The big splash for Make Music New York 2010 was the performance of Iannis Xenakis’ percussion work, Persephassa, on Central Park Lake. It was a spectacle, and spectacular, drawing a mass of rowers (including your correspondent, who had the pleasure of rowing Anthony Tommasini around . . . I like to row), to loll about amidst volleys of beats and the shimmers and twitters of chimes and whistles. Some of the Park’s birds joined in as well.

So of course we’re back on the lake this year, with another centerpiece event. This one comes to us from Australia and its title is SWELTER. The piece is the creation of sound artists Julian Day, Luke Jaaniste and Janet McKay of Super Critical Mass (SCM), and is being realized by the TILT Brass ensemble, led by trombonist, composer and new music star Chris McIntyre, and produced by our friends at MATA.

The work that SCM does is (and there is an excellent audio sample at our schedule page), as they describe it, large-scale performance/installation projects that explore space through masses of musicians. They use the tool of identical instruments (the Mass Appeal idea) playing in public spaces and without direction or a set score, instead using algorithms (that is, a set of instructions) that guide the mass in the production of sound. The results, in enclosed spaces, take on a powerful, ambient physicality. Sonically, the idea is related to the gorgeous cistern recordings of Pauline Oliveros and Stuart Dempster, but the underlying goal is philosophical (even political), rather than spiritual. Sound is the ideal means of defining the dimensions and limits of an enclosed space, it is a physical wave that travels out and touches the real constraints of the space, bouncing back to our ears with some information about the environment. In a grand enclosure, one that dwarfs our corporeal selves, sound extends our own limits and in a way our own capabilities and powers.

A Deep Listening piece from Pauline Oliveros

A Super Critical Mass performance

What will happen on the lake, with SWELTER, will be a departure from SCM’s previous work and an adventure. The sound of brass across the water will have an antiphonal (call and response) effect, but there is only the air itself for the sound waves to reach into, until they dissipate. But SCM is by their intention flexible and improvisatory in their ideas and their production. As McIntyre explained to me, Day, Jaaniste and McKay are in the ongoing process of tailoring SWELTER to the site itself, the gently rolling rises and nooks and crannies that surround the water. That process includes actually testing the sound of the site, revising and adjusting the algorithms the musicians will use to take the environmental effects into account. Where Persephassa last year was placed on the lake, SWELTER this year will be made for the lake.

While the physicality of the sound SCM seeks will need adjusting, the ideas behind the piece will remain assuredly consistent. SWELTER is about the democratic use of space, about the public, egalitarian meaning of “public places.” There is no roof over the park, but that’s a strength, not a drawback. The park is for the public, the people, and the note from the brass player that reaches across the distance to the ear of the listener in the rowboat is a message and a statement, one that connects the two in the shared freedom of the public commons. It also binds performer and listener in a shared compact of respect and mutual involvement. Making sound in the park, pace the recent restrictions, is in the constructive and eminently civil creation of anarchy, people working together to create a common order without rulings from on high.

SWELTER is also, like every other MMNY event, open to you, every person with the right instrument. This is a piece for you to participate in, and TILT is looking for more brass players and needs to hear from them by Friday, June 17. If you have a brass instrument with valves (sorry, natural horns and bugles can’t create the harmonic consonance that the piece needs), and can play comfortably in at least one octave, they want you. You can sign up here, and spend the afternoon of the first day of summer, 2011, claiming Central Park Lake as your space, and that of your fellow citizens.

On Tuesday, MATA held a workshop for Make Music Winter projects, some of which will come to life on NYC streets this December 21st.

Check out all of the proposals here.

Lainie Fefferman, along with Jascha Narveson and Cameron Britt, have an awesome idea entitled The Gaits in which contact mikes affixed to participants shoes would trigger various sounds and patterns. James Holt wants to position cello players (or potentially any ensemble) at every station along the F train, all playing the Prelude from Bach’s Suite No. 1 in G major, creating a connection between these spaces through coordinated performances. Ravi Kittappa’s piece centers around the Shruti Box (which I had never seen before) and how the drone created by this instrument accompanies the general drone of the city around us. I had the chance to present my piece Bell by Bell as well. Here’s a sample of how it might sound.

Phil Kline, whose Unsilent Night was the inspiration for MMW, was on hand to offer reactions and advice to all presenters. After leading Unsilent Night for the last 19 years, he has invaluable knowledge about what it takes to create a successful public sound event. His questions and comments following each presentation shed important light on a number of different issues ranging from how the public would interact with and interpret the pieces, to ideal location, to the complexity of coordinating logistics. The conversation with Phil also focused on the nature of public art and the appropriate role for artists in creating work in public space. The common conception of public art is of a static piece that simply sits in space and does not encourage individuals to interact with it, or to think about the environment around them in a different way. It was really exciting to be sitting in a room with a group of composers that were committed to taking action in urban space that would create public art that is supposed to be participatory, engaging, and rewarding.

Also in attendance were MMNY’s Aaron Friedman as well as MATA’s Executive Director David T. Little, Artistic Director Yotam Haber, and President of the Board of Directors Jim Rosenfield.

We are far from being the only festival organizer in New York City – we’re closer to being the youngest – and one of our peers and colleagues hits the stage, and the club, this week. It’s time for the latest MATA Festival, a concentrated showcase of the newest in new classical music, from America and the rest of the world.

The fun all starts, in the funnest way, with a party tonight, May 9! If you buy a pass, you gain entry to the party, otherwise it’s a $50 charge (it’s part fundraiser). The music really starts tomorrow, May 10, 2PM, at the Cornelia Street Cafe, where we come in, with the MATA composition workshop, with our friend Phil Kline, for Make Music Winter (please RSVP to info@matafestival.org, although I’m sure no one will be turned away). The concerts themselves start at 7:30PM Tuesday and all shows are at Le Poisson Rouge, running through Thursday. And for you starving composers, check out Lisa Bielawa’s Composer Survival School at Cornelia Street, Thursday at 2PM ($7). I wish this had been around twenty-five years ago . . .

Phil Kline’s Unsilent Night has been a holiday tradition in New York City for the last nineteen years.  About a week before Christmas, people gather at Washington Square Park, armed with boomboxes. Each box has one of the four tracks to Kline’s lovely electronic piece. At the composer’s call of “Play,” the music starts, and everyone sets off on a casual parade to Tompkins Square Park. Last year, 1,200 people took part, carrying boomboxes or just listening, and the parade itself has spread, as of 2010, to eighteen cities across the country and another six around the world.

This year, inspired by Unsilent Night, we’re creating Make Music Winter, a new event with thirty simultaneous, participatory musical parades throughout New York City on December 21, the winter solstice. Some parades will feature boomboxes, others percussionists, singers, kazoos, cellphones – essentially any instrument that can be played while walking along frigid streets.  Each parade will feature its own distinctive music, composed or curated by different artists, and will be produced by its own presenting partner, all overseen by Make Music New York. MATA is helping out by leading a workshop for potential Make Music Winter composers, to be held on May 10 at the Cornelia Street Cafe (time to be determined). MATA has a deadline of April 1 for the proposals to this workshop, and ten chosen participants will be notified by April 10.

(Please note that not every Make Music Winter parade will come out of this workshop. If you’re interested in getting involved in another way, or don’t fit the MATA guidelines, email us at aaron@makemusicny.org.)