phyllis Chen: http://iceorg.org/blog/post/ice-in-chicago-phyllis-chen-its-all-in-the-hands3

Composer/violinist/singer Carla Kihlstedt's #ICElab dreams project at MCA Chicago: http://iceorg.org/blog/post/ice-at-mca-carlas-kaleidoscope-of-dreams 

ICElab Confidential, the second installment of our series about composer Dan Dehaan's #ICElab experience: http://iceorg.org/blog/post/icelab-confidential-sounds-coalescing-into-music

ICE at Americas Society in New York: http://iceorg.org/blog/post/ice-at-americas-society-reflections-in-an-ancient-mirror

ICE performed David Lang’s Whisper Opera at MCA: http://iceorg.org/blog/post/ice-at-mca-psssssst

Rebekah Heller’s 100 Names CD Release event at Constellation Chicago: http://iceorg.org/blog/post/rebekah-hellers-cd-launch-ice-sizzles-on-the-tundra

Claire Chase Density CD release event at Constellation: http://iceorg.org/blog/post/claire-chase-ravaged-breathless-joy-density

David Bowlin performed Sciarrino in Oberlin: http://iceorg.org/blog/post/david-bowlin-spinning-gossamer-webs-of-sound-in-fairchild-chapel

ICE celebrated John Zorn at 60 at MCA: http://iceorg.org/blog/post/ice-celebrates-peripatetic-genius-john-zorn-at-mca-chicago

ICElab Confidential, part 3: ICE premiered Dan Dehaan Trompe l’Corps at Roulette in Brroklyn: http://iceorg.org/blog/post/icelab-confidential-reality-as-sensory-illusion-at-roulette

I CARE IF YOU LISTEN [20 posts]

Chicago Q Ensemble at The Empty Bottle: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2013/02/hour-power-chicago-q-ensemble-unfamiliar-music-series/

Fifth House Ensemble premiered works of Zorn and Burhans at MCA: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2013/03/fifth-house-ensemble-coming-soon-mca-chicago/

Another #ChicagoNewMusicPlethora: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2013/03/another-chicagonewmusicplethora/

Fonema Consort presented Mirrors II in Chicago: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2013/03/fonema-consort-dazzles-with-mirrors-ii-in-chicago/

Interview with contemporary art and music advocate Scott Hunter: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2013/04/5-questions-to-scott-j-hunter-contemporary-music-and-art-advocate/

Interview with the founders of Chicago's new music media empire Parlour Tapes+: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2013/05/5-questions-to-parlour-tapes-contemporary-music-recording-label/

Spektral Quartet and Pretty Monsters ushered in the summer at The Hideout in Chicago: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2013/07/spektral-quartet-pretty-monsters-steamroll-summer-chicago/

Performances at the biennial Oberlin Percussion Institute: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2013/07/canny-veterans-riveting-newcomer-oberlin-percussion-institute/

Joffrey Ballet and The Cleveland Orchestra presented the revival production of The Rite of Spring at Blossom Music Center: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2013/08/the-rite-contemporary-contemporaneous-music-dance/

No Exit New Music Ensemble performed music of Jeffrey Mumford and other local composers at Lorain County Community College: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2013/09/no-exit-entree-to-the-cleveland-new-music-scene/

The JACK Quartet performed  at Cleveland State University: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2013/10/jack-quartet-spans-600-years-surprising-sounds-cleveland/

Ryan Muncy HOT CD release event at Constellation: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2013/10/ryan-muncy-breaks-new-sonic-ground-saxophone-chicago-hot/

Oberlin Conservatory Contemporary Music Ensemble with special guests eighth blackbird: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2013/10/eighth-blackbird-soars-oberlin-contemporary-music-ensemble/

Paul Lansky premiere by Hammer Klavier Quartet at Oberlin: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2013/10/filmmaker-playwright-composer-paul-lansky-premieres-textures/

Ensemble Dal Niente at the Bowling Green New Music Festival: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2013/11/outsourced-music-from-germany-at-bowling-green-new-music-festival/

