In 2008-2009 we collaborated with Danish composer Morten Skovgaard Danielsen on several works. Several of the pieces are included in his posthumously released opera Donalds09.
We are featured throughout Act 2. Track 8 'Conversations' is a dialogue between Paris Hilton (Allan) and Che Guevara (Kristen). 'This Year I'm A Stray Black Cat' features Allan on processed Double Bass and Kristen on Piano.
Morten had a unique approach to notation. The score often used the 16th note as the beat so the the score was full of 64th notes making the score very complex. Allan remembers asking Kristen and Morten to take a walk while recording the complicated solo bass part.
Morten was a nocturnal creature who would stay up all night composing and then sleeping through the day. We would return home late at night and then rehearse with him during his residencies with us.
Donald09 can be purchased and listened to via Dacapo Records. The opera was positively reviewed by Gapplegate in November 2010.
We have just agreed to contribute music to forthcoming British drama 'The Glue'.
The Glue series is a new drama series set in North and East London. Written and directed by Ibi Vaughan. The series explores the lives and bonds between ten strangers from completely different worlds who are brought together in ways that they could never have imagined. Throughout April 2010 we filmed nine introduction stories that will establish the nine individuals who will become members of The Glue. Each introduction story/episode will be released online in the Autumn of 2010. The first series of The Glue will be aired in 2011.
Along with original music we also partnered with Turkmen/Russian composer Maral Yakshieva.
Morten Skovgaard Danielsen, 1967, Denmark, holds a diploma in composition from the Royal Academy of Music, Copenhagen. In 1999, Danielsen achieved the nomination and final selection as a official Danish Composer for three years, thus earning him financial independence and several Composer in Residencies all over Europe.
In 2001, Danielsen was awarded the Haakon Boerresen Prize for “outstanding efforts in the field of contemporary composition”. Alongside other grants, he has successfully headlined international Festivals, given a huge number of interviews on television, radio and in Magazines. In 2002, he announced his 'exit' as a composer and took up writing. His poems have been published in a number of Underground Text-books. In 2004, Danielsen returned to composition. He is currently a constant traveler, receiving commissions from all over the world. After the release of his debut album ROADMOVIE ACCESSORIES 2000/01, he was baptized both 'The enfant terrible' and ' Emblematic for a whole generation' by the press.
BMD: Could you begin by telling us about your current project?
MSD:I am composing an opera which is built up by commissions from ensembles in Europeand the USA. The main goal of this work is an attempt to build a musical symbiosis between Baroque Music and Punk Rock, especially the Grunge movement. I am a huge fan of slap sticks and spent time learning about “Mickey Mouse” techniques as well as my passion of “fairytale-like” or “Magic-Music” is installed in my music. This allows for very sudden change of mood and style such as slap sticks. A lot of cameos are entering the libretto, amongst them Francesco Petrarcha, the Montgolfier Brothers, Che Guevara and Paris Hilton.
BMD: Please tell us about your early works and the various periods you went through.
MSD: I began composing and gave my first concert at age five while attending the Musical Kindergarden in Odense, Denmark. During my time at the academy, I studied every kind of modern composition techniques and I studied hard. I went through three periods of creating music including the “Academic Style”, which offered my knowledge of musical composition mixed up with a manic flirtation with all kinds of Renaissance and Baroque era styles. I easily wasted weeks on writing Palestrina or Bach style movements, especially the fugue. It made me two faced in that by day I would investigate d minor conflicts and at night I was a regular head banger, introducing recordings of early Grunge. The Academy did not approve and considered me a mess.
At age 28, I realized, that the “perfect” piece can never be written. I revised the same piano piece (INSTALLATION, piano solo/electronics, 1994) eleven times in a row. All I learned, was that the “Masterpiece” is outgunned in terms of “over-individualism”. I am not pointing out, that “serious” music - as some people call it to somehow draw a line between music for the classic concert hall and whatever appears to be “not serious”. I am certainly no fan of “work in progress”. Attempting to finish other commissions in this period also failed. I got to a point of “positive depression”.Each OPUS became impossible. Indulging in a high speed life style, I began to provoke without any intension of being provocative at all while just being plain honest about my opinions and attitude. At age 32, I trashed all my home made “systems”, writing the piece TripInVainwithStarsbutSUGARfeelOkay in one single afternoon during a severe hangover in South Italy. In Paris, during the fall of 2000, I gave up any attempt of writing what I felt would at least somehow resemble a “finished” piece, re-writing D-TOX for violin solo (originally written in Rome 1999 for a small ensemble). My perfectionism was at last installed in the tempo in which I from then on enjoyed to compose. My Dogma opera was composed in 21 hours, in which I was locked up in a hotel rom. I wrote both the libretto and the music, using note sheets marked by the Danish Radio Broadcast Company. It began as a show off and ended up performed 12 times in a row during 2005.
