Blackbird, learn to fly

The word “new” in new music implies a lack of regard for convention, and eighth blackbird -- lowercase and all -- takes the implication seriously.

For this Chicago-based sextet, gaining career momentum has involved two seemingly contradictory approaches: disregard (or reinvent) convention and, at the same time, behave traditionally. Somewhere, somehow, the twain successfully meet.

Saturday at Royce Hall, eighth blackbird arrives in the Southland with a program called “di/verge.” Four composers from the New York City-based Minimum Security Composers Collective each were commissioned to write four-movement works based, in some way, on the opening chord of Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto. Those movements, once turned in, were then arranged by the ensemble into a mosaic of their devising. As it turns out, they mixed and matched two 35-minute, eight-movement pieces.

So much for the traditional singularity of the composer’s voice.

And so much for the normally static performance attitude of the players. The six musicians that make up eighth blackbird -- percussionist Matthew Duvall, pianist Lisa Kaplan, flutist Molly Barth, violinist-violist Matt Albert, cellist Nicholas Photinos and clarinetist Michael Maccaferri -- play primarily from memory, which allows them to move about the stage in subtle choreography. Refusing to stay put is a hallmark of this group’s operations.

At present, eighth blackbird is touring, they’ve had numerous successful New York concerts and just last week officially launched their recording career with the release of the CD “Thirteen Ways,” for the Chicago-based independent Cedille label.

Are things going according to some grand plan, hatched when the group started as a humble Ohio student group at Oberlin College back in 1996? Duvall says that if there is a plan, “none of us know about it.”

On the phone from Chicago, where eighth blackbird is ensemble-in-residence at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago, Duvall cites a sturdy practice ethic and, especially, an active touring life as habits that have paid off for the ensemble.

That touring schedule is one area where this new music group looks more like older classical-ensemble models.

“We operate more like a string quartet than we do any new music ensemble that I’ve heard of,” Duvall says. “Most new music groups are based in a region. Performances are filled out by regulars or freelancers, depending on their needs. Because everyone is gigging or has other jobs, they’ll do two or three concerts a year, maybe they’ll have a series; they stay pretty local. That’s not a formula that we follow at all.”

There are a few new music precedents. The New York-based Bang on a Can All-Stars, which grew out of an annual new music festival, has built a strong presence in Europe and a growing one in parts of the U.S. with occasional run-outs by an ever-changing lineup of players. And then there is the atypical towering presence of the 30-year-old Kronos Quartet, in which three of the four players are founding members and for which international touring and brand-new music is the name of the game. That’s the real eighth blackbird role model.

Kaplan observes that Kronos has -- enviably -- built a brand name for a certain kind of programming and a high level of performance. “They’ve obviously been around for a long time and have worked really hard,” she says. Like Kronos, eighth blackbird commissions and champions lesser-known composers, along with established new music voices, and like Kronos it would like to be a destination ensemble.

“We’re always fighting that battle with our manager,” Kaplan points out, “saying, ‘Look, we want to play these pieces. Yes, they’re by people you haven’t heard of, and yes, we think they’re really great and no, it’s not Philip Glass. You have to try and get us these gigs because of who we are and what we do, not because of who we play.’

“That’s really difficult. They’ve been very supportive in general, but it’s a hard thing to do, to sell yourself on your name alone.”

Some poetic license

And what about that name?

The group was formed by a conductor at Oberlin but soon dropped the conductor and morphed from student to professional status. The name came before the decision to go pro. It derives from the music-referential eighth stanza of a Wallace Stevens poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”: “I know noble accents / And lucid, inescapable rhythms / But I know, too / That the blackbird is involved / In what I know.”

Violinist Albert, an English major, made the suggestion. “We didn’t want to be the XYZ Sextet or the New Music Whatever,” Kaplan explains. “Matt came in one day and said, ‘How about “eighth blackbird.” ’ He explained the reference, and we thought, ‘That’s cool, OK.’ ”

What began casually grew ever more solidified. “I don’t think anyone thought that we would stay together beyond that,” Kaplan recalls of the group’s earliest student performances. “We got some inspiration and some hope that we were good at this, when we played in some chamber music competitions and won those.”

Among their wins: the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition and the Coleman Chamber Music Competition, in 1996. They auditioned for summer festivals, sending out a sampler on CD of four pieces -- the only four pieces they knew (Kammersymphonie Opus 9 by Schoenberg was one; “The Yellow Pages,” by Michael Torke was another). In 1997 they moved, en masse, to a graduate program at the conservatory at the University of Cincinnati and, as Kaplan says, “Things just kept plugging along and we kept figuring out what we were doing as we went.”