Interview with Ellen McSweeney of the Chicago Q Ensemble: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2013/11/5-questions-to-ellen-mcsweeney-chicago-q-ensemble-violinist/

Interview with Time Weiss, Director of the Contemporary Music Division at Oberlin Conservatory: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2013/11/5-questions-to-tim-weiss-conductor-educator-at-oberlin-conservatory/

Morton Subotnick performed at MOCA Cleveland: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2013/12/morton-subotnick-performs-a-sorcerers-brew-of-music-at-moca-cleveland/

Interview with toy piano virtuoso and impresario Phyllis Chen: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2013/12/5-questions-to-phyllis-chen-director-uncaged-toy-piano-festival/

Interview with Cleveland-based percussionist Luke Rindeknecht: http://www.icareifyoulisten.com/2013/12/5-questions-to-luke-rinderknecht-percussionist/

Cleveland Classical [2 posts]

ClevelandClassical.com covers the classical music scene in the greater Northeast Ohio region. Editors Dan Hathaway and Mike Telin, along with former Cleveland Plain Dealer culture critic Don Rosenberg team-teach the Introduction to Music Criticism course at Oberlin Conservatory, which Larry audited this semester. 

Review of Rebekah Heller's 100 Names CD: http://clevelandclassical.wordpress.com/2013/10/22/cd-review-100-names-rebekah-heller-bassoon/

Report on the Bowling Green New Wusic Festival: http://clevelandclassical.wordpress.com/2013/10/29/review-34th-annual-bowling-green-new-music-festival-october-16-19/

Oberlin ConNotations [4 posts]

Oberlin ConNotations is a new site created this fall to feature the writing of participants in the Introduction to Music Criticism course. 

Review of the Oberln Opera Theater's production of Humperdinck's Hansel und Gretel: http://inside.oberlin.edu/connotations/concert-reviews/oberlin-opera-review.shtml

Review of a concert of the chamber music of Maurice Ravel: http://inside.oberlin.edu/connotations/concert-reviews/oberlin-artist-recit.shtml

Review of eighth blackbird's Fred CD: http://inside.oberlin.edu/connotations/recording-reviews/cd-review-eighth-bla.shtml

Review of the new Vijay Iyer and Mike Ladd CD Holding it Down: http://inside.oberlin.edu/connotations/recording-reviews/cd-review-holding-it.shtml

Acornometrics [9 posts]

Destination: Oberlin, an examination of how and why we decided to move to Oberlin: http://acornometrics.tumblr.com/post/41554988577/destination-oberlin

Recipe: Orange Marmalade http://acornometrics.tumblr.com/post/44076416354/when-life-gives-you-oranges-make-marmalade

Review of bassist Matt Adomeit's senior recital, featuring the deturtle sextet: http://acornometrics.tumblr.com/post/44678977497/would-you-like-some-cat-in-that-cream

Recipe: Harissa, Tunisian chili paste: http://acornometrics.tumblr.com/post/54669377716/spice-up-your-life-with-harissa

Recipe: Pickled Red Onions: http://acornometrics.tumblr.com/post/55716316598/savory-treat-pickled-red-onions

Thoughts on the Cooper International Competition at Oberlin Conservatory: http://acornometrics.tumblr.com/post/57995938974/sage-advice-for-music-for-life

Recipe: Classic Andalusian Gazpacho: http://acornometrics.tumblr.com/post/58054136726/gazpacho-sunshine-in-a-bowl

Love in the Late 60s, the story of how we met and fell in love: http://acornometrics.tumblr.com/post/69883222794/love-in-the-late-sixties

Arlene’s semester project for the class she is auditing at Oberlin Conservatory, Introduction to African American Music, taught by Fredara Hadley: http://acornometrics.tumblr.com/post/71694795864/soundtrack-for-a-long-march-to-justice-the-role-of

[acornometrics]

Love in the Late Sixties

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

~Anaïs Nin

[Editor’s note: Larry wrote this story in November of 2004 as a gift to our niece Jodi and our nephew-to-be Gary as their wedding day approached. It was inspired by their telling of their own love story on their wedding website (the first time we had seen such a thing) and their pitch for others to tell their love stories to them. We are bringing it to the blogosphere in honor of our 44th wedding anniversary, August 16, 2013.]

