Evolution Contemporary Music Series

The New Now

There's a guerrilla in the room. He's tall and thin and his hair is stuffed under a wool cap, and he's scowling around the circle of musicians assembled in a fourth-floor studio at MICA's Brown Center on a late February evening, making forceful gestures. As various players advance knotty improvised solo lines into the ongoing mix of sounds and textures, the guerrilla jabs an index finger at a saxophonist, then at a cellist, and then back, whereupon the players start tossing phrases back and forth. He faces the upright bassist and gives him a "thumbs up" sign, at which the bassist suddenly stops playing.

The gestures and musical rearrangements continue for a few more measures before the guerrilla takes off his hat, sits down, and picks up a saxophone. A slim, bespectacled man standing in front of the circle of players paws through a pile of colored posterboard signs before seizing one marked with a large black p, holding it up so the seven players can see it, and then dropping it to the table, when the rich thrum of sound shifts again.

After the man at the table drops a final card--all black--the music stops. Silence for a few beats. As the musicians relax, saxophonist John Berndt asks, "Is there any way to effectively suppress a guerrilla?"

There is, as it turns out, but it's complicated, as are many things about John Zorn's 1984 composition Cobra. Based on Zorn's interest in game theory, the piece involves no score, per se, only a series of rules about who among an unspecified number and type of musicians can (and must) improvise, when, and how, as dictated by a prompter--in this case Brian Sacawa--via a series of symbol-bearing cards and hand signals. The rules also allow someone to put on a hat to become a guerilla, as Sam Burt did, and enforce their own prompts.

Burt volunteers to relieve Sacawa as prompter, allowing the latter to pick up his saxophone and join the other musicians, a mix of local jazz players (saxophonist John Dierker), veteran improvisers (cellist Audrey Chen), and one classically trained composer with a Ph.D. from Harvard (turntablist Erik Spangler). As Burt raises his first card, the rehearsal for another installment of the Mobtown Modern concert series heads off in yet another direction.

While group improvisation has been a staple Baltimore music for more than 15 years, this may be the first time Zorn's groundbreaking composition has ever been performed here, or at least outside the walls of Peabody Institute, Mount Vernon's esteemed conservatory. But it represents an unusual kind of musical activity that's becoming more and more common.

Thanks to Peabody and the esteemed Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and their many offshoots, local music fans rarely lack for performances of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, and the other major composers of the traditional canon. But a small but growing community is dedicating itself to performing composed music that's nowhere near canonical, at least not yet. Mobtown Modern, curated by Sacawa, is now nearing the end of its third season of presenting music by 20th- and 21st-century composers ranging from Karlheinz Stockhausen and Giacinto Scelsi to Alexandra Gardner (no relation to this writer) and Michael Lowenstern. For four years now, the Evolution Contemporary Music Series has devoted itself exclusively to concerts of pieces by living composers, a mandate that excludes even "new music" giants such as the late Stockhausen. ("That's our only criteria," series founder Judah Adashi quips. "The undead.") Perhaps what is most notable about this modest boom in modern music is that it's happening outside the auspices of the town's traditional institutions of high musical culture--in clubs and art spaces, not concert halls. It's a grassroots movement, of all things, and it's part of a sea-change in the world of serious music that isn't confined to Baltimore.

"I think that a new musical culture is trying to form itself," Sacawa says. "And I don't know what it is or what it's going to turn out to be, but there are all these experiments going on right now."

Brian SACAWA first came to Baltimore in 1999 with a bachelor's in music performance and the secret to making it as a classical musician. "I had this book from the Concert Artists Guild about 'things you need to know' to be a performer," Sacawa says with a wry smile during a chat in a Mount Vernon cafAc. "It's so hysterical to read that today. Like, 'How to write a press release.' And there might have been a little thing in the appendix about the internet."