BMD: What aspects of your earlier works is still present in your work today?
MSD: Farthest from your mind is the thought of falling back. In fact, it isn´t here at all, so you dig your hole carefully and you wait.
BMD: Who is influencing you now?
MSD: People! People like the Basso Moderno Duo. Contradictions! I love contradictions as much as I hate boarders between nations. I look upon every single life as a type of installation. Existence is art in itself and every second is a performance. Someone once said: “A sculpture is something you stumble upon in a museum, moving backwards to get a better glance of a painting.” That is my point. I constantly “stumble” over people and I install them in my memory as sculptures. Modigliani saw people the same way. That would explain his obsession with portraits, eyes without pupils, and open spaces of never-seen landscapes. Every individual is a piece of art and vice-versa, which puts the definition of “art for art’s stake” as well as being mere existence. All of that influences me.
BMD: Is your music in a single style or do your compositions differ from work to work?
MSD: I tend to write very energetic music with lots of grace notes. This has been my style over the past thirteen years. Both the music of Bach and Cobain was equally important to me. It was my goal to create a symbiosis between baroque music and Punk-Rock. I am a mixture of Stockhausen, Cobain, myself and hard core punk.
BMD: From the interviewers’ perspective, your music challenges the traditional classical music listener. Which one of your pieces/projects do you feel pushes your own boundaries?
MSD: That would be the CD project SHOTGUN DIARY (2001-02) and my first opera ABSENSE.
BMD: Do you prefer to compose music that will ultimately be performed live or music which is meant solely for recording?
MSD: Both. Live performances are still limited to festivals, concert halls, underground scenes, or whatever. The recording is much more powerful. It is the way people absorb art these days.
Sonia Megias Lopez recently completed a residency at the Basically Modern Arts Sanctuary where she composed ‘White Doll’ for the Basso Moderno Duo. During her stay here she was interviewed by Kristen Williams.
Tell me about the work you completed at the Basically Modern Arts Sanctuary.
I just completed a new work for the Basso Moderno Duo. The work's title, "White Doll" comes from a very beautiful choral habanera, "Black Doll". I've sung this habanera with the "Entredós" choir in Madrid. The work is an intimate wink to my friend Patricia, a woman whose presence has encouraged and helped me a lot. "White Doll" is organized in more of a process than a structure. This process begins with unpitched (non-harmonic) sounds, continues with pitched (harmonic) notes in central section, and returns to unpitched sounds to finish the work. Theatrically, this process is represented by a white cloth doll's actions: she starts sleeping (inside the piano, over highest strings, then stopping their sound), wakes up (noise lightly becomes sound), goes out from her bed and remains out for a while (beautiful melodies and harmonies) to finish returning to her bed (unpitched sounds). This work has been easy to write for Basso Moderno Duo because they are always opened to theatricality and high beautiful melodies in the double bass, both qualities not easy to find in a music group.
What inspires you?
My inspiration in fact comes from a lot of things and feelings. Inspiration depends each time on what I have around me. In some of my works I focus my whole attention on the commission characteristics: what kind of music are the performers used to playing (what are their limits). Where is the piece going to be performed (acoustic, room), how long does the work need to be, what kind of audience ... etc. In some other works I feel really free and I ask myself: "what do I need to hear?" What do I need to feel from a stage?” I leave my mind work from my deepest feelings and my childhood. In some works, I combine both aspects: commission + myself.
How do you get your ideas?
My ideas depend on what mood I have. When I am inspired and full of energy, ideas come in a very fluid manner. My friend Joaquín Martínez Oña, a magnificent music teacher, posed to me the possibility that composers are simply mediums that sends the ideas to us as a superior being. He continues by saying that our mission in life is to give the ideas a development and shape and then to transmitting them to the listener.
What guides your work?
My work is guided by creative impulses. As a good Gemini, one of my two personalities is impulsive, obstinate and very demanding. It is concerned with "pulling the wagon" in my projects. What gives shape to those starting ideas are reflected in the kind of performers and audience that I imagine the work will have in most of its performances and specifically the premiere.
What do you hope for the future?
Who knows! Life brings so many choices. I would like to continue composing and teaching, and I'd also like to live in contact with the nature.
You love to travel, where will you go next?
At the moment, I'm returning to Spain in order to rehears my next premiere and to see my family and friends whom I miss a lot.
Julie Mandel has just composed ‘Solitude In The City’ for the Basso Moderno Duo to be part of our New York Women Composers program.Mandel was a student of Ernst Krenek and is an active composer of musical theater and chamber music.
