Dear reader,
Today I’m going to take off my editorial mask, and the “editorial we,” and that whole “the present author” thing I usually do. Today I want to talk to you just as a person, a writer and fellow music lover who used to attend concerts all the time and then spent four and half years without live music of any kind. Because a few weeks ago, Andy Akiho got me out of my self-imposed hermitage and back in the concert hall, and it was glorious.
I’ve interviewed Andy several times in recent years, and he always asks “are you gonna make it to the show?” Usually the answer is “yes, can’t wait,” but last year when we spoke by phone about his upcoming Sculptures concert the answer was “no, can’t, out of town.” Which is a long story all by itself, but I was bummed and so was he. I’m still bummed that I missed this:
And had to content myself with the album, and James Bash’s review. Normally I’m all about contenting myself with the album–I’ve been that way since I missed the farewell concerts of my favorite band and had to content myself with the live album (and video) of the experience. Sometimes it’s just the best you can do.
Control, alt, delete, reboot
When the pandemic hit – the weeks of quarantine turning into months and years – it punched the Great Reset Button for most of us. I know that most of you couldn’t wait to get back into live music, no doubt partly because so many of you are deeply invested in making live music. But not me. I had existing fault lines that widened into grand canyons in my soul, so that when everything shut down I went deeper into my autistic mind and embraced a solitude and a virtual existence that had already long been a part of my life. And when everything shut down I was doubly relieved, because I’d spent the preceding years overextending myself, attending and/or performing and/or producing live concerts every week, traveling for music, going to school for music, living in music scenes, deeply invested in live music.
I wrote about all this, to some extent, as it was happening. The last concert I attended was this one, Caroline Shaw with Third Angle New Music on March 6, 2020; later that year I wrote about how her song “And So” got stuck in my head at that concert and got me through the first months of the Weird Times. Very early on during lockdown, I wrote this impassioned plea for conscious indolence, and late the following year I composed this lament for isolation’s end. Here’s what I had to say in that one:
And I have a confession to make, dear reader: I don’t miss it. At all. Many of you have been aching to get back to live music, as performers and audients, and no doubt you’re all celebrating the return to some kind of normal as the choirs and orchestras and operas and touring bands and hip-hop nights come back online. That’s great. I’m happy for you.
But there are plenty of us introverts and neuroatypicals for whom live music was always a strain. The sweet acoustics and vibrant “liveness” of in-person shows are great, of course – no home sound system can come close to replicating the richness of sound you get from an orchestra at The Schnitz (especially with The New Upgrades) or in any decent church or even in some small club with one mic and two shitty speakers dangling over the tiny stage in the corner by the bathrooms and slot machines.
But the stress of jostling elbows with other patrons, socializing in the lobby or at the bar or out on the smoking patio, asking the bartender if she’ll put on another pot of coffee, and sweating under a mask (I don’t mean the covid-mandated kind) while pretending to be normal – yeah, it wears you out.
When it all shut down, I dropped out and spent some time investing in myself – it wasn’t a decision I made lightly; in fact it wasn’t really a decision at all. I crashed, and hard, but it was a controlled crash that still left me with a lot of options that didn’t involve hunkering down and drawing straws to see who would get eaten first (just to extend that metaphor to its goriest logical conclusion).
But it was pretty grim for awhile there. I dropped out of school, dropped out of bands, dropped out of friendships, dropped out of Portland, dropped out of sight. For a time, I found it impossible to write. But that gave me an opportunity to rebuild myself, to clear everything else out and just listen. I went for walks in the forest and sang to the deer and the trees. I bought a vibraphone and got my electric guitar retuned, another funny story in itself, involving a few hilarious phone calls about essential business legalities with the folks at Revival Drum Shop and Eastside Guitar Repair Shop. I recorded an album, and then another, and another. I reread Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, started in on Le Guin’s Earthsea, finished that. I journaled every day (sometimes all day long), quit smoking weed, got a day job in a bakery, and gradually put myself back together.