To that point Sacawa, now 32, had gone about his musical career in the Guild-approved manner. As a saxophonist, he could never hope for a steady orchestra gig, the ultimate goal of many classically trained players, but he had landed a prestigious spot in The U.S. Army Field Band in Washington, D.C.--"basically like the New York [Philharmonic] of the saxophone," he says. He earned a performance certificate from the Peabody Institute and, in 2002, gave up his spot in the Field Band and his new home in Baltimore to work on a master's and Ph.D. in music performance at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He had his official Guild-style New York recital debut in 2005, with the appropriate press releases written and sent. "My plan was I wanted to pursue the college-teacher track and groom myself as a soloist and recitalist and so on," he says.

Adolphe Sax didn't invent his namesake woodwind until the mid-19th century, meaning that Mozart never wrote a saxophone concerto and the instrument was still a novelty as the last chapters of the traditional orchestral canon were being written. Playing the classical saxophone meant performing 20th-century music. "I was playing Stockhausen and more established names in composition circles," Sacawa recalls. "When I got to Michigan, I started reading more about what was happening now. Who are the composers living who are making an impact now?"

Sacawa eventually wound up teaching at the University of Arizona. He loved the students, but "it wasn't my thing," he says. "A lot of academic stuff just perpetuates itself, and it's all playing for each other in this little bubble." When tenure didn't materialize, he returned in 2006 to The U.S. Army Field Band and to Baltimore.

Though Sacawa occasionally guests with orchestras (he joined the BSO for Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition in February), such ensemble gigs are rare and soloist gigs rarer still. "I've seen the generation of guys before me, they put all their eggs into that basket--championing the [saxophone] as a solo instrument in front of the orchestra," he says. "And what saxophonist gets to play in front of orchestras? Branford Marsalis. Or Kenny G."

But not only had Sacawa been keeping up with contemporary composers, he had been making contact with many of them. Jerry Bowles had heard about Sacawa's New York debut and enlisted the saxophonist to write for Sequenza21, his influential new-music blog (sequenza21.com). Via blogging and the overall ease of web connectivity, Sacawa came to know plenty of contemporary composers looking to get their work performed and plenty of new-music players looking to play.

Sacawa can recall no eureka moment that led to the idea for Mobtown Modern. As he speaks, it sounds like an outgrowth of what he and others are beginning to understand as a new path for trained musicians to build a career--a path that's still faint and branching, but which leads inexorably forward.

"You can't just be a performer," he says. "If you can, that's great. I envy that. But you've got to be so versatile, and not just musically. You've got to have an entrepreneurial sense, a marketing sense, a design sense. There are just all these components a modern musician has to be. No one taught me any of this stuff. I just threw myself in and learned as I went."

He certainly beat the usual learning curve when he made his first cold-call about his idea for a contemporary-music series in Baltimore to Irene Hofmann, executive director of the Contemporary Museum. "She said, 'That sounds great. Let's do it,'" he says. "In the beginning, it was just a trial kind of thing. She loved the idea, but I needed to convince her that, yes, there was an audience for this kind of stuff, and that they'll come."

The first concert, on Jan. 29, 2008, was scheduled to coincide with George W. Bush's annual (and final) address to both houses of Congress. Entitled "State of the Union," the program offered politically minded compositions ranging from percussionist Tim Feeney's performance of Vinko Globokar's harrowing, body-centric Corporeal to Mobtown Modern co-founder Erik Spangler's turntable-driven Iraq Mix to Steve Reich's minimalist tape-loop classic Come Out. It was a program that announced serious musical ambition as well as a willingness to package serious music in an engaging way for neophytes--such as playing politically charged music near the height of an unpopular president's unpopularity.

"Obviously, there are ways to frame [the music] so that it's more marketable," Sacawa acknowledges. "But nothing is ever a compromise in terms of musical integrity, and it's never a gimmick."

From the first three concerts during the early months of 2008, the Mobtown Modern series expanded to six concerts over September-May 2008-09, to monthly concerts for 2009-10, and this season moved from its initial home in a bare-bones upper-floor room at the Contemporary to the Metro Gallery, with its club-like vibe and bar. Not only is Metro bigger, but it also helps advance one of Sacawa's goals: making music people often assume is serious and forbidding as approachable as possible.

"It doesn't have to be all buttoned-up," he says. "It should be an inviting experience where you don't have to go and worry, Should I clap now or can I talk? There is no proper way that you should experience it. It's presented as it is, and you can enjoy it in this setting."