America in tumult, 1968

Any love story is better understood in the context of its times. Despite how exceedingly personal love between two people must be, it can be the swirl of external events around it that provides much of its enduring fabric. Our love story—Arlene’s and mine—begins in 1968 and is inextricably entwined with social unrest, the struggle for civil rights, and the Vietnam war making the world topsy-turvy all around us.

Arlene Wilgoren – 25, Dorchester Mass, Jewish, Brandeis grad, civil rights worker, math whiz, socially adept and worldly wise.

LD Dunn – 18, Royal Oak Mich, raised to be a priest, pending college dropout, hippie, rabble rouser, troubled genius, painfully shy, often outrageously entertaining, and casual in his conviction that he was destined to flame-out before reaching his 21st birthday.

Whatever could bring these two together?

That mini-dress, those earrings, and . . .

April 1968. Martin Luther King gunned down by a sniper’s bullet on a motel balcony in Memphis. We were each working in fledgling political organizations—Arlene with PAR (People Against Racism) and LD with Yipfugs (Youth for Peace Freedom and Justice)—that were thrust into the limelight in the aftermath. PAR was in the midst of a hastily called organizational meeting in Detroit that week, using their newfound notoriety as impetus to form a national organization out of dispersed, loosely affiliated groups in Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, Ann Arbor, and Washington. Yipfugs, based in the Detroit suburbs, were up to their usual disruptive tricks, demonstrating and leafleting at a Eugene McCarthy for President rally at Tiger Stadium—yes, we were against poor Gene McCarthy who was way too establishment for our taste. We wanted nothing short of revolution, baby!

Following the rally, we were invited to a PAR party at the home of Les and Bonnie Biederman. Les and Bonnie were the first Jewish folks I knew as friends, having come form a very insular Catholic community. A group of us Yipfugs arrived at the party well into the evening, exhilarated from our evening of haranguing naïve young people to jump off the McCarthy bandwagon and join the radical movement for real change. Welcomed inside by Bonnie, my eyes almost immediately settled upon Arlene.

She sat in an Eames leather lounge chair. An overhanging high-intensity reading light cast a halo around her. She wore an orange and yellow mini- dress, which she had made herself, with big orange and yellow hoop earrings. She had a trim, pixie haircut and a 10,000 watt smile. All of this struck me, but what struck me even more was that she also happened to be expertly rolling joint after joint.

“Oh, let me introduce you to Arlene Wilgoren from Boston PAR,” I heard Bonnie say.

Without taking my eyes off Arlene or those joints, I said, “Well sure, please do!”

Throwing darts at LBJ

Arlene moved to Detroit to be the National Secretary of the new PAR National Organization, located in the McKerchey building on Woodward Ave. in downtown Detroit. It happened that the office was about 5 blocks from the Detroit Institute of Technology (for some reason, we dis-affectionately called it Z-I-T), where I was in the second semester of my Freshman year in college and already at my second school. I wasn’t very interested in school, at least not at ZIT. I preferred to hang out at the PAR office where David Baker, PAR’s leading political theoretician, had taken me under his wing as his protégé. I was getting the education I really wanted in political analysis, organizing techniques, propaganda, that sort of thing. David wasn’t always around, or maybe he shooed me away as a pest when my endless inquiries got to be just too much.

So I spent the rest of my time there in Arlene’s office. She had a Lyndon Johnson dart board (the first president she ever voted for, because he pledged to stop the war; within weeks of his inauguration the bastard was bombing the shit out of North Vietnam, giving Arlene a somewhat sour outlook on voting). I would throw darts at LBJ and shoot the breeze while Arlene tried to get some work done. She was awfully tolerant of my intrusions, and possibly even a bit charmed by this wacky young hippie who liked to hang out in her office. Over the weeks we talked about all kinds of personal history, and compared notes on the current state of affairs in the world and how we were going to straighten them out.

