NEWS & REVIEWS
Old Bottles, New Wine
BILLBOARD MAGAZINE -The Classical Score
By Steve Smith
June 29, 2002 - OLD BOTTLES, NEW WINE: Among the more valuable
lessons imparted by the period-instruments movement in classical music is
that despite the march of time bringing forth newer, more flexible implements
for music-making, there's still a great deal of vitality to be found in using
historic instruments and techniques in the music of Bach, Beethoven, and even
Berlioz. More recently, those instruments have been used to make modern music
as well: Composers have begun to write for the distinctive timbres of gut-string
violin, wooden flute, and harpsichord, and early-music ensembles have commissioned
new pieces to sit alongside Handel and Vivaldi on concert programs.
This month, the Santa Fe New Music label has issued a compelling case for such generational hybrids with The Shock of the Old, a collaboration between the Common Sense Composers' Collective—an eight-member cooperative based in New York and San Francisco—and American Baroque, an early-music consort that makes its home in the Bay Area. The disc is available via amazon.com and the Web sites of the composers (commonsense.org), performers (americanbaroque.org), and the label (sfnm.com).
Since its inception in 1993, the members of Common Sense have composed for a different performing ensemble each year. According to founder Dan Becker, this particularly uncommon collaboration began as small talk more than six years ago.
"[American Baroque] flute player Stephen Schultz and oboe player Gonzalo Ruiz are old friends of mine," Becker explains. "Up until that point, they had recorded but hadn't done any live performances. I was talking to Stephen about our group at a party, and he said, 'Why don't you do a project for us?' " Becker notes that many early-music practitioners are also new-music adherents; American Baroque had even made two recordings of original compositions by their viola da gamba player Roy Whelden, both issued on the New Albion label.
The offhand comment led to months of experimentation. "We got together once a week and taped all of our sessions," Becker says. "They demonstrated their instruments and talked about problem areas that might come up. People started sending snippets of music experiments, improvisational games, chords re-voiced in different ways. We read everything over and over, taped them, and sent them back."
As the individual composers developed their pieces, they reacted to the unusual instruments and their implications in different ways. Becker and Ed Harsh, for instance, created spirited and witty pieces inspired by Baroque music, while Marc Mellits and John Halle composed works very similar in style to their music for modern instruments. Melissa Hui focused on the unique timbres of the instruments in "Shall We Go?" Randall Woolf took the musical gene-splicing further still.
"Before I moved to New York, my music was much more classical and Baroque-based," Woolf says, "and when I moved here, I got very involved in electronics. I was sort of thinking, 'Well, I thought I'd just left this behind!' But I found a way to incorporate it [by using] the sampler I'd just bought." Woolf sampled previous American Baroque recordings of music by Telemann and Handel and interpolated it into his work. "It enabled me to put the ancient thing in a little box and bring it out when I wanted to and to write in more modern, minimalistic ways for other instruments."