They made their New York City debut in 1998, at Merkin Hall, and went on to garner more awards, including the two citations for adventurous programming from Chamber Music America and ASCAP.

In its formative stages, the group eased into a repertoire still very much in the making. Duvall says, “I remember, getting off the ground, there was a real scramble. But [with] our instrumentation we were able to get the ball rolling. Things really did snowball from there. We’re way beyond the point now where we can play the repertoire that’s available to us, not just pieces that we’ve found, but we also get submissions all the time.”

A signature work for the ensemble, and one with a sentimental connection, is “Thirteen Ways,” written in 1997 by composer and teacher Thomas Albert, violinist Matt Albert’s father. Kaplan says the piece, the title of the just-released debut CD, has “became a signature piece of ours.” Albert’s chirpy and smart half-hour assemblage of movements includes recitation of the Stevens poem, camouflaged allusions to the Beatles classic “Blackbird,” and shades of post-impressionist and minimalist writing. All these elements tend to show up in the ensemble’s repertory, which follows a generally accessible contemporary musical route.

Critics and crowds have been impressed. The Boston Globe declared them “so good it’s dangerous.” The New York Times said they weren’t so much breaking barriers between classical and pop, they were helping “expand the definition and scope of classical music -- on classical music’s terms.”

A ‘dream project’

The “di/verge” project, performed in New York, Philadelphia and Washington before the tour headed west, is a prime example of eighth blackbird’s outside-the-box thinking. The pastiche concept was a natural to suggest to the Minimum Security Composers Collective. The collective -- Dennis DeSantis, Roshanne Etezady, Adam Silverman and Ken Ueno -- former composition students at Yale, wanted to work directly with performers. “It’s difficult to be a young composer, and it’s difficult to be a composer at all, to create a career from it,” Silverman says. “We wanted to find a way to do concerts in an interesting way.” Working with eighth blackbird, Silverman says, “has wound up being our dream project.”

“When we initially commissioned the collective,” Kaplan recalls, “I remember we were obsessed with how we were going to unify the whole thing. In the end, it was the composers who came up with the chord idea.” The re-ordering of the works into two collages not only subverted tradition, it allowed for real interaction between players and composers. Duvall happily calls the results “a different animal altogether.”

Still, each part is duly identified by title, movement and composer in the program, and the ensemble realizes that many habitual classical listeners will be program-obsessive.

“It’s almost like they can’t detach themselves from how they’ve been taught to listen,” says Duvall. “It’s almost like, in their mind, they need to be able to identify them in four-movement chunks by each composer, the way you would hear them at a normal concert.”

Still, Duvall feels the program’s “real success is when audience members just allow themselves to take in 35 minutes of what becomes an entirely new production. When we mix it all up, each half becomes its own brand-new piece.”

Composer Silverman contributed a work called “In Another Man’s Skin.” He agrees that upending the relationship of the listener to material is part of the project’s appeal.

You have to “surrender what’s really a very ingrained habit of feeling like you want to know who a composer is, know what the context of a piece is,” he says. “ ‘di/verge’ takes that away from you. You really can’t tell whose music is being played at a given time. However, the movements themselves are sufficiently distinct that, even if you don’t know me, you can probably associate one of my movements with the other three. In a way, it’s almost like a composer becomes a theme in a concert.”

For eighth blackbird, “di/verge” is just an extension of the rest of their professional ambitions: taking audiences somewhere unusual and somewhere many of them may not exactly want to go. The key is to do it with all the skill at their disposal.

“Classical music audiences almost always fall back on what they know,” Duvall suggests. “It’s a comfort and security thing. But people get excited about discovering something new that they enjoy, whether it’s music, food, a movie or whatever. It’s a tough call for audiences, if it’s a piece they’re unfamiliar with, knowing how to evaluate it. Was it a good or bad performance, a good or bad piece? If the performance wasn’t really good enough to tell if it’s a good piece, you don’t really hear the composition the way it was meant to be. The easiest conclusion for an audience member to make is that they say, ‘I guess I don’t like new music.’ ”

“The advantage that we have as a chamber group is that we are a collective,” Kaplan says. “We decide to play these pieces because we like them. Just the fact that six people like something is going to come across in a performance.”

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‘di/verge’

Who: eighth blackbird/Minimum Security Composers Collective

When: Saturday, 8 p.m.

Where: Schoenberg Hall, UCLA

Price: $30

Contact: (310) 825-2101