Tables Turned: André de Ridder Interviews Channy Leaneagh

BY LAUREN MCNEE

This interview mini-series began with s t a r g a z e's André de Ridder answering questions posed by Poliça's Channy Leaneagh (if you missed it, you can read the interview here) as part of Liquid Music's first ever "virtual residency" featuring the two ensembles. This round, it was André's turn to ask Channy a few questions about her favorite things, thoughts on Classical music, and dreams for the future. Enjoy!

Poliça's Channy Leaneagh, Photo Credit: Cameron Wittig

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Who, What, Where, and Why

Did you have musical parents? Was music present in your house or did you discover it completely by yourself? Do you have siblings and did or do you make music with them?
My mom learned the accordion as a kid. That was a valuable instrument in the small Czech community she grew up in South Dakota with all the polka dances and etc. My dad was a self-taught piano player and pursued songwriting until I was about 9 years old. He is a very talented musician and I learned a lot from him about songwriting and evoking emotion when I sing. They both valued music and put all of their three kids in private lessons and orchestras and gave us access to music both live and on the stereo. I have never made music with any of my siblings though.

What is your experience with and attitude to 'classical' music? Did it change from when you first got into music to how you perceive it now? Do you agree with many that it has an elitist feel and social connotation about it? What interests you about it? Do you go to opera or orchestral concerts when you're at home?
I’ve had four wonderful violin teachers, and they all introduced me to some really great classical pieces for solo violin and also chamber and orchestra; so my first introductions were as a student. I liked classical music as a kid and I still do; it’s soothing to me even when it’s jagged and dissonant. Music with lyrics/vocals can be too stimulating for me sometimes. I often want to listen to sounds without a personal point of view—I just want to feel the music. It’s similar to electronic music to me in that sense. You have to search it out a lot more so than other musical styles; it’s separation from pop-culture makes it seem exclusive but I think it’s just modest. It’s like a shy kid being accused of being snobbish. I don’t discredit classical music’s part in history of being very white and western though; it’s past isn’t as inviting as rap or jazz but I hope that is changing and the future of classical music will be a more inclusive one.

What classical instrument do you like most the sound of and which one are you most intrigued about to feature in our collaboration?
My favorites are the viola and oboe. I like those tones the best. I hope those two instruments will be involved in our collaboration and I am also looking forward to the bass flute.

What's the compositional process in Poliça? Do you personally write songs and then bring them to the band to arrange and develop?
The compositional process is akin to an assembly line. We are very egalitarian. Ryan is always at the head of the line. Most of the time I react first to what he’s made and lay down the lyrics and melody. The bass player, Chris Bierden comes next reacting off of the new combination of Ryan and I. And finally the drums come in to react with their beats. Sometimes I come after the bass and drums but always Ryan starts the clock.

What do you like doing to switch off from everything, what gives you respite and recharges your batteries, creatively speaking?
Walking is my main thing for switching off but I also like reading and drawing for getting away.

Where would you like to live and work/write for a while, if given the chance, outside your home country?
This question was probably the hardest. I never dream about moving somewhere else. I lived and worked in Cambodia for a few years and do miss it now and then. I guess I could see hiding away there for a few years someday.

As a conductor I am often told that life only starts at age 70! On the other hand I have heard people say pop music is a young wo(man)'s game. How do you feel about that and where do you see yourself in say 20 years time? Are you sometimes thinking about musical life after relentless touring and album-cycles? What are your dreams for the future?
I believe that’s true for the life of a conductor; I predict you have a long and fun career ahead of you. I believe the future of classical music is strong and exciting and it is doing such cooler and more rebellious things than pop music! I don’t consider myself a pop musician but the kind of music I make is for sure a young woman's game and; being a “professional” musician also feels like a branding game and a self serving game but I like fighting against those things and seeing if I can still stand on my own two feet.

I always want to make music but I don’t hope to engage in selling myself for too much longer. In the future I see myself screaming into the microphone in a cacophony of noise at night while teaching pre-school during the day and spending my in between time fighting the evils of capitalism.

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André de Ridder conducting s t a r g a z e, Photo Credit: Emanuel Florakis

Favorite Things

Favorite contemporary/modern composer?
Nico Muhly

Favorite old 'dead' composer?
Fritz Kreisler

Favorite recent band/artist discovery?
Oneohtrix Point Never

Favorite recent collaboration (outside your work), in the music world anywhere, recently?
The Body and The Haxan Cloak; I Shall Die Here (2014 via RVNG).