Through all of that was the music. Lots of Portland jazz and hip-hop, listened to at a safe distance so I wouldn’t have to actually drive into Portland and hang around Kelly’s Olympian waiting for The Thesis to start. Lots of Oregon heavy metal bands, listened to at a safe distance so I wouldn’t have to drive into Eugene and hang around WOW Hall waiting for YOB to obliterate my earplugs. Lots of indie-punk-whatever bands, listened to at a — well, you get the idea.
And lots of virtual concerts with Oregon classical groups, my favorite of which is probably still Portland Baroque Orchestra’s “Pocket Messiah”:
1,675 days later
Yes, I actually sat here and calculated how much time had passed from the Caroline Shaw concert with 3A in March 2020 to the Andy Akiho concert with the Oregon Symphony on October 6 of this year. Four years and seven months.
When I interviewed Andy for this one, he asked again, “are you gonna make it?” and I was pleased to tell him, “yeah man, probably.” Because I already knew I was going to be near Portland that weekend, for a wedding out on the edge of the metropolitan area, just barely close enough to take Tri-Met into downtown. I didn’t include this bit of the conversation in the published interview, but it went something like this:
Matthew Andrews: I’ll be there.
Andy Akiho: Bring everybody! Bring Portland! We need your support in the audience. Scream for me — if you like it. If you don’t like it, throw tomatoes. That’d be kinda fun.
MA: We should bring that back. I’ll bring tomatoes.
AA: I actually love tomato salad, that’d be a compliment.
MA: Just come up with a basket of tomatoes, “we loved your music.”
AA: Heirloom, and cherry, and all kinds of tomatoes. All of em, bring em!
So when the day arrived and I hopped on the bus, I was sorely tempted to bring a big basket of heirloom tomatoes and take them up to the stage afterwards like a bunch of flowers. In retrospect, I wish I had.
Instead there’s this reflection, which probably won’t taste as good with olive oil and sliced cucumbers, more’s the pity, but will probably last longer.
You can read all about this concert right here in Lorin Wilkerson’s review, a vivid write-up in which he not only perfectly captures the spirit of Andy’s music but also provides a surprisingly detailed assessment of why the steelpan sounds the way it does and why it ends up working so nicely in an orchestral context. This bit took my breath away when I was editing Lorin’s piece, and I have to reshare it with you now:
Akiho’s extended cadenza took the form of a fantasia, wherein he highlighted the unique, entrancing dolcissimo legato capability of the pan, exploring the surprising, mellifluous sostenuto of the instrument wherein the sharp attack and the gentler, bleeding decay seem both to be ever-so-slightly out of phase with the center of the pitch, so as these shifting colors bleed one into the other from one note to the next it yields a dreamy, ethereal timbre.
“Entrancing dolcissimo legato,” how about that?
The ride into downtown took well over an hour (told you I was out at the edge) and this journey – my first real ride into Portland since leaving – was another tale in itself, full of churches and Goodwills and chain-link fenced parking lots and dispensaries and Burgervilles. Same old Portland. But I’ll save that and content myself with two details from the ride: a purple-haired young woman carrying one of those purses made to look like an oversized hardback book (hers was, of course, The Raven) accompanied by an adorable German Shepherd in a lavender service animal coat; and an elderly Japanese man in a puffy vest who, halfway through the ride, unpacked a little snack from his bag, carefully tossing a series of wrappers out the bus window onto the street.
(Impossibly, or perhaps only improbably, I saw the same elderly Japanese man on the return ride that evening. Had he been at the concert? The one with a cello concerto called Nisei, composed and performed by a pair of second-generation half-Japanese men? Or was it all a bizarre coincidence? We’ll never know.)
Anyways, on to the concert. The Schnitz is The Schnitz; I’ve been going to concerts here for decades (starting with Tool and King Crimson in early September 2001) and at one point lived close enough that I could look up at the kitchen clock, go “oh shit it’s five minutes to downbeat” and still get there, on foot, on time. Thus it was with mixed but mostly happy feelings of warmth and nostalgia that I settled in (eight rows from the front, and thank you Oregon Symphony PR folks for that) to watch the orchestra gather and start chatting and tuning up.