When British composer Oscar Bettison first came to Baltimore in the fall of 2009 to teach composition at Peabody, a Mobtown Modern concert was one of the first events he took in. "I really like the mix of music that they're presenting in the show," Bettison, 34, says of the series. "They've got so many things right."

He especially likes the informal presentation, more akin to the concert scene in the Netherlands, where he studied for three years, or to New York's Le Poisson Rouge, which has become a sensation among younger classical and new-music fans simply for occasionally presenting the music in a cabaret setting, complete with cocktails. "I like the fact that there's a bar at these shows," Bettison says. "There's been some kind of resistance to this format in some places, cause people think that the music isn't going to be listened to as seriously, but I think the opposite happens, ironically. I think that because people are more relaxed and they can have a drink and mill around before the concert and you don't have to get dressed up, they sit down and relax and listen to the music."

Mobtown Modern is still a fledgling enterprise, despite the support of the Contemporary and a handful of sponsors and donors; Sacawa has covered many of its expenses himself and musicians are paid modestly (occasionally, as with the Cobra performance, via a case of good beer). But it's a raging success by new-music standards.

"Being a new-music player, I'm used to playing shows where there's 15 people in the audience and I know them all," Sacawa says. "With these shows, we regularly have 50 to 70 people, and I have no idea who half the people in the audience are. We're doing something that's interesting to people beyond just the usual suspects."

WIND THROUGH the warren of gates, passages, buildings, and hallways that make up the city-block-sized Peabody Institute and you eventually find yourself in an office whose sparse decoration consists mostly of a set of fliers for the Evolution Contemporary Music series. It looks like a space barely used, perhaps because its occupant, Judah Adashi, is busy teaching composition and music theory at the conservatory, working on his Ph.D., curating and running the Evolution concerts, and working on his own compositions as well.

A compact, composed Baltimore native, the 34-year-old Adashi first dispels the notion that new music is somehow new to town. David Zinman's stint as the BSO's music director from 1985-'98 was marked by a dedication to presenting American composers and new commissions before packed houses at the Meyerhoff, Adashi reminds. Zinman's successor, Yuri Temirkanov, focused on opulent versions of time-honored European classics, but current BSO Music Director Marin Alsop "is picking up where [Zinman] left off," Adashi says.

For many years, however, if new music was performed in Baltimore, it was mostly performed at Peabody, by student ensembles or visiting musicians. It was still relatively rare. As Adashi says, for some students Peabody remains "a trade school, an apprenticeship." They come to polish and refine traditional musical skills they've honed for years in hopes of making a career out of playing Sibelius or Chopin like generations before them.

Adashi attended Peabody Prep before going to Yale for his bachelor's degree. After college he returned to Baltimore, and, eventually, to Peabody, beginning a master's program in composition under the late Nicholas Maw in 1999. He acknowledges that the conservatory was still "pretty quiet" on the contemporary-music front when he first came back, but its conservatism had started to loosen thanks to Maw and a wave of other faculty members with an active interest in contemporary composition. It helped that the battles fought throughout most of the 20th century between the defenders of the traditional classical canon and the proponents of the mid-century musical avant-garde were finally winding down and, indeed, becoming irrelevant.

"Baby-boomer composers come through [Peabody] all the time talking about, 'When I was in college, I had to write like Schoenberg or Stravinsky and that was it,'" Adashi says. "At this moment, there's no dogma. You don't have to be writing tonal music or atonal music. It's OK if you invoke rock, it's OK if you use electronic means. You can do what you want."

By the mid-'00s, the music of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s was finally getting more attention at Peabody. "You started to see more and more concerts of Berio, Ligeti, Davidovsky, Stockhausen, and I think that's fantastic," Adashi says. "But I thought, You know what's not happening? People don't know that contemporary music is also the last 20 years, the last 10 years, right now."

Adashi had made attempts to add to contemporary music performance to the conservatory, but an option farther off Mount Vernon Square made sense. "Part of [the reason for starting the series] was practical," he says. "Peabody is getting bigger and bigger with more and more students, and hall space was getting scarce."

