It’s summer. You’re given a date for a really cool eight-hour marathon concert you’re helping organize the following year: Feb. 6, 2011. Looks as good as any other weekend, and besides, the venue locked it in almost immediately. So sure, why not? Feb. 6 it is.
Now it’s fall. You’re in the trenches, waist deep in concert submissions and logistics. And someone brings up that date: “Hey, isn’t Feb. 6 Super Bowl Sunday?”
Like any other concert organizer, your jaw drops, along with the bottom of your stomach. But unlike most other concert organizers, the feeling is fleeting, and suddenly you realize that this could be a most exciting and even awesome opportunity.
“It’s going to be an insane day, with the best cutting-edge music along with the Super Bowl,” says Matthew Cmiel, 22, concert codirector and a second-year composition student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. “Great music and great football are not mutually exclusive!”
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New York Counterpoint at Hot Air 2010
Yes, the Super Bowl will be shown on a large screen in the atrium of the Conservatory during the upcoming second annual Hot Air Music Festival. And if you need game updates but don’t want to hoist yourself out of your seat in the concert hall, fear not! Someone will be coming in to announce what’s going on at Cowboys Stadium. “There’s even going to be football food!” says Cmiel. (The chow is the only part of the event that requires money, although donations will be gladly accepted.)
Cmiel’s enthusiasm as a codirector of the festival is vital to pulling off an eight-hour program that coincides with what is, essentially, an American holy day. Fortunately, Cmiel is kind of a living, breathing, highly talented, exclamation mark.
“This year’s concert is going to be unbelievable. There’s not a bad hour!” says the energetic Cmiel, who composed a piece for the event, conducts another piece, and plays keyboards in yet another. Cmiel, along with codirectors Carolyn Smith and Kelsey Walsh, is working nearly around the clock to make sure the event scores big with its audience.
A Whole Lotta Music Goin' On
One goal of the concert, says Cmiel, is “to promote the conservatory’s awesomeness.” Performers include students, alumni, and faculty of the Conservatory. The festival’s other goal: to showcase modern, cutting-edge music that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
“A lot of the greatest composers in our history have had a really violent witty side. We wanted to incorporate the idea of not being too hung up in seriousness, and having some fun,” he says.
To wit, there’s only one dead composer on the program, and he’s not exactly an ancient relic. Influential composer Lou Harrison wrote the Concerto for Violin and Percussion Orchestra, which premiered in February 1961. “We noticed that this is exactly 50 years to the month before our festival this year, so we are truly thrilled to present this piece,” says Cmiel.
Harrison’s concerto will be the oldest piece in the festival, which also features music by John Adams, Dan Becker, George Crumb, David Lang, and Kaija Saariaho, among many others. (Many, many others, in fact. If you’re going to fill eight solid hours with music — including two hours in which concerts happen simultaneously in two halls — your composer roster is not going to be a short one.)
The festival ends with Morgan O’Shaughnessey (who played in six of the eight hours of last year’s festival) playing, as Cmiel puts it, “a hybrid-electric-violin-viola-random-extra-low-F-string-thingamajig” as he takes on John Adams' The Dharma at Big Sur.
“It’s such an amazing piece, a 25-minute tour de force of stunning harmonies and brilliant textures. The piece ends in such a joyful and uplifting manner,” says Cmiel. “It's just going to be fantastic. I cannot imagine a better way to end the concert than this piece’s final, glorious, D sharp.”
That, and maybe a hot dog with something to wash it down.