The more I learned about Arlene the more she became like an icon to me on a professional level, if you can call radical rabble rousing a profession. In those heady days of my radicalization, I had some first-rate mentors training my mind. But Arlene was different—she was schooling my soul. I learned from Arlene about passion for freedom, equality, and justice, not just intellectual justifications. Before too long we became really good friends and started hanging out a lot together, though always in group settings—which was how we usually did things in those days anyway. We were very communal. I’m sure it never occurred to me to “ask her out on a date”—that wasn’t exactly one of my top skills. And even if I had thought of it, I’m sure I would have been scared to death to ask.

On tour with the Melville’s

As the summer of ’68 approached, my mentor threw me a summer challenge. I was to conceptualize, organize, and implement a speaking tour of the state by some recognizable authorities on the war, racism, and imperialism. Something that would draw some crowds we could proselytize and organize into the movement. I set about doing my research and hit upon a move I thought ingenious. A recent event of some note was the “Catonsville 9”—all nine were current or former Catholic clergy who broke into the Catonsville, Maryland draft board office and poured lamb’s blood on all the files. They were all arrested, because their policy was “Don’t just do something . . . Stand there!”—meaning take demonstrative, symbolic actions against the war and stand there in the face of the authorities and take credit for what you do.

We were very taken with this approach because of its blend of political action and street theatre—or guerilla theatre—of which we were great devotees. Among the “9” were the Berrigan brothers—Daniel and Phil, both priests—and Tom and Marge Melville, former Maryknoll missionaries, priest and nun respectively, who were kicked out of Guatemala for helping the underprivileged classes organize against the corrupt right-wing dictatorship (which was heavily subsidized by the US because they were anti-communist). The Melvilles would be perfect for my speaking tour challenge. I loved the fact they were defrocked clergy (me and the Catholics had gone our separate ways by now) and they had the whole package—anti- racist, anti-war, anti-imperialist. As a bonus, Phil Berrigan was living at my Uncle’s church in Baltimore and could surely provide an entrée to the Melvilles.

We put together a five-city tour of Michigan in July and went on the road with the Melvilles. I don’t remember how we decided who should go—but Arlene ended up joining our entourage, partly because she hit it off with Tom and Marge. And likely, we needed her car. So we had about a 10-day road trip, cooped up in Arlene’s Corvair, sleeping on the floor in other hippie-radical’s houses, and introducing the Melvilles to enthusiastic crowds at one movement church after another.

That road trip greatly cemented the friendship between Arlene and me, and it wouldn’t be long before things took an interesting turn.

The unforeseen value of being a communist

When Arlene relocated to Detroit, she had moved into a basement apartment on Cass Ave., just off the campus of Wayne State University. That apartment was later dubbed the Apartfug because of all the wayward Yipfugs Arlene sheltered in their time of need.

It all began with our friend Carolyn from a good Royal Oak Catholic family of about eight or ten kids. For some reason her family couldn’t cope with her; I believe they thought she had flipped her lid. Perhaps she had, though more likely it was just the drugs. Carolyn wasn’t too thrilled with her family either, so a couple of us Yipfugs cooked up the idea to see if maybe Arlene would let Carolyn stay with her for awhile. Arlene being the generous soul she still is today said—“Of course.” Not surprisingly, one thing led to another. Soon, Carolyn’s boyfriend, Otto, had moved in and the Apartfug was on its way to becoming a mini-commune. The next refugee turned out to be me.

I was still enjoying the relative hospitality of my parent’s house. “Dunn’s Room” was the inner sanctum of the 60’s hippie-radical movement in Royal Oak. It occupied the entire upper floor of the 11⁄2 story house we grew up in. From 1967 onwards, we had transformed this space into an outrageous lair of hippie-dom–floor-to-ceiling psychedelic murals in day-glo colors, pulsing in 3-D with the black lights and strobes, and the stereo blasting one acid-rock anthem after another. And there are probably some drug stashes still hidden away in cubby holes in the attic to this day.

