Still Life with Avalanche - Bang on a Can 2016 Summer Marathon (Reflections)

Today's Bang on a Can Summer Marathon 2016 memory is focused on a piece called "Still Life With Avalanche" by Missy Mazzoli.

Composer’s Notes (from her publisher’s website):
Still Life With Avalanche (2008) was commissioned by Eighth Blackbird. The piece is essentially a pile of melodies collapsing in a chaotic free fall. The players layer bursts of sound over the static drones of harmonicas, sketching out a strange and evocative sonic landscape. I wrote this piece while in residence at Blue Mountain Center, a beautiful artist colony in upstate New York. Halfway through my stay there I received a phone call telling me my cousin had passed away very suddenly. There's a moment in this piece when you can hear that phone call, when the piece changes direction, when the shock of real life works its way into the music's joyful and exuberant exterior. This is a piece about finding beauty in chaos, and vice versa. It is dedicated to the memory (the joyful, the exuberant and the shocking) of Andrew Rose. - Missy Mazzoli

Preparation
So this piece was a fun experience to put together. The interlocking rhythms within the odd/mixed meter visually looked difficult, but were surprisingly catchy and graspable as a performer. I found myself learning it more easily than the other tunes because it was something I could digest and sing to myself when I was away from the piano. Even though it still has its difficult passages, it was a welcome piece to learn in an already intimidating lineup of pieces to prepare in such a short time, as music was given less than a month before arriving at Bang on a Can for the summer festival.

Rehearsals
When you put together any chamber music piece, there are the two learning stages: learning your part well individually (maybe against a playback track if available) and then putting that part together with the rest of the ensemble. As our chamber group rehearsed, it was very clear the trickiest parts of the song involved lining up the piano with the percussionist on hits during the droning texture from the harmonicas and strings in a couple spots. This piece was also performed without a click track, so everybody had to focus on keeping solid internal time. Luckily, making it through these passages rewarded the group some stability, with rhythmic figures grounding folks in meters and locking things back into place if things shifted. The grooving passages felt super satisfying, flexing those rhythmic muscles while showcasing our group’s strength in these parts of the piece.

Performance
When performing this tune live for the marathon, some of the same things in rehearsal, even after confidently running the piece multiple times, still were cause for concern. The sections with the harmonica/strings droning were difficult to perform, but the visual components involved as performers had to be negotiated as well. Ideally, you’d want to telegraph the moods within the piece across each ensemble member, so with the drone acting as a  “suspension of time,”  there would be little movement as possible. However, to communicate within the ensemble, everybody had some form of movement to keep things in time. Moving to tunes in general in a contemporary classical group loosens up the tension that builds from the typical rigid expectations many of us experienced in our journeys in music school trying to achieve perfection too. However, as a participant, I knew these players could be trusted to go into difficult territories, which made the live performance way more exciting than nerve racking!

Check out the performance below, and browse more Bang on a Can performances on their new archive website, https://canland.org/

Ensemble:
Nick Photinos - Cello/Director
Maria-Fiore Mazzarini - Violin
Hila Zamir - Clarinet/Bass Clarinet
Gina Izzo - Flute/Harmonica
Josh Graham - Percussion
Dutcher Snedeker - Piano