“My intention was to write music that would make good use of both instruments, piano and bass, giving each a part that best utilized their abilities. The unusual high range of the solo bass was particularly interesting, offering opportunities not usually associated with the bass.
In writing ‘Solitude In The City’ I thought of the piano, with its ability to play chords of several notes and colors and provide almost continual movement, as representing the City; while the bass is set alone against that busy background to experience loneliness in the midst of a crowd, perhaps lost in the anonymity of the city”.
USA composer Lawrence Kramer has just completed 'At the Crossroads' for the Basso Moderno Duo. Kramer is a professor at Fordham University, co-editor of the journal 19th-Century Music and has authored many books on music including: Why Classical Music Still Matters (2007).
Of the work Kramer writes: "The crossroads is the traditional site for fateful encounters and fateful decisions, from the Oedipus of Sophocles to the speaker of Robert Frost’s 'The Road Not Taken.' My piece 'At the Crossroads' seeks to evoke the drama of the crossroads in compressed musical form. (What happens at the crossroads happens quickly.) The music begins with the double bass and piano in very different frames of mind, but the two instruments gradually unite, part again, and reconcile—a process made possible here by the expanded expressive range of the double bass in high solo tuning".
The premiere will take place on October 22, 2008 at Fordham University.
Maral Yakshieva of Turkmenistan and Russia has joined us at the Basically Modern Arts Sanctuary to compose a new work for the Basso Moderno Duo. The Duo will share the stage with the composer and pianist on Sunday July 13 at the WAMC Performing Arts Center 'The Linda' in Albany, NY at 4:00.
Marie Incontrera recently composed a new work for the Basso Moderno Duo entitled ‘Liszten’.This work will be included within a larger program the duo are organizing which focuses on members of the New York Women Composers, inc.
Of the new work, the composer says “Liszten was inspired by a fusion of the intricacies of dance, classical techniques and rhythmic rock. My intention in writing this piece was to have the subtleties of each style interact the way dancers or musicians interact with each other and with their audience in each of the aforementioned artistic media”.
To learn more about Marie Incontrera and her music please visit her website www.lamentbassmusic.com
The Basically Modern Arts Sanctuary opened its doors to famed Armenian composer Mikhail Kokzhayev in June. The Basso Moderno Duo hosted Kokzhayev for his first visit to the USA. During his stay he composed two pieces for the Basso Moderno Duo including ‘Birds and Bell’ and ‘Unrepeatable in Repetition’.In addition to time spent composing, Kokzhayev accompanied us to our recital in Washington DC at the Harman Center for the Arts and a day trip to Woodstock, NY.
Turkish composer Semih Korucu has just completed his new work ‘Empathy 4’ for the Basso Moderno Duo.It is the forth part of a series entitled ‘Emphaty’, with each work being for a different duo combination.Korucu says of the work “This piece is established on one chord and mode – C major triad and the mode B#,C#,D#,E,F#,G,A,Bb (minor 2ndfollowed by a major 2nd or mMmMmMm), which was Messian’s favorite.In this piece, we hear two melodic lines trying to emphasize around one mode. In this context, empathy is something to reach by deep listening, dialog and emotional bond”.
Semih Korucu (b.1965) studied at MSU Fine Arts University in Istanbul with Usmanbas, Firat, Tarcan and Bayraktar.Korucu is currently the coordinator of the Composition Department at the Conservatory of Mersin University in Turkey where he teaches composition, fugue, harmony, score reading and analysis.
Romanian composer Ulpiu Vlad has just completed a new work for the Basso Moderno Duo entitled 'DIN SUNETELE PRIVIRII I' or 'From the Sounds of Sight I' for solo bass.
Vlad makes use of a variety of unique appoggiatura's, virtuosic improvisation and complex rhythmic motives. The score could be described as having highly detailed dynamics and phrase markings. The long phrases are placed in the extreme upper register of the instrument.
Ulpiu Vlad (b. 27 Jan 1945) is one of the leading composers in the active Romanian new music community. He is a professor at the National University of Music in Bucharest and has received many prizes for his unique musical voice. Many of his works have titles related to dreaming.
Dr. Scott Brickman is a full professor at the University of Maine at Fort Kent.His acoustic and electronic music has been performed throughout the USA as well as Canada, South America, Europe and the Middle East.Recordings of his works appear on the New Ariel, Capstone, Seamus and ERM labels.Dr. Brickman composed ‘Danzon Moderno’ especially for the Basso Moderno Duo.