Somehow, we had convinced our parents we should install a doorbell at the bottom of the stairs for them to use when they wanted to talk with any of us. This was purely for their own convenience, not ours, we reassured them. (What can I say? I wasn��t called the Minister of Bullshit for nothing.)

One now-historic afternoon in the Fall of ’68, that doorbell rang persistently. Shaking off whatever fog I was in, I stumbled out of the bedroom and leaned over the second floor landing to see what was up. It was my father. “Whose leaflets are these?” he barked, pointing to a stack of papers on the bottom stairs. He was pretty good at getting worked-up into a red-faced lather in those days.

“They’re mine,” I said. In truth, I couldn’t recall for sure what they were, but they were obviously leaflets even from that distance. And as the resident propagandist, it was quite likely they were mine. “What’s the point?”

“Where did they come from?!” he barked.

“I made them—so we can get people to come to this rally we organized!” I said somewhat incredulously, still missing the point.

“The speakers at this rally are communists!” he barked back.

Me, broken record again, “What’s your point?”

His blood pressure was still on the rise, “Are you telling me you’re a communist?!”

Me, bewildered, “OK, so what if I am?”

“No communist is going to live in this house!,” he roared.

“Does that mean you’re telling me to leave?!” (whose blood pressure was up now?)

“If you’re telling me you’re a communist, then yes, I guess that is what I’m saying.”

“OK—fine. I’ll be gone by tonight!” “Fine!” he said, and slammed the door.

My expulsion was as unexpected as it was inevitable. But what to do next was not so clear. The only “job” I had was my political activity—organizing, propagandizing, learning from my political elders. And the only income I had was occasional hit or miss cash from dabbling in the traffic of mood- altering substances.

LD ensconces in the Apartfug, and that ain’t all!

I packed all my worldly possessions in a black plastic garbage bag, I didn’t really have much more than nothing. But where the hell was I gonna go? I screwed up my courage and called Arlene.

“Hey,” I said. “I got kicked out of the of the house. Can I stay there for a day or two while I figure out what to do?”

“Well . . . sure,” Arlene said. “I don’t see why we can’t make room for one more if it’s just for a few days. Come on down and we’ll help you figure it out.”

Who would have ever predicted those few days would turn into 36 years and counting? Of course, there wasn’t really any ready place for me to sleep. Carolyn and Otto were sleeping on some sort of couch or day-bed in the living room. Arlene had the small bedroom to herself, with a single mattress on a box-spring on the floor. She offered to pull the mattress off for herself and I could sleep on the box-spring. I wasn’t in any position to quibble, and it was surely better that sleeping on the floor.

I don’t know if either of us can fully explain what happened that night. Did a comforting hand reach for a hand in need? Or did a grateful hand reach out in thanks. No matter, that simple gesture turned into a hug, that hug into a passionate embrace that lasted well into the night. From there, it was likely not as quick or simple as it seems now – Arlene probably thought it was crazy to conclude this was anything more than friends taking care of each other; I was probably too crazy to recognize whether it was crazy or not. But a deep and enduring bond was formed that night, as friendship blossomed into love. And before long, love was precisely what we were calling it.

Such a romantic proposal

I remember it all as just so simple and nonchalant. Sometime in that Winter of ’68-’69, the local Detroit PAR organization took a determined decision that if they were going to confront racism in the white community, they had better relocate to suburbia and live among the heathens. So the Detroit PAR office moved to the corner of 9 Mile Road and Woodward Avenue in the welcoming community of Ferndale (just three miles from my youthful, very white, stomping grounds of Royal Oak).

The PAR National Office remained downtown, as did we for the time being. But we were also quite involved in the local Detroit PAR activities and I still had Yipfugs business to attend to in the suburbs as well. So we made frequent trips out Woodward Avenue for meetings and such. Sometime in late winter or early Spring (I don’t have any specific notion of the date and wonder if Arlene does) we arrived at the Ferndale office early for a meeting and were sitting in the car listening to music. I’ll never recall this moment verbatim, but it went something like this.

Arlene: “You know, I’m awfully happy to be in love with you. And it just seems to keep getting better.”

