We all love to pigeon-hole;
we are defined and often define ourselves as a "classical composer”
or a "folk musician.” But the truth is, as Alban Berg told
a certain young American popular composer, when the latter hesitated
to perform his songs in front of the great Austrian, "Mr. Gershwin,
music is music,” and in reality the vast majority of musicians cross
back and forth over these artificial dividing lines of style several
times a day. No one more so than Michael Ward-Bergeman, accordionist
with the
Groanbox Boys, who last year went literally overnight from
foot-stomping with the Boys in a Southern English pub, to joining Yo-Yo
Ma onstage for a new concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
The great thing about Michael is he is one of the hardest people to
pigeon-hole I know.
I first met Michael on the
Dawn Upshaw/Osvaldo Golijov workshops for composers and singers at Carnegie
Hall. He was horrified to see me, as nobody had told him we were
to share a hotel room during the residency. I barged in and caught
him watching a corny old Western film. Pizza boxes and large quantities
of accordion equipment were scattered on the floor. Despite, or
perhaps because of being flung together at such close quarters, we hit
it off, and discussion soon led on to a number of mutual musical interests.
Michael introduced me to his self-built instrument, the lagerphone,
a percussion instrument made from a large wooden pole, fixed with beer
bottle tops (hence the 'lager') along its length and a boot to stomp
with at the base. This instrument forms the centre-piece of the
Groanbox Boys performance, and his description of it inspired me to
build my own, which I then incorporated into the piece I wrote for the
workshops,
Piosenki.
Shortly before this I had come
across a program the
Metropolis Ensemble were putting together, featuring
a piece of Osvaldo Golijov's (my mentor on the Carnegie program), together
with a new piece for one of my favourite instruments, the mandolin.
The colorful program caught my eye and I fired off an invite to Andrew
Cyr, Metropolis Ensemble’s artistic director and conductor, inviting
him to the premiere of
Piosenki. Andrew came and a second musical
and personal friendship was soon flourishing - it was a good first trip
to NYC! For the Ensemble’s April 2008 concert, I made an arrangement
of Satie's
Sports et Divertissements for the group. I was
stunned and thrilled by the quality of the musicianship the ensemble
brought to my little arrangement.
In the intervening year or
so, Groanbox Boys concerts had become a regular feature of my life.
For me, what makes them special, apart from their high-energy, riotous
stage presence, is the sheer quality of their musicianship. Cory has
to be one of the finest banjo, guitar and harmonica players I've ever
heard and Michael somehow combines bass line, chords, foot-stomping
percussion, and an earthy soulful voice, all in perfect synchrony. More
recently Paul Clifford has added his own perfectly eccentric and eclectic
selection of percussion into the mix, and it now seems hard to imagine
them without him.
So a voice entered my head:
what would happen if we mixed the Groanbox Boys with the amazing players
from the Metropolis Ensemble? I mentioned the thought to Andrew
and he jumped at the idea. We would create a program inspired
by American folk music, which, in that terrible phrase, cross over the
boundaries between the classical world and the folk world.
It seemed a great idea to ask
Michael, who is also a composer (you see what I mean about the pigeon-holes),
to write a piece for lagerphone and ensemble, a 'lagerphone concerto'
if you will. That is the piece that literally kicks off tonight's
concert, the evocatively-titled
Kicking up Dust. I am certain
Michael's piece will, like a good opera overture, provide a sense of
the scale for the evening ahead, and also hints of what is to come.
Michael tells me the piece he has written was inspired by the African-American
Fife and Drum tradition.
Next comes John Adams's
Gnarly Buttons. Adams is of course one of America's leading
composers, and one of the most performed, but in this piece he draws
particularly heavily on American folk music, even featuring a part for
banjo. It is an intricate and unusual work that ranges from wild, dance-like
figures through to tranquil serenity at the end. Its three movements
are, Adams says "based on a 'forgery' or imagined musical model:
The Perilous Shore --
A trope on a Protestant shape-note hymn found in a 19th century volume,
The Footsteps of Jesus. The melodic line is twisted and embellished
from the start, appearing first in monody and eventually providing both
micro and macro material for the ensuing musical structures,
Hoe-down (Mad Cow) –
Normally associated with horses this version of the traditional Western
hoe-down takes the perspective of the other animal.
Put Your Loving Arms around
Me - A simple song, quiet and tender up front, “gnarled
and crabbed at the end."
Andrew Cyr then asked me to
write the piece that would 'bridge the gap' between the Adams piece
and The Groanbox Boys performance, a piece which would plunge itself
even more thoroughly in the folk tradition than the Adams piece.
In truth, of course, the gap is quite small already. Adams famously
said that, "Whenever serious art loses track of its roots in the
vernacular, then it begins to atrophy," and he, more than most
contemporary classical composers, has led the fight to embrace that
vernacular within his music. On the other side of the pigeon-holing,
a Groanbox Boys track itself is very much a 'composed' work of art.
For all the improvisation and free spirit, it is immediately apparent
from the sophisticated orchestration and the range of influence their
music incorporates that this is music that has a lot of thought behind
it.
As a composer whose music has
long incorporated folk elements, it has been an incredibly exciting
challenge to write a piece for these two groups of outstanding musicians.
I titled my piece simply Groanbox, (itself an old American term for
the accordion), and wrote a piece which is not at all like a traditional
'concerto', but rather a piece in which the two groups merge as one,
along with the two styles of music. I suppose it's a sort of imaginary
folk-music I'm writing, played by the largest and most virtuoso village
band you've ever seen.
The four movements of my piece
are as follows:
Goat Train – I recently
heard musicians from the Polish Theatre company Piesn Kozla
('The Song of the Goat' which interestingly is apparently is the origin
of the word 'tragedy') play a bagpipe-like instrument which was literally
shaped like a goat. This movement mixes bagpipe-like melodies
with a banjo-driven, energetic train-ride groove.
Goat Train
just seemed to make sense as a title.
Cajun Races – The
accordion features prominently in most Cajun music and for this comically
over-exuberant movement I found myself stuck with the surreal image
of wheelbarrow race that careers to the brink of collapse.
Satie's Scooter –
Another slightly surreal influence, the quirky, clunky, 'broken machine'
movement of this piece was inspired by a character called Po from the
BBC children's television program Teletubbies, who pushes around a somewhat
mournful sounding scooter, squeaking and clanking as it goes.
The accordion line that emerged made me think of the French composer
scooting sadly along. At the center of the piece however, a radiant
violin line unexpectedly blooms, before dying back once again.
Redhook Revival Rival
–
Redhook Revival is a song by the Groanbox Boys which has
a quite modern sounding funk-groove. I took it as my mission in
this movement to out-funk them. I am sure I won't succeed, but
I felt it was important to try.
The concert will end with a
performance from the Groanbox Boys, playing selections from their new
album,
Gran Bwa, alongside some of their best earlier work including,
I hope,
Redhook Revival itself - please compare and contrast
at leisure. We all hope you have a great evening, and that the
concert will confirm to you the simple truth that there are no barriers
to break down, there is no dividing line. There is just music.
David Bruce
9 Jan 2009