Having worked at An die Musik when it was a CD store, he knew proprietor Henry Wong, who had expanded the business and its purview by opening an on-site concert venue booking classical and jazz performances and the occasional new-music-friendly bill. Evolution came to life in November 2005 with a chamber performance of works by Robert Beaser, Joan Tower, and Adashi himself. Each season has brought a slow growth in the number and breadth of events, from themed concerts (the Obama-inspired "Music for Change," presented in October 2008, presented a program of hopeful works by contemporary-music marquee names Arvo PA¤rt and John Adams, but also Baltimorean Will Redman) to informal encounters with the likes of the BSO's Marin Alsop and New Yorker music critic Alex Ross. The recently concluded 2009-'10 season was organized under the banner "A Sense of Place" and presented concerts of contemporary music from countries such as Finland and England, including an Oscar Bettison world premiere.

The plush appointments of An die Musik are a far cry from the somewhat grungier Metro Gallery, and Evolution's marketing remains more traditional than Mobtown's. (The promotional art for "Low Art," Mobtown's October 2009 program of music for lower-pitched instruments, featured a neon-red low-rider street rod.) But both put a premium on contemporary-music advocacy.

"There's sort of a do-it-yourself energy that composers and musicians in the classical world [now], and we're starting to do what bands have been doing since time immemorial--find any old place and set up and play," Adashi says, though he adds, "that's not a new model in classical music--Steve Reich and Philip Glass were doing that, and people before them as well."

One thing that minimalist godfathers such as Reich and Glass didn't have going for them was the internet. The rise of the web has not only allowed for better networking, it has allowed composers the opportunity to connect directly with listeners and for listeners to seek out information about more obscure sounds, as well as the sounds themselves. In years past, a curious music fan might have had to go to the trouble of special-ordering a costly CD from a European label to sample new work by Kaija Saariaho or Harrison Birtwistle. Now, a relatively inexpensive download is just a few clicks away.

"The fact that music is so easily shared on the internet, and people becoming aware of lots of different types of music, everything is happening so much faster," Bettison says. "I had a piece [played] in New York recently, and there was a review up before I'd even got back home from New York. Everything's being disseminated in a much more rapid fashion."

There's enough contemporary music--and enough growing interest--that having two new-music series in Baltimore doesn't lead to competition. The two series even compare dates so they don't book opposite each other.

And unlike traditional independent music, there seems to be little compartmentalization between one school of contemporary music and another. "I write fairly tonal music, and I write fairly lyrical music," Adashi says. "But I don't feel any need to justify that and to stake a claim for it as the one true path. I could easily put together a concert of young composers in their 30s with one of them writing serial music, one of them writing electronic music, one of them working with beats. It's all going on now, and each one of those or all of them together can [bring] people into something that beforehand they might have considered foreign or forbidding."

Neither Sacawa or Adashi is interested in promoting new-music as superior to older composed music or even whatever's playing the other nights of the month at An die Musik or the Metro Gallery. "I don't think it's about converting people to Team Contemporary Music," Adashi says. "It's about opening doors."

For decades, the path to success for musicians and composers, especially those involved in contemporary music, led straight to New York City. "New York was the place to be," Brian Sacawa says. "That's where stuff happens." He's not convinced it's the path for him anymore, and maybe not for many in Baltimore.

"I think our ideas of success need to change," he says. "Especially nowadays when things are more connected and you don't have to be in a specific geographical place, I really think Baltimore is ripe for this kind of thing, whatever that is--this new musical form that's going to happen." He pauses and smiles: "The Live Baltimore people should pay me. I talk Baltimore up."

Oscar Bettison agrees that Baltimore's non-New Yorkness could be a positive thing for new music: "I like the fact that there's a buzz about a regional scene that isn't New York, you know?" After all, what may prove most fruitful for his composition students can be accomplished anywhere rent is relatively cheap and musicians and listeners are plentiful.