LD: “I know what you mean–I keep feeling like, ‘this is great, how could it get any better,’ but then it does. I have a hard time remembering what life was like before I loved you, and don’t know why I should even try.”

Arlene: “You know, I’ve been thinking, maybe we ought to get married.”

If it’s true that inside every cynic is an idealist striving to avoid disappointment, then inside every idealist is a real pisser of a cynic. I replied: “Wow, married! What a great idea!” while thinking, hey man, I’m going to die before I’m 21 anyway. Even if it doesn’t work out, I can stand anything for two years.

So I said yes. And the truth is, yes was just the right answer. It seemed, and seems, so right in every way.

A dashiki so short you can see her pupuk . . . and honey, couldn’t you at least wear shoes?

So that brings us to the wedding. A weird and wonderful hippy wedding which Jodi herself wrote about as a college Freshman at Yale and which continues to be the stuff of myth and lore—even among folks who were not there.

The wedding outfits: Arlene made matching dashikis—brightly colored and ornately patterned, modeled after African ceremonial robes. She made mine a shirt and hers a mini-dress, so short that the casual observer could catch occasional peeks at her underpants. .

The setting: We planned to be wed outdoors (out in nature, man, among the birds and the bees and the flowers), unfortunately bad weather forced us into the basement of a movement church in downtown Detroit.

The guests: Hundreds of young radicals in their finest hippy garb, along with pockets of straights— notably Arlene’s mother Goldie and stepfather Al, my parents, some relatives and neighbors. The hippies reeked of pot smoke, the straights of Chanel #5 and Old Spice. Rising above the noise and intermingling scents, our favorite local rock band jamming Come on Baby Light My Fire and Sunshine of Your Love.

The vow: an original, so perfect for its time, hand-lettered in calligraphy on a scroll made from a window shade:

The 23rd Day of Leo, 1969 Because of the way we love each other, we, Arlene and LD, have decided to live our lives together. And we declare that we will act not only as individuals, but also as a unit until that union inhibits our growth rather than stimulates it.

The ceremony: Everyone gathers in a circle, sitting on the floor. Arlene hands out wild flowers—for Peace. LD hands out peaches—for Sustenance. Goldie, whispering, pleads with Arlene: “Honey, could you at least wear shoes?” We jointly recite our vow, as a promise to all assembled, with no official witness for the state. We conclude with a massive group hug, readily given. And everyone signs our wedding scroll in witness.

The celebration: A potluck supper, featuring hot dogs, followed later in the evening (for the hippies only) by an endless night of partying and carrying on in all the special manners the 60s had to offer.

The aftermath: Over-indulged, finally in bed by 5:00 AM. Phone ringing at 7:00. It was Goldie. “Darling, are you actually married?”

“Of course we are Ma,” said Arlene, groggily.

The truth: Well, legally, no, we were not. We had decided that what really mattered to us, and, we thought should really be what matters at all, was to stand up in front of our community and announce our love and commitment to each other. So we did just that. And to hell with the state. It was none of their business, so we burned the marriage license!

This pesky legal detail we finally did take care of several months later with a few signatures on a newly registered license.

Thirty-six and counting

Thirty-six and more years later, it seems like so long ago and yet only an instant in the past. Since those early days we’ve wandered from Detroit to Boston to the great American West; back to Detroit; to Ferry, Michigan; to Washington, DC; to San Francisco; to Fayetteville, Arkansas; to Chicago; and, for the moment at least, to LaCrosse, Indiana. Not to mention stints as rabble-rouser, consultant, administrator, teacher, farmer, consultant, student, finance executive, nurse, computer scientist, consultant, executive, nursery owner, philanthropist, consultant, and retiree. And somehow, through it all we remain inseparable beyond a few days at a time.

The message in all this—cherish each other for who you are, support each other to be who you can be, never stop learning and growing. And you can never say “I love you” too often, too much, or too enthusiastically.

[acornometrics]

Gazpacho: Sunshine in a Bowl

We're having a bit of separation anxiety from leaving our garden behind at Acorn Ridge and moving to Kendal at Oberlin. But frankly, we're not missing all the back-breaking work. Fortunately, there is an excellent farmers market in Oberlin and lots of farm stands nearby. So we have had plenty of tasty, fresh, often organic produce available all summer long. 

