In music, like any other creative medium, imagination can obliterate pre-conceived notions of the possible. Through its series of live streamed concerts that were created as a response to Covid, Eighth Blackbird’s Creative Artist Workshop (CAW) has been reminding us of the many forms excellent music can take. Since CAW began its entertainment offerings, showcasing and advancing the noteworthy work of local artists has always been one of its central purposes. Both its live events and the streaming one-night only concerts that kicked off in the Fall of 2020 have helped draw attention to the diversity and quality of the city’s musical arts community.
In one of the last remaining shows to be presented in a virtual format, Detroit based soprano Jocelyn Zelasko and one of Eighth Blackbird’s artistic directors, Matthew Duvall, teamed up on June 17th to perform work composed by Matthew Burtner. An alum of Eighth Blackbird’s Creative Lab mentorship and development program, Zelasko returned here to contribute her vocal skills to a project so innovative that many may not realize music of this type even exists.
A contemporary composer, Mr. Burtner’s musical inspiration comes from his unique relationship with nature and his concerns for its future. Growing up near Alaska’s Bristol Bay where fishing is the main industry and human survival is still tied to one’s understanding of the natural world, his bond with the environment has enabled him to hear music in the sounds it creates. As a composer who attempts to sometimes embed and other times suggest these sounds in his musical compositions, often electronically, he has developed his own concept of what music can encompass and express. Last week’s concert had Zelasko and Duvall performing three of Burtner’s works using percussions, piano and voice.
In another time and place the music they produced might be considered transcendent, ethereal or even spiritual. Indeed, it is each of those things, but there are other characteristics that give the music its own distinctive signature. That elusive attribute is likely Burtner’s effort to enmesh the “audio maps of sounds” he finds in the outside world into his music. It’s this attempt to mesh one into the other that infuses something of the exalted into his compositions and stamps the final product with considerable beauty.
The first work, Kuik, is an aria from one of Burtner’s operas that recalls the flow of glacier waters to the ocean. In it, Zelasko uses her voice as a musical instrument that blends melodically into the host of colors Duvall summons from his vibraphone and the other remarkable tools in his percussive arsenal. The effect, unquestionably very beautiful, hovered between peaceful melancholy and drifting bliss.
Beauty is what all the music performed last Thursday night had most in common. During the customary chat with artists during CAW’s streaming concerts, Burtner, in ingratiatingly good humor, joined the conversation from Alaska via Zoom. It was clear how well these creative artists thought of one another as they shed insight into how they collaborated in the production of the evening’s performance. They also shared their approach when making new music and how they go about reimagining existing compositions; as Zelasko and Duvall did with the works they performed of Burtner’s that night.
Song for Low Tree was inspired by the process in which trees breathe and makes you understand why Duvall considers Burtner “a poet first”. Reinterpreted by Zelasko and Duvall, with both playing an impressive variety of instruments, the music took on a life of its own that was full of references to the indigenous and the timeless. A musical picture of a different reality, the music Burtner composes; as the world’s first practitioner of eco-acoustics, allows the mind to conceive of a world apart from the one that surrounds our day to day lives.
The fluid beauty of the composer’s music belies how astonishing it is. Thursday night’s performance again exposed the wonderful musicianship of Matthew Duvall and was a delectable introduction to Ms. Zelasko’s vocal brilliance. The technical team behind the concert deserves recognition for capturing so well the entirety of the music’s expressiveness and subtleties.
Ending on June 30th with a performance by composer Ayanna Woods, the live streaming events developed by Eighth Blackbird’s Chicago Artists Workshop are nearing their close. Chaos Hands, a “genre-bending, cross media improv trio” will stream from Eighth Blackbird’s Rockwell Ave. studios a few days before on June 26th.
Find more information at https://www.eighthblackbird.org/caw
