A Far Cry packs for West Coast Tour!

Dear Friends,

On Tuesday, May 13th, the Criers fly to San Francisco to begin their 3-week trek up the West Coast to Seattle, with stops along the way in Santa Rosa, Roseburg, and Portland. From outreach programs to concert hall performances, chamber music shenanigans, and a working retreat, A Far Cry is prepping for a very busy tour!

Do you know someone who enjoys music? Please bring them with you! Do you know someone in the cities we're visiting? Please tell them about our concert and invite them to attend! Here's the line up:

San Francisco - Thursday May 15th 2008 @ 8pm - Koret Auditorium at the de Young Museum

Santa Rosa - Sunday May 18th 2008 @ 3pm - Glaser Center at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation

Roseburg - Wednesday May 21st 2008 @ 7pm - Melrose Community Church [by donation]

Portland - Friday May 23rd 2008 @ 7:30pm - First Unitarian Church

Seattle - Monday May 26th 2008 @ 7pm - Great Hall at Town Hall

Tickets to these concerts can be purchased in advanced through Brown Paper Tickets, a Seattle-based fair trade ticketing service (www.brownpapertickets.com or toll-free 1-800-838-3006). Get your tickets ahead of time!

There are three very important and easy ways you can partner with A Far Cry in our commitment to bring you world-class, passionate performances:

1. Come to our concerts and bring your friends along!

2. Tell all of your friends about our performances, invite them to come, and also encourage them to visit our website to learn more about us!

3. Make a fully tax-deductible contribution to A Far Cry (we are a 501(c)3 non-profit incorporation). This is as easy as clicking the link on our main page and donating by credit card or mailing a check to the address listed under "Get Involved". This, our first Tour, is made possible entirely from your generous support.

As always, please contact us with any questions you have at info@afarcry.org / 617.297.2796.

We look forward to seeing all of our West Coast fans at the concerts!

On programming...

One of the questions we are frequently asked is, "How do you choose which music you play?" The truth is that we program collaboratively, with everyone being welcome to give their input. We take into account musical compatibility, potential connections between pieces, availability of soloists, and yes even the extra costs associated with choosing certain music. Words and the Night is a great example of the kind of open-minded, thought-provoking program which can result when musicians put their heads together. In this case, Megumi suggested Shoenberg's Verklarte Nacht, a masterpiece with strong connections to poetry and the night. Next, yours truly suggested 16th-century madrigals, in particular Gesualdo to pair musically and poetically with the Schoenberg. Then Jason bounced us back to the 20th century, suggesting Britten's Lachrymae with Roger Tapping, which just so happens to be based on 16th-century songs by Dowland. Finally, Jae found the perfect opener, a wonderful divertimento by Mozart, which pairs exquisitely with 16th-century motets by Palestrina. No single person was in charge. There were many false starts and dead-end ideas, but a truly collaborative solution finally presented itself, and the whole proved to much greater than the sum of the parts. That's A Far Cry in a nutshell.

Mr. Seymour Lipkin in Beantown April 20.

I spent 7 consecutive summers at the Kneisel Hall Chamber Music Festival in Blue Hill, Maine, and Mr. Lipkin was there as the Artistic Director for every single one (and still is). He has coached me in numerous different chamber ensembles, including a memorable Brahms Piano Quintet in the year 2000. As a teacher, he is utterly unrelenting. If he hears something which he thinks is not communicating to him, he will right away let one know that the phrase is not coming out. "Again!" as he used to say, and we'd be trying our hardest to make the music breathe a little more. ("mere mortals" applied to my status every time..)

Because he knew how to do it... Grab those moments of ecstasy, and making you believe that one should strive to live in such beauty, as he chose how to touch the hammers of the piano to sculpt the last lines of the slow movement to the Schubert B-flat Piano Trio. As a frequent member of the audience at Kneisel Hall, every time a faculty concert would happen, was already an occasion, but especially when Mr. Lipkin would be performing, there was never a question that it was going to be electric. For 7 summers and twice most weekends, I heard everything he played on that stage and soaked it in as much as possible... The meat and potatoes of the chamber music repertoire, the Mozarts, the Beethovens, and the Brahms, he just knew it more convincingly than anyone I had ever met before or since that first year. And of course, behind a great man, there's always a greater woman. Ellen Werner, who is the Executive Director of Kneisel Hall, have been our surrogate summer mom for many summers, and she makes sure he is well, and we are well. We love you Seymour & Ellen.