"It's expensive to put on an orchestral performance, so why would an orchestra put on a piece by a 21-year-old?" he asks. "But what a 21-year-old can do is write music for [his or her] friends and put this stuff on. We're pretty much talking a garage-band aesthetic, but for classical music."

And there are signs that Baltimore's new-music grassroots could be spreading. Inside a Station North loft space, 26-year-old Rod Hamilton confesses that he isn't familiar with Mobtown Modern or Evolution. And despite the fact that he earned a Towson University bachelor's degree in music performance, he says, he never got much formal exposure to contemporary music.

"I learned a lot about Baroque music and a lot about classical music," he says, but "my teacher had to skip over the minimalists because we didn't have time at the end [of the class]."

He came to contemporary music on his own, via friends and the internet ("The answer to everything," he deadpans). And he and his roommates in what they call the Soft House are passionate enough about it, particularly minimalism, that recently they recruited more than three-dozen local musicians to perform Terry Riley's 1964 minimalist masterpiece In C.

A tiny fawn-colored puppy romps over the afghans strewn across the loft floor on a March evening as a stream of musicians walk up to Hamilton, cellos and guitars in hand, and ask where they should set up. Lacking a single room big enough to hold 37-plus musicians, Hamilton and roommates/collaborators Amanda Schmidt, John Somers, and Grayson Brown decided to arrange players in groups throughout several rooms and allow listeners to build their own version of In C by wandering from spot to spot. After all, the piece itself is never the same twice.

"There are 53 melodies [to the score] and you start with 1, then somebody moves to 2, but somebody else is still on 1, and it just kinda morphs and moves," the wide-eyed Hamilton says between incessant cell phone calls. "It's exciting even to rehearse it."

The semi-improvisational nature of the piece is, in part, what inspired the Soft House performance. The piece accommodates players of different skill levels and "I could gather so many musicians together who I'm friends with, but never have been able to all play together at the same time," Hamilton notes. "It's been fun working with this many players--this many friends."

Fifty-three-year-old jazz pianist Tim Murphy, one of Hamilton's TU teachers, is set up as part of a circle of keyboardists in the front room. Ponytail's Dustin Wong and Dope Body's Zach Utz sit at the center of a line of electric guitarists lining the hall. Percussionist Will Redman, who played drums in Mobtown Modern's Cobra and has had a composition performed at an Evolution concert, is set up behind a vibraphone in the rear corner. At a few minutes after midnight, the strident, steady clink that keeps the pulse of the piece begins in monitor speakers on the floor in front of each grouping of musicians. The packed house of twenty- and thirtysomethings (and a few parents and/or older music aficionados) falls silent as the musicians begin picking or pecking or bowing or blowing the first notes of Riley's score.

For a few minutes, then 10, then a half hour, the various players ebb and flow on their various parts, locking in and drifting apart, pausing and then moving on, creating a room-filling tintinnabulation that changes in timbre and texture depending on whether you're facing the reed instruments or have turned toward a line of laptops and other electronics set up along a low table.

After more than 50 minutes, Hamilton and Somers climb up on chairs at opposite ends of the space, and, with simultaneous downstrokes of their arms, bring the piece to a stop. A brief silence succumbs to wild cheers and applause.

The Contemporary Museum's Mobtown Modern series presents the world premiere of Erik Spangler's Mandala Of The Four Directions at MICA's Brown Center April 1 beginning at 8 p.m. The piece begins an all-night musical "vigil" featuring drum circles, djs, and free jazz from Microkingdom and the Out Of Your Head Crew. For more information visit mobtownmodern.com

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Every year, the American Academy in Rome selects a handful of American composers to come study in the Eternal City for a year. The Rome Prize is a big deal in the galaxy of competitions, fellowships, and prizes that help make up the classical-music universe (Samuel Barber won twice), and tonight, the Evolution concert series presents contemporary chamber works by recent winners Lisa Bielawa, Sebastian Currier, and Pierre Jalbert, as performed by pianist Insun Kim, violinist Courtney Orlando, and the Vinca Quartet (pictured).

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Composer and Evolution Series founder and director Judah Adashi was featured on WYPR's "Maryland Morning," discussing his own music and, in the second half of the interview, the Evolution Series.