Favorite music festival, currently?
My favorite collaboration thus far was with Alex Ridha of Boys Noize, Orlando Higginbottom from T.E.E.D (Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs) and Ryan (Olson). We met up at a studio after a Poliça show in LA and jammed out. Orlando was on piano, Alex on electronics and Ryan was processing my vocals and I just sang over them and we made one of my favorite songs ever. We were listening to each other and reacting without any walls between us. Those are the most treasured moments in making music; when we listen to each other and we are subtracting our own self to combine with others. I hope some truly inspired moments can occur in this Stargaze and Poliça collaboration.

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Listen

"Raw Exit" from Poliça's Shulamith (2013)

“Relief” by The Dodos featuring s t a r g a z e orchestra at the Kilkenny Arts Festival in Ireland (2014)

Extracurricular listening: Pt.1 Spiritual America

by Patrick Marschke

As purveyors of contemporary music, or perhaps more accurately “current music," with a growing and increasingly adventurous audience, we are wholeheartedly committed to the creation of new and challenging music. But we also think that ‘challenging’ might not be the best word for it. Running a marathon is challenging. Music can be demanding, but not marathon demanding (though we are sure some of you might disagree). So perhaps what could be considered ‘challenging’ music is actually just lacking some context. Context that we will attempt (<—key word) to provide as part of a new blog series that we will be pursuing for the entirety of the 15.16 season.

For each concert we will provide some extracurricular listening (or watching) and some rabbit holes for LM super fans to excavate and discover their own exciting but perhaps obscure corner of the music world.

Innova (our Saint Paul neighbors!)
New Amsterdam
Bedroom Community
Brassland
Asthmatic Kitty

^all record labels that will pop up A LOT—we encourage you to delve DEEP into the endless supply of amazing music being put out by these organizations. Now on with Part One:

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Wye Oak and William Brittelle: Spiritual America
with special guest Michi Wiancko

“William Brittelle is creating a body of work that has no precedent . . . one of the most promising heirs of the vital American maverick tradition.” — Classical TV

William Brittelle is actually one of the founding members of New Amsterdam, and his attitudes and ideas about music definitely shine through.

Note the incredible diversity of sounds in Brittelle’s music (even in a single piece!):

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“Shimmering loveliness… a soundscape that borders on the sublime.” — BBC Music on the music of Wye Oak  

Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack prove that two is plenty. Check out this live performance and try to keep track of what sound is coming from where:

Here is a track off of Wye Oak’s most recent album Shriek, selections of which will be presented on Wednesday recomposed by Michi Wiancko and Brittelle:

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Michi Wiancko will become a very familiar face here in the Twin Cities (if she isn’t already) in the coming months as she works closely with The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra—read more here.

Michi brings us "You Are the First" through her Kono Michi project (“the result of 4,000 jumps over the course of 6,000 miles…”):

“Chamber Pop” with Alice and Michi

Never-before recorded violin and piano works of the fabulous composer and violin virtuoso, Émile Sauret:

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One of the best ways to keep up with artists and new music these days is through social media—follow and share if you find something you love!

Follow Liquid Music for updates and insights:

Twitter: @LiquidMusicSPCO
(https://twitter.com/LiquidMusicSPCO)

Instagram: @LiquidMusicSeries
(https://instagram.com/liquidmusicseries/)

William Brittelle: www.williambrittelle.com/ 

Wye Oak: 
http://wyeoakmusic.com/
FB: https://www.facebook.com/wyeoak
Twitter: @wyeoak (twitter.com/wyeoak)
Instagram: @wyeoakmusic (https://instagram.com/wyeoakmusic/)

Michi Wiancko:
http://michiwiancko.com/
Twitter: @KonoMichiMusic (https://twitter.com/KonoMichiMusic)

Be sure to share your own discoveries and thoughts in the comments below.