So it is a sincere honor to be performing with one of my truest mentors and beacons of musical spirits, as he has agreed so generously to help A Far Cry mark its first year. This upcoming Sunday, April 20th at 4pm, at St. Paul's Church in Brookline (which is the 2nd installment of our April set), he will be performing the ebullient C Major Piano Concerto, no. 13, K. 415 by W. A. Mozart. I mean he is one of those rare old-school guys who's performances are completely spell-binding, and I assure you, the Criers are going to be SO excited to play, it is going to be off the hook!! Seriously, Boston... Do not miss this one!!! (Or the night before!!)

on missing rehearsal...

The other day, A Far Cry had its first rehearsal for our April concerts: Words and the Night. I missed it. (click "Continue Reading!") Please don't feel bad for me; I was in Florida with my girlfriend, lying on the beach, spotting dolphins, and eating delectable hogfish. I can think of worse reasons to miss a rehearsal. And yet, I really did miss it, like one misses the hand-holding of a loved one or Mom's home cooking. A Far Cry is a family, and I missed the reunion.

I wonder: how did it go? At the first rehearsal for our last set of concerts, Remixed Classics, we read Grieg's Holberg Suite, and we couldn't help but whoop when it was over. It was a feeling like riding a classic convertible for the first time in the spring after it's been garaged all winter. This time, were the Palestrina Madrigals soothing and lovely? The Mozart Divertimento chipper and bright?

We have an ambitious program to perform, including a number of original transcriptions, two different concertos, and a bona fide masterpiece, Schoenberg's Verklarte Nacht. Will we rise to the challenge? Meet it? Transcend it? I'm not concerned with the concerts - A Far Cry has yet to play a lackluster concert - and I'm not concerned with my ability to plug into what the group is doing - there are 12 more rehearsals for that. I'm not concerned with anything, really, except for the fact that I missed even one minute of the A Far Cry experience. I can hardly wait for that second rehearsal to come!

The JP Community

This evening Megumi, Frank, Jae, and I all went to the Neighbors for Neighbors Fall Community Organizing Expo. Somewhere around 45 JP-based nonprofits, social organizations, and causes were represented, and A Far Cry joined the ranks with a table displaying info about our upcoming concerts and our mission, making lots of friends in the process. For the uninitiated, JP stands for Jamaica Plain, which is a neighborhood of Boston southwest of downtown. JP is becoming THE place to live in Boston for artists, musicians, social workers, and interesting people of all ages! Nearly all of the Criers live in JP - I myself moved here just a few months ago. Wandering around checking out the other booths was incredibly inspiring. There is so much energy and so much enthusiasm out there - people really want to do good, and are in fact doing good. A Far Cry was proud to be part of an incredible evening made up of people who don't just talk - they do!

Our Place in This Zeitgeist (part 1)

I had a busy summer of traveling to play concerts, see a couple of old friends tie the knot, make the requisite visit with my family, and went back to Korea for the first time in almost 5 years, the place where I was born and spent 10 of my youthful years. This whole time I have been working on another blog piece to put on the website, but realized I just had too much to say about the subject. I started the piece initially, as a concert review of the Canadian indie rock bands, Memphis and Apostle of Hustle after seeing their show in Boston back in June (They are both amazing bands, with charismatic live shows). I got to meet the members of Memphis after the show and had a chance to talk to them about a few ideas that I'd been brainstorming over the last months since the start of A Far Cry. Not that I was surprised, but non the less impressed, when they did have a lot to say about the subject of a melding point between Art music and Pop music, with more knowledge than most of their own concert going audience about classical music, citing examples from Beethoven symphonies to Puccini operas. Rewrite after rewrite, I could not stick to the subject and found myself drifting into multiple issues and tying them into my personal account as a performing musician, also as an observer of the present classical music business, and as a fan of indie rock and what it stands for. So after weeks of this personal tug-of-war, I'll see if I can put these thoughts in installments, not only because I think it would help me organize my ideas and hoping that it would be somewhat of an entertaining read, but to wrestle with issues dear to me and where I want to see us catapult in directions where I believe we (A Far Cry) can help bring music to people who feel uncomfortable and foreign to the idea of having to put on a dress shirt and a tie to go hear a classical show.

