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"To
Beat or Not to Beat?"
Lewis
& Clark College, Evans Auditorium,
284-7497. 8 pm Friday and Saturday, Sept. 15 and 16. $5-$8.
$8-$12 for both nights.
Waters'
self-titled CD has just been released.
Seattle's
20th-century choral group the Esoterics will perform Waters'
Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos at the end of the month.
Portland's
Fear No Music has chosen Waters as its first composer-in-residence
and will perform three of his works as part of the Northwest
Film Center's tribute to video animator Joanna Priestley
Sept. 22.
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Joe Waters closes his new disc with a musical setting of Lawrence
Ferlinghetti's epic rant The Populist Manifesto: "No
time now for the artist to hide above, beyond, behind the
scenes--refining himself out of existence."
The local contemporary composer takes Ferlinghetti's mantra
to heart. Though his "serious music" c.v. is in order--he
studied under Jacob Druckman and Dominick Argento--he's
not content to write music for an allegedly educated elite.
Music that, at the end of the day, nobody wants to listen
to.
But in a world ruled by a tyrannical music academy that
encourages its students to write scores with all the aridity
of physics formulas, and symphonies whose idea of new music
is Stravinsky's Sacre du Printemps, what's a rock-loving
composer to do? If you're Joe Waters you start a do-it-yourself
festival and cultivate an audience. The founder of the Northwest
Electro-Acoustic Music Organization, or NWEAMO, is bringing
this hybrid musical form to the masses with its second annual
electronic music festival.
"My purpose as a composer in society," Waters says, "is
to interpret feelings, dreams, thoughts that are current
and to channel them so that other people can reflect on
them. And you have to do it with a language people can understand."
For many in the classical music world such talk is extremely
controversial, but such critics have unfortunately missed
the point entirely. There's a sensual and emotional freshness
to Waters' creative appetite that turns its back on the
conservatory and eschews gratuitous brain-tickling. Waters'
warehouse of influences--Prokofiev, jazz, Tangerine Dream,
Beat poetry, '70s-era Miles Davis, the paintings of Bosch
and Australian Aboriginal song--creates a music that's intensely
playful and accessible.
Such culture-clashing is what it's all about. "I'm a member
of the first generation of composers who grew up playing
in rock bands," says the Yale-educated composer. "Rock is
a very immediate and
direct approach."
Though his salt-and-pepper hair gives away his fortysomething
age, Waters maintains a boyish exuberance. Kicking through
the doors of musical elitism gets him riled up. "Mozart,
Beethoven, Brahms, all those guys felt very free," he says.
"They depended on the folk music of their time to have this
ingenious sense of melody that they could draw from. What
is our folk
music? Rock."
For Waters, rock is the entire popular music tsunami that
swelled from the 4/4 hurricane of the '50s that originally
derived from African rhythmic roots. He includes factions
from early R&B to '70s electric funk, fusion and art
rock to the hip-hop, house and techno of the past 20 years.
Most of all, he includes the sonic experiments of this past
decade's ambient and electronica underground movements,
much of which he's been exposed to by his students.
"To Beat or Not to Beat?" is the question this year's festival
asks--a no-brainer to pop aficionados but something, in
a world where rhythmic stagnancy was de rigueur in
20th-century serious music, that makes classical music heads
look askance. "The pieces vary," says Waters about the festival's
scope. "What I'm interested in are the people coming from
the classical music background who are willing to embrace
something new, and people coming from the rock world who
are wanting to expand on that realm at the same time."
Composers are joining in from France, Great Britain, Germany,
Hong Kong and all across the States. They range in age from
early 20s techno-tykes to people who were on the ground
floor of techno's development, now in their 50s.
Stanford University's Michael McNabb brings his electronic
golden oldie The Far and Brilliant Night, a visual-sonic
astral project that uses the movement-detecting Buchla Lightning
synthesizer wand to turn movement into sound. England's
Matthew Adkins presents "Breaking"--a pastiche of British
telly colliding sound clips. Mark Applebaum forges "new"
instruments from hardware and junkyard scraps, captures
their sounds and then converts them to
computer-speak.
Ryan Wise, of local band Wolf Colonel and a former student
of Waters', presents one of his own pieces along with one
with his experimental hip-hop group, Pirates of the Caribbean.
Waters himself is represented by Drum Ride, a frantic race
between pianist Susan Dewitt Smith and the sizzling current
of the composer's electronic samples.
"In both my own music and the music selected for NWEAMO,"
says Waters, "my goal is to create a contemporary music
that has a place and that has a dialogue with the culture
that surrounds it." That dialogue, Waters feels, has been
forfeited by the "rarefied and strange" serialism of musical
academia, where people are playing unmusical music. This
explains the impatience that many classical music audiences
have for new voices like Waters'. "But," he adds firmly,
"that's
changing--it has to."
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