“Danzon Moderno is based on a 12 tone row whose first six pitches are a subset of the octatonic scale.While the melodic and motivic pitch material is modern, other elements are traditional. The form is akin to early bebop music, where a doubled line is played at the beginning and the end of the piece. Solo sections for piano and bass are derived from motivic fragmentation of the row, and are framed by duet sections which elicit a call and response effect”.Scott Brickman, Feb. 2008
Octavian Nemescu is one of the most important figures in Romanian contemporary music.Nemescu has received many awards including the Aaron Copland Prize, six prizes from the Romanian Composers Union and two prizes from the Concours International de Musicque Elecroacoustique de Bourges. His lifelong creative activities have led the exploration of avant-garde thought, approaches and compositional techniques.AM UAT manifests a variety of original musical practices which reflect this composer’s unique research.
"AMUAT is a music with a slow development, ana d a g i o. It must be played piano-pianissimo so to offer the pianist and the soprano the possibility to ascenddescends the STAIRCASE, falling down in forte towards an accelerated time, gradually condenced, the further a s c e n s i o n s become more and more difficult, being defiled by foreign musics which tend to change direction. But the target from the top of the STAICASE is finally reached by bright sounds of c r o t a l s peacefully to a STAIRCASE. Every ASCENSION is unique, non-recuring. When the bass and the increasing SILENCE. AMUAT is the title of the Egyptian Book of the Dead without a missing letter". Octavian Nemescu, February 2008
'Piece for Basso Moderno' is based on a modal cantilena in the bass, which is superposed with energetic writing in the piano part. The piece is composed of 3 sections which alternated a lyric and passionate language with a concrete rhythmic structure, which is developed in a climax, along with the dream-like language found in the harmonic system of the bass” - Iulia Cibisescu-Duran
Romanian composer Iulia Cibisescu-Duran composed ‘Piece for Basso Moderno’ in February 2008.
Dr. Cibisescu-Duran is a Romanian composer of mostly orchestral, chamber, choral and vocal works that have been performed throughout the world.Previous to teaching at the Gheorgehe Dima Academy of Music in Cluj-Napoca, she studied with Emil Simon, Petre Sbarcea and received her DMus in Musicology in 2001. Among her many honors are first prizes from the Gheorghe Dima National Competition, Lasi National Competition, Romanian TV Prize and others. In 2007, she received the Union Composers Prize.As a writer, she has published many articles and the book Plymorphic Structures in Postmodern Romanian Music (2002).She founded the contemporary music ensemble Art Contrast in Cluj-Napoca and is a member of the Composers Union of Romania and the Professional Women’s Advisory Board of the American Biographical Institute.
The Basso Moderno Duo requested the work in anticipation of their March recital in Cluj and for their growing program of new works by Romanian women composers.‘Piece for Basso Moderno’ will be premiered at the Women Composers Festival in Hartford, Connecticut on March 7 at the exclusive Charter Oak Cultural Center.
Celebrated Australian composer Betty Beath has composed a new work for the Basso Moderno Duo. Included here are her programs notes for this lyrical new work:
From a Lake of Honey…
I am very attracted to the idea of bridging cultures, of delighting performers and audience, of lush sounds and lyricism, so it was easy to say yes to Allan Von Schenkel’s invitation to write a short piece for the Basso Moderno Duo.
I wrote this work soon after completing a major commission for voice and orchestra, Gambar Gambar Jawa…Images of Java. The first performance had come and gone, I was pleased with the result and looked forward to writing a piece shaped by the familiar influences of home… sub-tropical Queensland, now at its best with the colours and perfumes of Spring and heading into the hot, balmy days of summer. However, in writing this piece I soon saw I had not gone far from Java… for the images and sounds which inspire this work might be found in the beautiful landscapeI held in my mind, a place you might find, at sunset, on the island of Bali, a ‘lake of honey’.
When I listened to recordings of the Basso Moderno Duo it was easy to respond to the lush, beautiful tone Allan Von Schenkel draws from his modified Double Bass and to realize how well he and partner, Kristen Williams respond to each other in their intimate musical conversations. These were influences which colour and give shape to From a Lake of Honey. Other obvious influences were the use of scale and rhythmic patterns which are associated with the gamelan.
I was aware that Allan would produce intense, warm, sensuous tone and that together the Basso Moderno Duo would ‘sing’. The piece is really a landscape of the mind, it is a simple musical work, which gives opportunities for an imaginative collaboration between performers and audience as they ‘journey’ to a ‘lake of honey’.
Basso Moderno has commissioned over 100 lyrical works for solo bass and piano by some of the world's most prominent and exciting living composers.
Composers from 40 countries and all 7 continents have written specifically for Allan Von Schenkel's virtuosic and highly individualized manner of playing.
Kristen Williams' piano playing is a perfect complement to the intense voice of the solo bass. Williams is a focused musician who is able to share her devotion to the piano with the listener. Our program is designed to delight and surprise audiences with a combination of lush sounds, tasteful writing and lyricism.