Great ingredients make for great gazpacho. (photo credit: Larry Dunn)

Tomatoes are fully in season now, and we have been getting particularly tasty golden cherry tomatoes at the Saturday market. The plethora of tomatoes means it's gazpacho time! And these golden cherries make for a really tasty outcome. Here is our favorite recipe.

CLASSIC ANDALUSIAN GAZPACHO

(Adapted from Restaurant El Faro in Cádiz, Spain in Gourmet, August 2002)

The classic Andalusian gazpacho is found all over the region with surprisingly few variations, except for the addition of cucumber and onion — ingredients that have fallen out of favor with chefs who prefer to allow the pure taste of the tomatoes, Sherry vinegar, and olive oil to shine through.

Yield: Makes 4 servings

Active Time: 30 minutes

Total Time: 3 1/2 hours

INGREDIENTS

1 (2-inch-long) piece baguette

3 garlic cloves

1 teaspoons salt

2 tablespoons Sherry vinegar "reserva" (or similar)

1 teaspoon palm sugar (or other raw sugar)

2 1/2 lb ripe tomatoes, cored and quartered

1/2 cup extra-virgin Andalusian olive oil (or similar)

METHOD

Soak bread in 1/2 cup water 1 minute, then squeeze dry, discarding soaking water.

Mince garlic and sweat it with a little olive oil, salt, and fresh-cracked white pepper in microwave (or in a small skillet over a low flame). 

Blend garlic paste, bread, 2 tablespoons vinegar, sugar, and half of tomatoes in a food processor until tomatoes are very finely chopped. Add remaining tomatoes with motor running and, when very finely chopped, gradually add oil in a slow stream, blending until as smooth as possible, about 1 minute.

Force soup through a sieve into a bowl, pressing firmly on solids. Discard solids.

Transfer to a glass container and chill, covered, until cold, about 3 hours. Adjust final seasoning with salt, pepper, and vinegar before serving.

Garnish possibilities: sprinkling of Aleppo pepper, dollop of creme fraiche, strewn snipped chives, finely chopped cucumber, dollop of greek yogurt, cucumber raita, chopped hard-boiled egg . . . 

Golden cherry tomato gazpacho with a floated zucchini fritter, dollop of cucumber raita, and a sprinkle of Aleppo pepper. (photo credit: Larry Dunn)

[acornometrics]

Sage Advice ...for Music...for Life

One of our ambitions in moving to Oberlin is to engage ourselves more deeply into the process of making and presenting music, and the arts in general. Oberlin College and Conservatory are such a hotbed of art-making, we expect the immersion opportunities to be nearly innumerable.  We thought that by moving here in the summer we’d be able to get comfortably settled before the rush of activities that arrives with the start of the school year. But while we were still enmeshed in unpacking and organizing our new home, just such an opportunity arose — The Thomas and Evon Cooper International Music Competition. It was too enticing to pass up. 

Winners of the 2013 Cooper International Competition—(from left): second-place winner Ming Liu and co-champions William Ching-Yi We and Kyumin Park—with conductor Jahja Ling. (Photo Credit: Roger Mastroianni) 

The Cooper Competition, sponsored by financier Thomas Cooper and pianist/educator Evon Cooper, is a collaborative undertaking of the Obelrin Conservatory and the Cleveland Orchestra. The competition alternates annually between piano and violin focus and it draws highly accomplished young musicians (age 13 to 18) from around the world. The top three performers each year perform a full concerto with the Cleveland Orchestra at venerable Severance Hall; receive a full four-year scholarship to the Oberlin Conservatory; and are awarded cash prizes, $10,000 to the winner.  

The 2013 competition brought 24 high school violin students, aged 14 to 18, to Oberlin from July 18-26, 2013. Despite their youth, they completely wowed us with their talent and skills. The competition began with three days of preliminary rounds at which each performer presented a set of short selections, chosen from a designated repertory. Four judges winnowed the group down to ten who then performed a complete violin concerto accompanied by a piano reduction of the orchestral score. From this group, six were selected to play in the recital finals, after which the three finalists were chosen to play their concertos with the renowned Cleveland Orchestra in Severance Hall.