ACF interviews Miranda Cuckson

We asked our friends across the street, American Composers Forum, to interview Liquid Music artist Miranda Cuckson in anticipation of her November 14th show.  Innova (ACF's record label) Operations Director Chris Campbell took on the task. Learn more about Cuckson's work with electronics, how she gets to the heart of a new piece of music, and her passion for collaborating with living composers.        

photo by Damien Olsen

With the “Sun Propeller” concert, you’re performing pieces by composers from all over the world. How do you tie it together, or bring a through-line to such a diverse program lineup?  Or do you?

Sometimes I do programs that have some kind of thematic thread, sometimes not. Either way, I go for a sequence that's satisfying to the senses, emotions and mind: from the way pieces lead to each other or juxtapositions that perk up your ears or mix up the kinds of energy. I love when a program has you, as a listener, on some level continually aware of the experience as a whole. An overall theme can be a fun or thought-instigating way, though, to group music together. When I started thinking about the "Sun Propeller" program, I realized a couple of the pieces I had in mind had titles referring to elements in nature: light and wind. So I decided that would be a beautiful idea for the program. Dai Fujikura's "prism spectra" and Nina Young's "Sun Propeller" both are about light, and Kaija Saariaho's "Vent Nocturne" is about wind, Richard Barrett's "Air" is about air and breath, and Ileana Perez-Velasquez's "un ser con unas alas enormes" means "the being with enormous wings" and evokes many natural elements.

As someone with a mixed background (European/Asian/American/Australian) and as a woman, I do like to involve composers from different countries, and women since they are still under-represented in general. I think programming that way often happens quite naturally for me because there is just a very diverse bunch of composers that I know of and want to program.

What about performing with electronics appeals to you?

I'm fascinated by a lot of things about it. I'm not a tech geek and I'm wary of many implications of technology for human behavior, but the developments are also amazing in what they make possible. Basically I enjoy exploring the relation, and tension, between the human and technological. 

On the one hand, there's something so primal about the traditional instruments and the physicality involved. Essentially you're playing with a wood box and stick or blowing in a metal tube or hitting an object or plucking a string. The instruments have been sophisticated over the years—technological advances in themselves—but the basics of what they are and how you use them are the same. Now we have computers which use all kinds of complexity of coding and software to create sounds, in ways that are not visible or physical to us in that basic sense. 

There are infinite sounds that can be created with electronics so every piece can be a different sound world.  Also the ways of interacting with electronics can range from having a pre-recorded track to play with the pieces in which electronics are triggered at certain moments or by certain sounds, or are molded by a person in a more improvisatory way. Sometime I'll probably learn how to trigger and control the electronics myself during a performance, but I've also enjoyed having someone be the "sound artist" so we are playing "chamber music"—again maintaining a human dimension. I'm delighted Nina C. Young will be the sound artist for this concert.

Electronics can produce sounds in ways that would seem technically impossible for human players in terms of speed or crazy jumping between registers or sudden changes of dynamic. This makes for some amazing effects and it's fun when it also pushes you to strive to do some of those things yourself!

How do you discover new work or composers?

A lot of ways. Often I just listen to things and then in that intuitive way, let that lead me to listen to something else I didn't know. Sometimes I have the radio on. Sometimes I get obsessed with some area or group of composers and burrow into finding out more. I check out recommendations and people send me things they've composed. I'm very immersed in music and being a musician, so I am involved in a lot and know a lot of musicians and people doing premieres and newer works and I keep tabs on what's going on.  I work with a lot of younger composers, through programs at schools and universities and summer programs, so sometimes I get to make note of new talent that way.

photo by Damien Olsen

You’ve recorded composers such as Ralph Shapey, Donald Martino and Luigi Nono, but you embrace a wide range of repertoire. What qualities draw you to a piece and compel you to commit to its realization?

I'm basically looking for vividness and some quality that is very strong. That sounds general but I am open to different aesthetics. I just want the piece to create its own world and suggest something that makes me feel something very strongly emotionally or want to try to understand it more fully. A piece might take you through a compelling progression of moods, a structure that's somehow meaningful, it could be remarkably static or slow, it could offer astonishing sounds, or provoke surprising emotions. I do like technical challenges and to explore what my instrument can do, but if the piece is just a collection of sounds or tricks, I get bored with it after a little while and want to do something else.

What is classical music to you?