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A glance at the music calendar in Baltimore reveals enticing chamber-size programs performed by excellent ensembles this week, especially over the next couple of days.

On Tuesday evening at An die Musik, the Evolution Contemporary Music Series goes where few local organizations have dared go before -- contemporary Finland. Works by two very big names on the composer front, Kaija Saariaho and Magnus Lindberg, will be performed, along with music by Esa-Pekka Salonen, better known as a conductor, but a very persuasive composer as well. Among the performers: pianists Lura Johnson and Kenneth Osowski, percussionists Kelsey Tamayo, soprano Andrea Edith Moore, clarinetist Elisabeth Stimpert, and harpist Jacqueline Pollauf. (I wouldn't miss this one if I didn't have a good excuse -- I'll be participating on a panel discussion at the Loyola/Notre Dame Library about what the arts in Baltimore might look like in 2020. After that, I may have to check myself into a depression clinic.)

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Perhaps no composer is as closely identified with his or her native country as Jean Sibelius is with Finland. He not only defines Finnish culture for many throughout the world, he literally helped define it with a host of renowned pieces based on his country's landscape and myths. But in recent years, a handful of younger composers have emerged from Sibelius' shadow and are redefining Finnish music--and modern composition--anew. Tonight, the Evolution Contemporary Music Series presents chamber settings of pieces by Esa-Pekka Salonen, Kaija Saariaho, and Magnus Lindberg. Don't miss.

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One week ago, the Evolution Contemporary Music Series presented a program titled Across the Pond, featuring works by Knussen, Harvey, Birtwistle, Adès, and a world premiere by Peabody professor Oscar Bettison. The Evolution Series uses the intimate space of Baltimore’s An Die Musik LIVE!, where instead of cramped seating, rows of pink overstuffed chairs help create the intimate atmosphere of a salon. Evolution Series director Judah Adashi mentioned that English contemporary music, as with its predecessors, characteristically calls for a high degree of quiet introspection, making this venue particularly well suited for this program. To set the mood, Vaughan Williams’s instrospective Fantasia on a Theme by Tallis was quietly piped through onstage speakers prior to the performance.

The program began austerely with Tarik O’Regan’s Darkness Visible (2008) for countertenor, tenor, and harp, which features repeated harp motifs, played by Jacqueline Pollauf, along with carefully framed dissonances from the singers, Curtis Adamson and Deven Mercer. Pianist Timothy Hoft’s objective approach to performing new music was especially successful: by treating Oliver Knussen’s Variations, op. 24 (1989), as uncomplicated, Hoft allowed the work to be perceived as equally rhythmic, harmonic, and (importantly) pianistic. Though intriguing on many levels by the set of variations, most of the audience – including your reviewer – likely missed its actual theme. The first half of the program concluded with a stage occupied solely by speakers projecting Jonathan Harvey's Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco (1980), an eerily playful composition with spontaneous dynamic shifts able to lull the listener into a calm trance with tones at times resembling church bells and boy choristers, then turning to expectedly shake one into rapt attention.

Hoft opened the second half of the program with Harrison Birtwistle’s first movement of Harrison’s Clocks (1998). Again, Hoft’s precise control of dynamics and quiet approach to the keyboard with a perfect technique led to a beautiful automatic sense of music making in a work that used the highest note on the piano and resembled something like a mix of the Prokofiev Toccata and a microprocessor. The world premiere of Oscar Bettison's (b. 1975) experimental Neolithic Airs (2008) for solo violin (Courtney Orlando) with each string tuned to ‘D’ drew much excitement from the audience, primarily made up of Peabody students enthusiastic for their faculty member's piece. Due to the different tensions on each string tuned to the same pitch, each contained a unique timbre, which Bettison exploited by having the violinist repeat the same note on different strings that created an effect of multiple instruments. Some sounds were nearly painful to hear, grating, and yet absolutely purposeful, particularly Orlando’s experimental technique of descending clusters of non-vibrating harmonic bow circles in “Otherworldly,” the work’s last movement.