2013 Cooper International Competition judge David Bowlin coaching a participant in his Master Class. (Photo Credit: Larry Dunn)

We attended a few of the early rounds, as a break from our seemingly endless sorting and arranging our new digs. But the unanticipated bonus for us came from the Master Classes, which were offered by six of the seven judges. We initially planned to only attend the class presented by judge (and Oberlin faculty member) David Bowlin because we know him through our work with ICE (International Contemporary Ensemble). But we enjoyed David’s coaching of three competitors so much, we decided to attend two more, offered by judges Stephanie Chase and James Buswell. 

We learned so much by observing these three consummate violinists/teachers —about the music, the violin instrument, the bow, modes of expression, and the relationship between the player and the instrument, the audience, the orchestra (or accompanist) one is playing with. Surprisingly, little of the advice given to the young violinists was about technique, because their talent, dedication, and hard work have resulted in impressive technique. The focus was much more on how to more effectively put that technique at the service of their art, about being more expressive, adding some élan and evocative gestures. They also talked about projecting the narrative of the music, playing to the person in the back of the room and appreciating the resonance of the room they are in.

2013 Cooper International Competition judge James Buswell coaching a participant in his Master Class. (Photo Credit: Larry Dunn)

We found the class given by James Buswell, acclaimed violinist and faculty member at the New England Conservatory of Music, the most illuminating and entertaining. Buswell used great metaphors, such as describing a violinist playing too smoothly without subtle shifts in intonation and dynamics as sounding like a used car salesman. He compared putting too much emphasis on slavish adherence to the beat as sounding like a military marching band. 

Most revelatory to us was that much of the advice the experts were giving to the young musicians could be applied to more than just music performance. There were some sage life lessons for anyone paying attention. A common theme in these classes was advice about paying attention to the music and the narrative the composer was framing, rather than concentrating solely on the expert technique of playing the instrument. It made us think about how often we fret about little details and forget to appreciate the long arc, the big picture. Bowlin suggested to one youngster that what makes an artist great is how beautifully she plays the easiest parts, the long notes, and even the rests. Wouldn’t we all be wise, and likely happier, if we would relish the slow moments and rests we are offered. 

[acornometrics]

Savory Treat: Pickled Red Onions

Our larder replenishment continues here at Kendal at Oberlin. This time, we've added a new element: Pickled Red Onions. We were having lunch last week with Matthew Gallagher at Black River Cafe and one of us ordered a sandwich that came with delicious pickled red onions. We decided then and there it was time to stop planning to make them and just knuckle down and do it. We did a little research and experimenting and settled on the following recipe, which came out delicious. The onions had a good crunch, great color, wonderfully spiciness, and good sweet-tart-salt balance. They’re sure to be a new staple. 

PICKLED RED ONIONS 

Adapted from Bon Appétit, January 2010, by Chefs Andrew Chase and Erwin Schrottner of Café Katja

Yield: makes about 2 cups

Ingredients:

1 large red onion, halved through core, thinly sliced crosswise

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 cup red wine vinegar

1 1/2 teaspoons coarse kosher salt

1 1/2 teaspoons whole white peppercorns

5 whole allspice berries 

1/2 cinnamon stick

Preparation:

Blanch the onion slices in salted boiling water for 1 minute. Drain and place them in medium bowl. (Note: this blanching step is used to mitigate the “bite” from the raw onions; you can skip this step if you savor that flavor.)

Wrap the  peppercorns, allspice, and cinnamon in a piece of cheesecloth. Bring the sugar, vinegar, salt, and spice packet to a boil in small saucepan. When the sugar and salt are fully dissolved, pour this hot brine over the onions. Cover and let stand until cooled to room temperature. Chill overnight. (Note: remove the spice pack before serving.)

Can be made up to 3 weeks ahead. Keep chilled.