I think at this point it comes down to intention and the framing of the music as a defined work of art. There are no templates of form or harmony or anything anymore, every parameter has been challenged and upended, and it doesn't even have to be notated in the conventional way, it could even be just verbal instructions. But the piece has to have a clear intention as a distinct work of music, and a concept about how it is put together, whether in time or content. 

I like to think/hope that even people who have upended those parameters still put their work in the context of classical music's history. The term "classical music" as we've known it has referred mainly to Western, European-derived culture. Its origins are seen as coming from medieval chant through to the music of European Baroque and Classical/Romantic eras, which was exported to America and the rest of the world.  But as the world has gotten smaller, classical music has become less European per se and more inclusive of anything, in the best American sense of embracing all origins and ethnicities.

You play both violin and viola. Can you speak about your approach to both?

I've played the violin much of my life and I took up the viola about six years ago. I just love the expanded sound possibilities of playing both and adapting my playing style to each. It's comparable to wind players, who often play the full range of registers of their instruments: flute goes from piccolo to C flute to alto to bass, clarinet has the E-flat, A, B-flat and bass clarinets, etc. There are players who double on violin/viola but it's not as usual a thing for string players.

I relish the upper and lower extremes—the high E string of the violin, which can be soaring and radiant or delicate and whispery or even charmingly squeaky,  and the low C string of the viola, which can be rich or dusky and velvety. In the middle range which the instruments share, I'm always intrigued by the difference in tone color—the viola has its grainier sound, almost reedy, which I find particularly beautiful quiet in the upper positions, and the violin has its own kind of warmth but tends to be more focused and direct, and with a more nimble response to quick motions of the bow.

People often ask how it is to switch between violin and viola on a program. I've found the physical adjustment is pretty simple—your kinesthetic memory as a player becomes quite intuitive with years of playing and I get a physical sense of the viola quickly. The approach to sound production is certainly different—with the viola, it's more effort to draw the tone.  When I go from viola back to violin, the violin feels like a toy instrument, it seems so small and light!  Of course there's the matter of reading the viola alto clef—I occasionally still second-guess myself!

Besides viola and violin, I'm also going to be featuring a sort of hybrid instrument, because Nina Young's piece is for scordatura (de-tuned) violin. The lowest string is tuned down a fourth so it has a sound color all its own! 

photo by Damien Olsen

I’d like to ask about your process. How do you get beyond the mechanics of a complex piece and get to the expressive heart of it?

Part of it involves being so immersed in new musical languages that you start to hear and feel the emotional meanings and tugs and nuances as spontaneously as you do with traditional tonal classical music. For both performers and listeners, that takes time to listen to enough of the music so you can internalize it and just tap into those feelings and the colors that you hear in your mind. Once you do that, you can also make more purposeful decisions about how to get across the shape of a piece and how it evolves. 

The other aspect is that for me performing music is basically a form of being an actor. You are an actor embodying and conveying the personality of the creator, the composer, and within that you are also conveying a great range of emotions and moods and states of being that the composer is communicating in that piece. On a conscious level, I sometimes read about the composer, not necessarily drawing heavy-handed connections such as "he/she was going through this at that time so the piece is about that", but just getting a sense of the composer as a unique individual. If the composer is living, of course I like to talk with them, spend time with them, so I get a sense of who they are and what it is they felt they needed to convey through music. And on a less explicit level, I often try to sense the person in the music, kind of acting in a non-verbal way... it may sound vague but at my communicative best, that's pretty much what I am doing!

I'm not exactly sure how this happened...

by Michi Wiancko

...but during the month of October, Saint Paul will become the most Michi-friendly place on the planet.

Let me preface this by explaining that my musical universe and career is a patchwork of all the different ways of music-making that I love the most. I feel very lucky that way. Performing chamber music with some of my most favorite classical musicians? HELL YES. Writing music for groups that are looking to branch out and like the idea of a performer/composer? CHECK. Arranging both classical and non-classical works for both classical and non-classical musicians? BINGO.

"You Are the First"—the result of thousands of jumps over the course of 6,000 miles.

I come from an intensely classical background: I got an early start on the violin, went straight to private lessons and competitions after school, graduated from conservatories, and had classical performance managers who pinned down as many recital and concerto performance opportunities for me as they could. But there was a discontent I started feeling in my early twenties that grew steadily each year. I wanted to be a part of other kinds of creative scenes, to MAKE music, not just play it. I was also becoming disillusioned with the soloist path - it was so lonely and stressful.