Well shucks, there’s Sergio Carreno, I just saw him out in the Park Blocks. There’s Ron Blessinger, Charles Noble, Marilyn de Oliveira, Zach Galatis, JáTtik Clark. There’s Inés Voglar Belgique, fresh off her retirement from Fear No Music. And here comes Nancy Ives, one of the most important composers in Oregon and this orchestra’s principal cellist. Nancy stops and chats with the folks in her section, takes a seat. Concertmaster Sarah Kwak comes out, sits down next to associate concertmaster Peter Frajola, gets everybody in tune. The audience hushes up. Out comes Maestro David Danzmayr. I realize with a startle that I’ve never actually seen him conduct – except once, way back in The Before Times, 2019 to be precise, when he led the Oregon Symphony and Colin Currie in Akiho’s Percussion Concerto. That was his audition concert; he got the job; read about his first 573 days right here.
So. The steel pans are all set up, and here comes Andy. He and Danzmayr chat briefly about the afternoon’s pair of concerti, Akiho saying, “I have a way of making things complicated, in life and in music.” He explains that Nisei is not so much a cello concerto – ”it’s more a Jeffrey Zeigler concerto.” This will prove to be true.
And then we’re off. Akiho’s Concerto for Steel Pans & Orchestra opens with a loud bang, the sound of a young Yalie with everything to prove and nothing to prove, a sushi chef and budding virtuoso with more steel pans than he needs and way more ideas than could reasonably fit into a twelve minute concerto. Three things struck me, hearing it live.
The first was how utterly gorgeous a live string orchestra is. I waxed a bit rhapsodic about it a few weeks ago (in this piece, written out on that same edge of Portland a few days before this very concert) and I love writing about how the orchestra is important and you have to hear it live in a concert hall the way the gods intended and yadda yadda yadda. But, you know, “he who tastes knows.” Until I sat there in a darkened theater and heard the real thing for the first time in nearly half a decade, I realized I’d almost forgotten just how sweet that taste really is.
The second thing: what a precocious badass Andy is at the steel pans. He could have made a career just doing that, if he hadn’t had so much to say as a composer. The concerto has a lot of percussive tricks on the steel pan, the same sort of thing his steel pan ensemble piece Alloy is full of. Whapping away at the rims, reaching around and hitting the outer frame of the pans, that sort of thing. Andy plays this thing really loose, casually – almost flippantly – smacking his instruments with tiny mallets he seems to be barely holding onto. I kept worrying that he’d drop one, that it’d go flying off into the audience, that Danzmayr would have to stop everything and go dislodge it from some old dude’s eye (perhaps mine!) before moving on.
The third thing: melody! Luscious melody! Akiho melodies tend to be distributed across arpeggios and ostinati, or threaded through complex textures, more or less exactly the way Bach’s are. But every now and then he lets one really pop out of the polyphonic spree and breathe on its own. A good early example of this is the melodic line in “Ki Iro,” part of Akiho’s Synesthesia Suite – it’s one that hasn’t enjoyed quite the same level of popularity as “Murasaki,” “Aka,” “Karakurenai,” or “Hada Iro,” but it’s a personal favorite, not least because of that melody.
Another of these floating melodies haunts the first part of the Concerto for Steel Pans & Orchestra, and although I’d listened to the 2011 Yale Philharmonia premiere (listen for yourself right here) I was totally unprepared for how overwhelmingly beautiful it could sound in person with this incredible orchestra playing it twenty feet away.
That soaring line
According to Akiho, the concert I attended is the one they recorded. It’ll be amazing to hear all this again, properly mic’d and mixed and mastered, not least because Zeigler’s cello was often a little muffled by all that orchestral sound. Probably that’s a side effect of where I was seated, but it’s also part of how Zeigler plays – he is foremost a chamber musician, after all (though he does also play concertos from time to time). It’s not that his playing was inferior, at all, I don’t mean that. I only mean that he didn’t sacrifice his chamber sensibilities just because there was an orchestra behind him. This is still the cellist I remember from Clint Mansell’s soul-shaking soundtrack for The Fountain. Zeigler’s playing was elegant, lush and rich, rhythmically incisive – just the right fit for Akiho’s music, in other words.