The internet has changed so many facets of our world as we've known it and even for music alone, it has completely changed the way we listen, explore, watch and buy. I meet kids during outreach residencies and witness instances of how fast they can text message each other and even the kind of "code" they use to communicate with each other. I mean, I'm not that far off from them if there was a generation gap, as I proudly put myself in that Generation X category, who saw the rise of independent artists such as Nirvana and Quentin Tarantino become household names, saw the birth of the internet, finished college in the years when the so called "MTV generation" was filtering into society to lay down the infrastructure for the I-pods and High-Def TV's to flourish in the average living room, and of course when things were a little more peaceful around the world. I may not be as fast using these products as the 12-year olds, but lets just say that I know a few people who helped actually invent these devices.

One of the things that sets A Far Cry apart from most other orchestras is not only the fact that we don't have a conductor, but that everyone in the group is in pretty much the same generation. One would see examples in a chamber music ensemble such as a string quartet or piano trio, of this being true, but from an ensemble the size of 15+ people, I think we are pretty unique in that way. Take any one of the big American orchestras for instance, where they will only hold an audition if there is a vacancy from 100 or so permanent positions, whether the person before either retired at the fruitful age of 75, or went into a different business wanting to become a conductor or write for the NY times food column. My point is that for an organization that is as venerable but traditional as a band like the New York Philharmonic, new blood trickles in and rarely comes in brigades. Plus the tenure process in these orchestras will mold the new members to fit into the one that has already been established, and for the last 126 years for instance, if it was the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

We are starting out new with 15 members who have grown up to see the becomings of Hip-Hop, but moreover ENJOY  listening to Hip-Hop and can see the artistic merit in its art form. We are in the generation that doesn't get bashful to let loose when we hear bass and drums in common time, and not only have we seen rock shows but have played in them. And I think that's a really important point in furthering the cause of what we do. Because we want to play and perform for these people we meet at dance clubs, at poetry readings, at bars, at coffee houses, on the public transportation, those who are in our generation and love the same kind of music, movies, and live with similar good values. I was reading an article by Greg Sandow, a composer and former music critic of the Wall Street Journal, on his never mundane website. Sandow by the way, teaches a course at the Juilliard School called "Classical Music in the age of Pop" and is a progressive thinker who raises important questions about the state and trends of music, and gets us musicians thinking about where all this hooplah with the "biz" is going. Anyways, the article was about a big orchestra trying to reach out to a younger audience using flashy colors and coining hipper terms on their posters to attract them. Not that the programming was necessarily different, or exploring a venue to collaborate with artists (Why not Jay-Z or the National? They all live in nearby neighborhoods..) that could fill the house with a surge of young audiences, it was just the same old product wrapped in glitzier paper. A little superficial if you ask me.

People want contact. They want to meet the people they admire professionally and artistically, and when they do, want to feel comfortable around them and want to know what their favorite food is. Even in these recent weeks of the Baseball play-offs, one can go onto MLB.com and read blogs from the actual players like Kevin Youkilis of the Red Sox or Tony Clark of the Diamondbacks, (which by the way, I tip my hat off to MLB.com for opting to get the players to share their real thoughts), getting to find out a little more about their psyche, their games and their lives. And that's the kind of exposure people can relate to. Why can't an orchestra be more personable? I really believe that it needs to come from the musicians themselves WANTING to get to know their audience, from a person to person basis... Almost like a candidate running for congress for the first time, wanting to get to know his voters on a level beyond just face value. If I was working for a bigger company and my checks were coming in steadily without hassle, I wonder if I'd be all that motivated to go out and meet these people and get them excited about what I do. Well, I don't know...I think about that all the time.

