21st Century Schizoid Music not a manifesto.

Since we're only five years into the new century, it's a bit disingenuous to make sweeping statements about the nature of 21st century music. Already, however, many musicians and listeners are eager to distance themselves from the previous hundred years. While arguably the most fascinating and advanced period in the entire history of music, the 20th century was also an era of great tragedy, turbulence, and alienation. Not that it's much better nowadays; if anything, the seemingly endless news headlines about wars and natural disasters makes it seem much worse.

One thing that does seem to be changing in the music of recent years, however, is that the age of specialization, which reached its pinnacle in the 20th century, has begun to break down. Extremely circumscribed musical genres and musical roles have been morphing into an environment in which all sorts of musical multitasking are becoming more and more commonplace. For some savvy and adventurous musicians, the rigid delineations between highly specified areas, which seemed impossible to maintain and were already starting to break down in the past few decades, seem like a thing of the past. In a world where people have access to 500-channel television and the seemingly infinite-channel Internet, following one and only one path goes against the flow of the zeitgeist.

One of the most common musical responses to this cultural landscape has been the phenomenon of "cross-over" music, in which a musician or group of musicians from one musical genre creates work that is a bridge to another genre, frequently by collaborating with musicians from that other genre. This idea, however, is far from new. It goes back to the earliest days of the commercial recording industry. Moreover, such projects often have less to do with the resulting artistic product of the crossover, unfortunately, and more to do with marketing the product: the hope that the audience will cross over. Ironically, audiences rarely do crossover.

There's another more recent and equally prevalent response that directly addresses the niche-market fragmentation of audiences for disparate musical genres: musicians who create separate kinds of music for separate audiences. I like to describe this approach as "21st Century Schizoid Music," which is a slightly tongue-in-cheek provocation referencing the classic 1969 progressive rock song "21st Century Schizoid Man" by the British band King Crimson, whose output frequently fits this description. Of course, King Crimson's development of multiple musical personalities long predates our postmillennium times, and they are not alone among many other "schizoid music" pioneers who made significant contributions to more than one genre of music. Vernon Duke wrote symphonic and chamber music as well as Broadway show scores and pop tunes. Andre Previn did all of these as well, plus he led a jazz combo. The difference between most of those early schizoids and today's schizoid musicians is that in the past it seemed like someone ultimately needed to make a choice between genres, often abandoning one for another or at least hiding one identity from the other. Mel Powell gave up playing swing with Benny Goodman to became a Pulitzer Prize--winning serialist. Vernon Duke wrote his classical music under his Russian name, Vladimir Dukelsky. Nowadays, however, it is much easier and more socially acceptable to work in multiple genres concurrently. In fact, it frequently feels as if the only appropriate artistic response to our contemporary channel-surfing existence. It should be noted here for folks concerned with calendrical absolutes that while all the schizoid musicians I'm about to describe are active in the 21st century, some of them were already actively leading multiple musical identities in the previous decade and earlier, proving once again that the most exciting art is ahead of its time.

The CV of Brooklyn-based Derek Bermel is schizoid music personified. He's a rising star in the world of contemporary chamber and orchestral music whose virtuosic, occasionally sardonic works are published by Peermusic Classical. He is also the singer-songwriter frontman of Peace by Piece, a soul/R&B group. His two musical identities as well as the audiences for them are quite distinct, although soul inflections occasionally surface in his writing for strings, particularly in his sextet "Soul Garden." Recently, his two musical personalities both surfaced in The Loving Family, a musical-theater work in which a score of predominantly gospel- and R&B-infused songs also contains moments of angular atonality, but perhaps this is a third musical persona.

MIT-based Evan Ziporyn, who also happens to be both a composer and clarinetist, composes music involving amplified instruments in a similar vein to the music of the other members of the Gamelan Gal NYC-based new-music collective Bang on a Can, in whose "All Stars" he also serves as clarinetist. Despite the wide range of music that BoaC embraces, the overall aesthetic is about being cutting edge and the most prominent style is "totalist"--to borrow a term composer/critic Kyle Gann has coined for work that combines the volume and rhythmic drive of rock with the cerebral processes and often dissonance associated with contemporary classical music. But Ziporyn is also deeply involved in creating new music for the Indonesian gamelan (an orchestra usually made up of percussion instruments); to that end, he leads the Gamelan Galak Tika at MIT. Coming from a "totalist" aesthetic, Ziporyn has found a way to incorporate electric guitars and digital samplers with the gamelan in works such as Tire Fire and Amok!, bridging these two culturally distinct languages. Even in these works, however, the gamelan rules the day, and a gamelan still sounds nothing like an amplified contemporary music ensemble. In concert, the social conventions of these two separate traditions are separate as well. The dress of members of the Gamelan Galak Tika, a far cry from downtown new music's de rigueur black, ranges from full traditional Indonesian garb to slight Indonesian embellishments (e.g., a scarf or jewelry) on Western clothing.

Beth Custer, from the Bay Area, creates music that could best be described as a synthesis of alternative rock and progressive folk with an occasional hint of jazz. But she has also created the Vinculum Symphony, a massive multimovement work for homemade instruments. Turns out Custer also plays the clarinet! What is it about this instrument that seems to inspire such open-ended music making?

Before you start thinking every schizoid musician is a clarinetist, however, Kitty Brazelton is a vocalist who combines the adventurousness of free jazz with the aggression of punk rock in her performing bands. A composition professor at Bennington College in Vermont, Brazelton also composes fully notated chamber and orchestral works that, although occasionally referencing these other musical styles, ultimately have little to do with them.

