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.' "
