Previous Seasons

by Nancy Rabbe
News Staff Writer

In the realm of modern music, accessibility and integrity are qualities that few have been able to reconcile succesfully.

Composer Emma Lou Diemer may be diminutive and unassuming in person,as those who attended Tuesday’s Birmingham Art Music Alliance concert discovered. But in her music, Diemer, 71, has proven to be one of only a handful of living composers to have mastered that reconciliation of apparent opposites.

Arnold Schoenberg once noted famously that “there’s a lot of music still to be written in C major.” As far as serious composition goes, though, it’s a betrayal of our age simply to write a pretty tune in an easy-going key. To be true to his or her position in the historical continuum, a composer must bring to bear, in some unique way, an acknowledgement of what has come before and where the craft stands at this point in time.

With a substantial legacy spanning five decades and encompassing three symphonies, six concertos, and a wide range of chamber, choral, and organ works, Diemer has done just that in a wide variety of ways.

The two pieces included on Tuesday’s program, written within a few years of each other, were as different in style as night and day. Yet each projected its message clearly and effectively.

When in Man’s Music (1976), expertly sung by members of the First United Methodist Chancel Choir under James Cook, offered a lush setting of Fred Pratt Green’s stirring text, rich in harmony and noble in aspiration. Diemer’s 1973 Declarations for organ, on the hand, draws on strict 12-tone procedures, serialized rhythm and innovative organ techniques. But the virtuosic context in which they’re invoked made this a riveting program closer, especially in Diemer’s dynamic performance. (“This is not a tune that you’ll go away humming,” the soft spoken Diemer warned the crowd beforehand, adding that in fact this might well be only the second public outing it’s had. “It’s published,” she added as an afterthought, “but that doesn’t mean a thing.”)

The well-planned program also included a reading by Lester Seigal and the Birmingham-Southern College Concert Choir of Charles Norman Mason’s 1992 From Shook Foil, one of the rare pieces of “modern music” that one simple can’t hear too often. Richard Perry gave James Grant’s Three Furies for solo tuba an appropriately wild ride. And the vivid aural imagery of Rick Nance’s Between Dog and the Wolf for soundfile, proved a perfect foil for Edwin Robertson’s finely wrought Trumpet Reflection (1972), nicely played by Joseph Ardovino and Cynthia Jones.

By Nancy Raabe

News staff writer

The Birmingham Art Music Alliance has done the seemingly impossible: It has made it cool to do contemporary music.

On a Tuesday night, no less, BAMA packed ’em in at Samford University’s Wright Center Recital Hall. OK, so the recital hall only holds 250 people. But it was significant nonetheless that, when the hour came for the show to begin, there wasn’t a seat to be had.

Part of the fun is that we’re dealing with fresh material that hasn’t yet had a chance to stand or succumb to the test of time, so quality as we might perceive it tends to be uneven. Opinions will differ, but for this writer Tuesday’s program offered one perfect 10 in the form of Joe L. Alexander’s “Infamy…for Tuba and Tape. Premiered last December in Tuscaloosa, the piece is based on a startlingly percussive computer-generated manipulation of the first line of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Dec. 8, 1941, radio speech. This is overlaid with a darkly mournful line intoned with just the right shadings of vibrato by UA faculty tubist Michael Dunn.

Persuasive as well was Dorothy Hindman’s “I Have Heard…,” a creative and sure-handed treatment of excerpts from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”

James A. Jensen’s “Three Choruses from ‘A Lincoln-Whitman Duologue'” showed great firmness of compositional purpose, but one longed for the entire work in its larger original scoring rather than the pared-down version presented rather raggedly here by The Cantors and pianist Brent McWilliams.

Presented by The Cantors, ASFA student Robert Stanton’s rhythmic, tightly constructed “Alleluia” revealed an intriguing undercurrent of musical tension, while Rebecca Remley’s “From All That Dwell Below the Sky” proved a nicely gauged contemporary realization of Isaac Watts’ hymn. To close, cellist Craig Hultgren fearlessly ventured a vivid enactment of Robert Paredes’ theatrical “Small Writing.”

The Birmingham News – October 8, 1996

By Nancy Raabe
News staff writer

We’ve all been to one too many concerts where the main message was that of sameness. Perhaps it was the same kind of music written in the same style and played the same way, or maybe it was one of those all-Beethoven or all-Brahms programs where sameness, used as a substitute for creative programming, is glorified, even deified.

There are remedies. One is an event like that Monday night at the University of Montevallo, produced by the Birmingham Art Music Alliance, which roused all in need out of the stupor of similarity.

On this occasion, a crowd of about 150 in Montevallo’s LeBaron Recital Hall enjoyed a widely varied, thoughtfully designed journey through different modes of contemporary musical thought.

It began with the relative conservatism of the late Harold Beerman’s lean, carefully crafted “Impromptu” for flute and piano. UM senior Donald Ashworth and staff accompanist Laurie Middaugh gave voice to the work’s modest nobility through close attention to its elegant vertical sonorities.

Progressing toward the more overtly experimental, the evening climaxed with a recreation of Vivian Adelberg Rudow’s arresting three-way dialogue for live cello and decorated cello cases, “With Love.”

Inspired a decade ago by the similarity between a cello case and a woman’s shape, Rudow challenged the observer to decorate two cases in contrasting styles-one as a flamboyant daughter and the other a more conservatively clad mother. With speakers behind each case, she ran “unmarried, spirited” music through the daughter case and, through the mother case, a collage of interviews with 23 people about their own mothers, and mothers with their own thoughts on motherhood.

Positioned between them, the live cellist is called upon to carry on a dialogue with both surrounding characters in musical terms ranging from hyperactivity to blues to a prolonged dreamy ballad. With the skilled contributions of cellist Craig Hultgren, the result on this occasion was at once poignant, whimsical, deeply musical (the spoken words were electronically arranged so as to fit in with surrounding musical rhythms, yet seemed perfectly natural) and outrageously entertaining.

Serving as an appropriate denouement was UM faculty composer Edwin Robertson’s richly atonal “Three Movements for Two Pianos.” In this committed reading by Jane Gibbs and Norma Dean, each of the concise movements advanced a compelling musical argument from start to finish.