Another bit from my conversation with Andy about this piece – another bit that got cut, that is – had to do with the third movement. Despite everything he said about “that soaring line” in the second movement (which was, yes, terribly grand) it was the last movement I was really looking forward to. Here’s the bit I cut:
AA: The third movement, which is the longest movement, is based off of an eleven-beat ostinato. It just repeats throughout the whole piece, and it’s almost – I don’t want to say theme and variation. It’s not that. It’s more like different variations on this ostinato that’s in eleven. It’s very minimalist in that approach, just sticking to that one idea. But it’s not really minimalist music to me. I have way too many influences and inspiration that I need all that in there, I can’t confine myself to that. But it did help to have one idea and stick with it. I went in new directions with this, too, even though that’s my thing, that off-by-one kind of thing, where the ostinato takes four times through the cycle to repeat. You can think of it fractally, 11/16 versus 11/8 versus 11/4. Macro, versus micro. But you know a lot of it’s just in “one” to me. I feel the one, the quarter notes against that. That minimalist idea is there, but I try to do as much as I can with that and tell the story.
In Nisei, as in Sculptures, Akiho has been using these odd-metered ostinati to extend what I can only describe as his harmolodic tendencies – meaning the union of harmony, melody, and rhythm that can imbue a well-integrated and thoroughly-conceived composition with dense, holographic grace. It was always a part of his style (listen again to “Ki Iro” and “21”) but it’s something that’s grown as his compositional voice has continued to mature.
In fact, I’d say it’s the key vector along which his compositional voice has matured. You can hear it start to really kick in with LIgNEouS for string quartet and marimba, which took him eight years to finish (read more about that in my review of the 2018 premiere at Alberta Rose for Chamber Music Northwest) and another four to record and release:
You can also hear it in his recent work with Imani Winds:
And I could really hear it in that third movement of Nisei, when the eleven-beat ostinato started to fractalize and fragment and turn back on itself and blossom like a Mandelbrot flower. Here’s where Danzmayr showed us – showed me, watching him conduct up close after years of knowing him and knowing about him but not seeing him in his element – what he’s truly made of. He conducted the “one,” and the eleven too, and plenty more besides. It’s clear that he really understands this music, and understands how to make the musicians and hence the audience understand it. And here’s where Zeigler shone, too, with a sensitivity for Akiho’s harmolodic sensibilities earned by years and years of making music together.
En corps
Zeigler and Akiho closed with a lovely duo. Usually, after a concerto, the soloist takes a solo encore; in this case, with two soloists and one of them the composer, it made perfect sense to have them encore together. As Akiho got rolling with one of his “hits,” the aforementioned “Murasaki,” Zeigler simply sat and listened for awhile. Eventually he got to strumming, tapping on the cello’s body, doing the cool little things you do with music you’ve known for years, the cool little things you do when you’re just jamming with your composer friend at the end of a long workout. No pressure, no big deal, just a light tomato salad to close out the weekend’s activities.
And what, then, of “the present author” — did I have a good time? Yes indeed, dear reader. I’ll surely never go back to the supergrind of weekly concerts. I’m quite happy in my hermitage, at my writing desk, with my books and CDs and records and my wifi. But it was nice to get out again, to venture forth into the big bad city and live in person again for awhile. And I probably will do it again, and this time I won’t wait four years and seven months. Because it is now (*checks calendar*) only 221 days until the Oregon Symphony plays Nancy Ives’ Celilo Falls: We Were There next June, and it’s pretty likely I’ll be there.
Music editor Matthew Neil Andrews is a composer, writer, and alchemist specializing in the intersection of The Weird and The Beautiful. An incorrigible wanderer who spent his teens climbing mountains and his twenties driving 18-wheelers around the country, Matthew can often be found taking his nightly dérive walks all over whichever Oregon city he happens to be in. He and his music can be reached at monogeite.bandcamp.com.