It seems like with most things now a days, in order to find one's identity, the main conflict splits into that struggle between the individual and its government, mom & pops stores against the conglomerates, independents versus the established, the Republic against the Empire in the Star Wars sense, or David versus Goliath in the biblical sense. I'd say that A Far Cry would be an underdog...In the best sense of the word. And speaking of Baseball...the Red Hot Sox are back in the American League Championship Series to face the Cleveland Indians starting this Friday!!!

Thank-you, Vermont!!

A Far Cry had an AMAZING weekend tour in Vermont last week. We arrived in five different cars at six different homes(Montpelier/Berlin) Thursday night. Some of us had engagements in Boston until the evening, so we didn't in until very late, but ALL of our hosts were so nice. On Friday morning, we met up with Karen Kevra at Vermont Public Radio, outside of Burlington and had a live spot on what is probably one of the most popular public radio stations in the country! We were a little nervous, mostly for the interview part, but it all went just fine. We had a great lunch hour on Church Street in Burlington and then piled in the cars to head to Middlebury. We arrived at the college and entered one of the most beautiful halls! After a quick photo shoot and dress rehearsal, we had dinner and then a concert. The audience there was great and we were particularly impressed and thankful to the people who stuck around afterwards to talk to us. We decided we should encourage that more during all of our concerts - we like to get to know our audience!

Saturday, we were treated to a lunch at the New England Culinary Institute's cafeteria and relaxed for the rest of the afternoon, most of us in the quiet luxury of Mr. and Mrs. Iron's house. In the evening, we had one of the most exciting concerts I've ever played and that was mostly because of the energy coming from the audience. There was something that night about the way we could communicate with the people sitting in there. It was joyfully packed, and although it was almost unbearably warm in there (how many of us saw the sweat dripping from Andrew's violin?!), there was a spirit like no other. That evening, we were treated to a nice reception, again by the Iron's, and returned home Sunday, tired and blissfully happy from the weekend. I had a special treat - my host took me on a hike, right in Montpelier, just before I left. Thank you, Leslie!

If any one is reading this who attended these concerts or other concerts of ours, even in Boston, we'd love to hear your comments! We encourage you to leave comments on this blog, or write to us!

On behalf of the Criers, thank you, thank you, everyone in Vermont! This will be our home away from home, for sure.

Sincerely,

Margaret

Who goes to UNO'S?

I have to say that going to school in Harvard square doesn't offer many choices for late night food after practicing until the building closes. Late night food in the square was limited to Charlie's Kitchen (home of the double Lobster roll), and Uno's Chicago Grill. I remember playing with a hockey team from Canada, that was treated to beer, chicken wings and Pizza from Uno's (as they were one of the tournament sponsors), and it was sooo satisfying to be eating after playing a few hours of hockey. They serve all sorts of food that have a very distinct aroma. Their selection of beers is average, but they definitely go down easy, and compliment their famous pizza the "Chicago Classic." It always sits well in my stomach, and the great part is that you can take it home if you can't finish (like in a plastic bag, with napkins of course) Well that is my plug for Uno's in Harvard Square if you happen to be there late when nothing else is open...or if you managed to find it at four in the morning (excluding Massachusetts)...yeah I go to UNO's

Riding the Wave

It really does seem like yesterday that I was gearing up to meet with a few other people for this "idea" for a chamber orchestra. Then, after a few weeks of organizing and setting up a first reading, I was in Prague, on vacation with my parents, and any time I met anyone new, this was all I could talk about. They wanted to know about my life as a grad student in Boston, and I responded with a starry-eyed description of the birth and potential of this nameless, conductorless chamber orchestra that I was starting with some of the most amazing people around. Here we are now, on the verge of our second full set of concerts.  We've been riding an exhilarating wave all the way here and honestly,  I could still talk about it all day long.  The buzz is clearly there - people are talking in Boston (and elsewhere), people are offering us help and advice,  and we're busy dividing tasks to carry us through the business aspect so we can be totally devoted to making music.

Spending this many hours with all or most of fifteen other strong personalities is, as a friend of our observed, like watching a social experiment.  I could definitely see that and I found it amusing, and then realized that I couldn't choose better people for this so-called experiment. We've become quite a family, which means getting personal and comfortable, and sometimes even a little grumpy, but in the end we still love each other.   We're all really excited for our concerts in Vermont this weekend.  Handel, Tchaikovsky, Part, and Quantz are all becoming our own and we're ready to share our dynamic and transcending interpretations with everyone else.   The character with which this all started remains with us and feeds the interaction in our playing and what transmits through the music.  How lucky I am to be a part of this....