So, I started by joining other people’s bands—gypsy jazz, folk, country hick-hop, indie rock. I will never forget the time that I got a last-minute call to replace a violinist-in-labor for a solo performance with the New York Philharmonic. 90 minutes after stepping off the stage of Avery Fisher, I stepped onto another stage in the east village (in very different clothing, but with a heart still racing from my big NYP moment) to play alt-country versions of Cypress Hill songs for an audience of mostly SantaCon revelers. I could write a whole separate essay about this surreal moment in my career, but suffice it to say that this was a turning point for me when it came to accepting myself for who I was. I needed to make my own path.

Eventually I started writing music for my own band, Kono Michi, and collaborating with as many kindred spirits as I could find. Composing and arranging music for others feels like a natural outgrowth from that, and now that my discontent has disappeared, I have incorporated classical performance back into my life with gratitude and passion.

I love working with people who come from a completely different musical background from me. Oftentimes it’s the people who don’t read music or didn’t go to music school who have the most to teach us conservatory geeks, and who have the most profound and honed relationship with aural expression - the kind you can’t necessarily get from Juilliard.

I also love working with people like me who come from a classical upbringing but have itched for something MORE and NEW. It turns out that some of us grew up strictly classical, practicing our instruments for your standard 4 to 6 hours a day, while sneaking off to blast music that couldn’t be further from the kind we were making ourselves. Goth and new wave (my first loves), shoegaze and post rock, punjabi and rap and electro-pop and lo-fi indie folk… the list of what I identified with during my formative years goes on and on. I kept my passion for this “other” music locked up in a separate compartment for fear it would make me appear less than serious about my Brahms Concerto or Bach Chaconne to my peers and mentors.

Fast-forward to October 2015. Now everybody likes everything!* I think the opportunities that are in play for me here would blow the mind of my 20-year-old self.

Let’s start with Liquid Music. On October 14th, I get to collaborate with the incredible powerhouse duo that makes up the band Wye Oak. Theirs is a harmonically, rhythmically, lyrically, and artistically brilliant kind of pop music that I have taken and arranged for Wye Oak + myself + a musical crew comprised of people I love. Their pop songs trigger the obsessive fangirl in me, so orchestrating it for an electro-acoustic bunch with mega-chops is a project that I’ve found exceptionally fulfilling, and we haven’t even gotten to the live performance part of it yet.

On the same concert, we’ll present the premiere of a new piece I’ve written for violin, cello, bass, and synthesizer called I Have a Map. It’s the kind of piece that one might be inspired to write while going back and forth between Greenwich Village in New York and a serene hilltop farm in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts. And then. As if that was NOT enough to rock my (and, hopefully, eventually, both of your) socks off, I get to perform a bunch of new music by one of my FLC’s** and most innovative souls out there, Bill Brittelle.

View from Michi's hilltop studio/shack

The same day that this all goes down, I’ll be starting rehearsals with The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, with whom I’m performing for two weeks in mid-October (in addition to a November tour to Taipei, Singapore and Jakarta). As their “arranger-in-residence” this season, I’ve created an orchestral version of a piece that happened to already be close to my heart: Sergei Prokofiev’s lush, romantic violin and piano masterpiece, Five Melodies.

It’s really an honor to get to dig deep into this incredible music as both a violinist and as an arranger with one of the greatest chamber orchestras out there.

Finally, in other, SPCO-unrelated news, on October 11th, the acclaimed cross-genre string quintet, Sybarite5, will be premiering a piece I wrote for them called Blue Bourrée at the Schubert Club. I just found out about this. Life, right?

So, why this blog entry? 3 things:

1. Kate Nordstrum, Liquid’s illustrious matriarch, asked me to, and one feels compelled to never say no to Kate.
2. I want to get you to come to any or hopefully all of these concerts. (And if you do, please come say hello.)
3. In my experience, it’s quite rare that an organization can engage so many different sides of my musical personality at once, so I wanted to acknowledge how this particular moment in Saint Paul’s musical offerings is a unique marker in the evolution of my own musical life. It’s also one that points to a larger musical renaissance that I feel deeply fortunate to be a part of.

See you in October!

      * This isn’t actually true.
      **Favorite Living Composers