Young Concert Artists' composer-in-residence Mason Bates, who is also based in the Bay Area, has been the recipient of the Rome Prize as well as a Berlin fellowship and has several orchestral commissions lined up. But he also creates music for the danceclub scene under the moniker Masonic. On his website (www.masonicelectronica. com), he invites visitors to choose to enter either his classical or electronica site, but while the audiences may be different, the musical language shaping what he creates in both of these genres shares common ground. In fact, some of his "classical" compositions feature synthesizers. One such work, Sounds for His Animation, is basically a synthesizer concerto. And if you stop dancing and listen to Masonic's electronica, you'll hear the mind of a composer clearly at work.

I do not want to imply that today's schizoid music scene is an exclusively American music phenomenon. There are some fascinating examples abroad as well, such as the Finnish Eero Hameenniemi; who creates modernist orchestral music but also improvises a fusion music that is a cross between jazz and South Indian classical music. Dutch musician Guus Janssen is a highly regarded avant-garde concert-hall composer who also fronts a jazz piano trio and has a third identity--which is something of an amalgam of the other two--as a jazz harpsichordist.

While schizoid music is not crossover music, since the musicians described here are usually keeping their work in distinct genres separate, it is inevitable that work in one genre sometimes informs work in another. One of the most interesting side effects of this inevitability is that sometimes a schizoid musician will use the same material, albeit configured differently, in more than one musical idiom. Los Angeles-born Andrew Shapiro, who composes and performs minimalist piano music but also fronts an ambient-leaning alternative rock band, sometimes will come up with material before deciding which format he wishes to clothe it in; sometimes the material winds up in both places.

I have also engaged in multiple musical personae in my own work as a musician, but thus far two of those strands have remained completely separate from each other. I compose vocal and chamber music in a postminimalist style that incorporates structural elements of serialism, sometimes explores microtonal tunings, and is frequently scored for instruments associated with early music. I also front an old-timey bluegrass band called The String Messengers in which I sing, play fiddle, and contribute original songs. Other than the fact that both of these musical streams attempt to forge links between the past and the present, I don't really think of them as musically related. They tap into different energies and serve different functions for listeners. I want my vocal- and chamber-music compositions to be appreciated by attentive audiences, whereas The String Messengers perform at their best in a bar where people are chatting, drinking, and having fun.

The working methods are completely different as well. When I compose music for an ensemble, I work carefully at my computer, sometimes at a piano or another keyboard, and fastidiously keep notes on everything from napkins to my PalmPilot throughout the process. Unless a purposefully indeterminate element is part of a work's plan, the finished musical score is meticulously notated. On the other hand, String Messengers songs exist as lead sheets that only hint at what we actually play. Some still haven't made it to paper. While the sung melodies and lyrics to our songs pretty much stay the same from performance to performance, he hope that every instrumental break we play is somewhat different from the last time we played it. When I work on a song for the group, I work with a guitar and sometimes a piece of paper but never with a computer. I rarely play the guitar with the group, and I play fiddle almost completely by ear. Put a notated violin score in front of me, and I'm usually toast.

FOR FIVE YEARS NOW--which, as luck would have it, was the beginning of the 21st century--I've been hosting a concert series devoted to "schizoid music" in the basement of the Cornelia Street Cafe, a small concert venue in New York City's Greenwich Village, devoted to these musicians with multiple personae. The idea behind the series is to present these seemingly unrelated musical identities by the same musicians in the same evening so that, by hearing these distinct bodies of work side by side, listeners can have a better understanding of these musicians' complete creative voices.

The result of hearing two musical styles not meant to belong together performed by the same musicians in the same venue can be--if you'll pardon the irresistible pun--somewhat disconcerting. The task of sound engineers becomes particularly tricky since the two halves of a program usually require a completely different sound mix. But it's even trickier for an audience to navigate these frequently jarring juxtapositions. Most of the time, if you come to a concert, by the end you have a basic idea of what that musician is about. By the end of a "schizoid" concert, the goal for an audience is to not be so sure. Perhaps you came knowing one side of that musician and were not at all aware there was another side. That frequently happens in the concerts at Cornelia Street Cafe. Sometimes even the musicians themselves start to feel connections between their personae that they hadn't realized were there. Ultimately, it's a great way to open people's minds up to the remarkable variety of music all around us that's easier to find now than ever before.

New York City

FRANK J. OTERI'S voracious musical appetite finds many avenues of expression, but ultimately all lead back to his musical compositions, which range from full-evening stage productions to chamber and solo compositions. In all these works, Oteri combines emotional directness with an obsession for formal processes incorporating techniques from styles of music as seemingly unrelated as minimalism, serialism, Broadway show music, and bluegrass. His music has been performed in venues ranging from Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall to the Knitting Factory. MACHUNAS, his "performance oratorio in four colors" created in collaboration with Lucio Pozzi and inspired by the life of Fluxus-founder George Maciunas, received its world premiere in August 2005 at the Contemporary Arts Center in Vilnius, Lithuania. Oteri is also a widely published writer about music and the editor of the American Music Center's web magazine, NewMusicBox.org.

To listen to audio files these artists, go to our website: www.ou.edu/wordlit

Copyright [c] 2006 by Frank J. Oteri.

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Title Annotation:	Fine Arts
Author:	Oteri, Frank J.
Publication:	World Literature Today
Geographic Code:	1USA
Date:	Mar 1, 2006
Words:	2199
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