Chamber Music Day, Live + Free, 2010 — the fourth annual festival of the compositional and performance form with the intimate yet elastic definition of music that fits between four walls, with a single musician playing each part — will take place all afternoon on Sunday, Sept. 12. Featuring a diversity of small-group sounds and styles, it will be presented by the San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music (SFFCM) on several stages at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
More than 30 Bay Area groups, ranging from Baroque string quartets to jazz combos, will play in what’s also a celebration by the Conservatory’s chamber music department, SFFCM’s collaborator for the event, marking 25 years of chamber music education.
The diversity of musical styles covers several centuries and spans the globe: Berkeley Choro Ensemble, for instance, features music of Brazil, especially the Chorro style, which influenced composer Heitor Villa-Lobos; Melody of China performs Chinese folk, classical, and contemporary music; The Nice Guy Trio (trumpet, accordion, bass) plays a mix of anything from klezmer and Balkan dance through jazz and calypso; duos perform, such as martha and monica (on cello and piano) and Kate Stenberg–Eva-Maria Zimmerman (violin and piano, well-known to Other Minds festival-goers); and Zimmerman and Keisuke Nakagoshi’s four-hand piano duo, called Zofo Duet, contributes, as well. The performers’ repertory collectively runs the gamut from Romantic through avant-garde to contemporary compositions, while other performers are outright improvisers.
Said one performer, leader and percussionist Dave Mihaly, “The music for [my] Shimmering Leaves Ensemble is original, partly composed, partly improvised. For brass, reeds, and percussion. Sometimes there’s singing. The pieces are never the same twice; the motifs are. It’s composed by and on a web of improvisation, sometimes chordal, sometimes purely textural. Chamber music to me means the scale of the music, and the band itself is sort of an intimate band, not overwhelming in volume, that’s meditative, folkloric, and confrontational.”
Shimmering Leaves Ensemble was introduced to the Friends of Chamber Music by Chamber Music Day cosponsors Porto Franco Records, which will release the group’s CD, Eastern Accents in the Far West, in September.
Lisa Mezzacappa, a bassist and composer who has “instigated” groups including Bait & Switch, a “garage jazz band” quartet that played at last year’s Chamber Music Day, and Nightshade, an electro-acoustic quintet on this year’s program, commented on the significance of the festival for musicians like herself. Mezzacappa noted that she and some others have little or no background playing in “traditional” chamber music ensembles, but instead work with improvisationally based music, “from wide-open to rigorously composed and notated”:
It’s been extraordinary for those of us whose music lives in the cracks of strict musical genres to have the support of SFFCM. ... By defining chamber music as music performed by smallish, conductorless groups, we are all invited to participate, validating the work we do. The performer finally has a place of privilege. A lot of organizations give the ‘Composer’ with a capital C full access to grants and commissions; here is the acknowledgment that groups of performers do special things together. And that’s also a particular Bay Area phenomenon, I think. So it helps to define Bay Area music on its own terms; it puts us all on the broader artistic, cultural map.
That spirit of discovery — and rediscovery — seems to be borne out by a few audience comments from past Chamber Music Days that were held at Old First Church and Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco and at the Berkeley Piano Club. People of all ages, mostly anonymous, offered reflections such as these: “Am glad to be reintroduced to classical music” / “I loved the traditional music and that odd little piece about the bird” / “It’s good to see children listening” / “I like the come-and-go aspect.” Yet maybe the series is best summed up by these remarks: “It was not at all what I was expecting, but it doesn’t mean I was disappointed. I thought it would be dry, old music and it wasn’t” and, from Arthur, age 46: “Can every day be Chamber Music Day?”