Summer Lessons

Summer can be a strange time for musicians. The situations we find ourselves in are usually the most relaxed (summer pops) or the most intense (chamber music festival) without very much of the usual in-between. Festivals of all kinds dominate the summer, and most of them invite musicians year to year with no future guarantees. We therefore scramble to network and impress our way to tangible "real life" advantage. Summer is not "real life" for a musician. That was doubly true for me and my early-summer festival (sadly concluded). The feeling of "alternative reality" was complete, for I was not only in a different country, thousands of miles from home, and thousands of feet higher in elevation: I was playing entirely different genres of music (most entirely new to me), I was composing and arranging pieces for public performance (also entirely new), and I was being musically stretched and challenged nearly to the breaking point!

The Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music was three tumultuous weeks of improvising. The first improvisation was simply figuring out what I was doing there. The Workshop is Banff's most selective program, and is truly international, with emerging and established professionals aged 18-40 attending in order to study with, jam with, and be inspired by a jaw-dropping revolving faculty. Some of the participants and faculty are straight-ahead jazzers, through and through. Some are drawn to the more experimental and avant-garde side of jazz. Some are drawn to the more experimental and avant-garde side of classical music. Some are so far outside of my previous experience that I don't even want to try to classify them, and some (workshop leader Dave Douglas, for example) are drawn to anything and everything. The one common thread was improvisation, but as I came to understand, that is a bit like saying the one common thread between a group of writers is "language," or the one common thread between a group of sculptors is "space:" true but at such a basic level as to be almost meaningless.

I am, at a basic level, a classical chamber musician. I interpret notes on a page with my mind and realize those interpretations with my body. What was I doing at a "jazz and creative music" workshop? I had applied to the Workshop on a whim after hearing Dave perform at NEC, using in my application stories and recordings of various ethnomusical collaborations I had taken part in, a bit of a jazz standard I had recorded for an earlier project, and a sample of chamber music playing. When I arrived and found so many world-class improvisers, I suddenly felt very much the black sheep. Who was I kidding? The Workshop is not really about learning (although a lot of learning takes place)... with such a high level of participants, the Workshop is about doing, and I had to figure out what I could do to contribute to the incredible music around me!

Initially I worked extensively with the saxophonist Oliver Lake. Oliver is a ferocious improviser who just blows you away with the feeling and authenticity behind his playing. Even though we played some of the most "jazzy" tunes of the summer, with Oliver no wrong note could disappoint him like a halfhearted phrase. Notes are inconsequential. Feelings and emotions are everything. This was also conveyed (in a completely different way) in conversations with the classical and klezmer clarinet guru David Krakauer and the club-touring classical cellist Matt Haimovitz. Having started down that path, and realizing some of the ways a rigorous classical training was helping me to contribute, the arrival of Mark Feldman showed me just how much is possible when improvising on the violin. My hypothesis, that the violin is, at some basic level, just not quite natural in improvisation, was blown out the window. Mark helped the small contingent of string players in the peculiar art of sounding good on strings. Nothing in the world, however, could have prepared me for the arrival of the Instant Composers Pool in the third week of the Workshop. I'm at a loss to describe the ICP orchestra, besides "ten crazy Dutch people." The music wasn't freely improvised; it was instantly composed. They might start playing one piece, spontaneously modulate to a different piece, and end up with the drummer throwing a cymbal on the floor. It was during a spontaneous Workshop-wide improvisation with the ICP that I lost my last inhibition, interjecting with a wild fiddle-inflected solo, and simultaneously connecting everything I had experienced at Banff back to "real life."

It's ALL improvisation. From Corelli to Tonasphernia 12. In the entire wide range of determinism, from the performer inventing everything all the way to the most painstakingly notated Boulez, when we actually perform, what we are doing is improvising - or should I say "instant composing?" I will have a good time this coming year trying to infect A Far Cry with some of this freedom-inspiring outlook!