The program concluded with Thomas Adès' Darknesse Visible (1992) for piano (Stefan Petrov) -- Baltimore readers may recall the Baltimore Symphony’s presentation of Adès works a few years back. Adès created a vast 3-D sonic scape by having the pianist, with pedal down, play repeated notes high and low that later became clusters. He additionally teases the listener with hints at formal harmony while carefully controlling the decay of the layers of sound created.

The compelling Evolution Contemporary Music Series will present two more programs this season.

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Concert halls rarely go more than a week or two without multiple pieces of music from German, Austrian, French, or Russian composers on the bill. Pieces by English composers are fewer and farther between, however, and pieces by English composers more contemporary than early 20th-century eminences like Britten and Vaughan Williams scarcer still. Tonight, the invaluable Evolution Contemporary Music Series presents a concert of new-jack Union Jack chamber music, featuring compositions by Thomas Adés, Anna Clyne, Jonathan Harvey, Oliver Knussen, and Tarik O'Regan, plus the world premiere of English composer/new Peabody Institute faculty member Oscar Bettison's Neolithic Airs. A discussion precedes the music; wine follows.

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Judah Adashi was thinking about music—not unusual, since he teaches at the Peabody Institute. He had noticed a lack of concert series and ensembles devoted to the music of living composers. “People are doing everything under the sun,” he says, “but if you go to a symphony concert probably one of the latest pieces you’ll hear is Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring”—which premiered in 1913.

So in 2005, Adashi, a composer himself, founded a concert series focusing exclusively on living composers. The resulting Evolution Contemporary Music Series has featured an eclectic mix of up-and-coming and established composers, including those championed by Baltimore Symphony Orchestra music director Marin Alsop, whom Adashi praises for venturing into new repertoire.

Each concert this season explores whether a composer’s national or cultural heritage leaves a discernable mark on his or her music. The series’ December offering, Across the Pond, features five composers from the United Kingdom, including Thomas Adès (whose compositions were dubbed “viscerally appealing and intellectually stimulating” by a New York Times critic) and Peabody faculty member Oscar Bettison, whose “Neolithic Airs” (a ten-minute piece for detuned violin) will receive its world premiere. “Does it matter that these are all British composers?” Adashi asks. “Is there something about the music that has an ‘Englishness’ to it?”

Across the Pond will be followed by Finlandia in January and When in Rome in March. Last October’s concert, New Amsterdam, featured composers and performers based in New York City. “Their music has more pop in it,” Adashi says. “It’s a little more influenced by minimalism, the pulsing energy. Even if it’s not fast, there’s a beat.”

Adashi’s main goal is to introduce composers and performers to audiences who may not be aware of the tremendous diversity of styles in contemporary music. “Definitely there’s some music that is atonal and complex, some that is conceptual and abstract, but there is lots of tonal music that is very melodic,” he says. “‘Crossover’ is a loaded word, with connotations of Pavarotti singing pop songs, but there is a lot of interesting stuff that happens between genres.”

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Has Baltimore become a haven for new music? It sure looks that way.

"I've always been optimistic about new music here," says Baltimore-born, Peabody-trained composer Judah Adashi, founder of the Evolution Contemporary Music Series.

"I'd definitely say that, with our series, Mobtown Modern, what Marin [Alsop] is doing at the BSO, and the High Zero Festival, we have a vibrant scene going. You might find something like this on every street corner in New York, but given the relative size of our town, there are really dynamic things on almost any given night," Adashi says.

Tuesday marks the fifth anniversary of the Evolution series, based at An die Musik. Adashi's wide-ranging tastes have resulted in consistently interesting programs. This one will feature the NOW Ensemble, co-founded by composer Judd Greenstein, who helped launch the cutting-edge New Amsterdam Records. The group will perform works by Greenstein, Missy Mazzoli, Timothy Andres and others, at 8 p.m. Tuesday (a pre-concert chat with Greenstein and Adashi will be at 7 p.m.) at An die Musik, 409 N. Charles St. Call 410-385-2638 or go to andiemusiklive.com.

Works by several major contemporary composers, from Thomas Ades and Oliver Knussen to Magnus Lindberg and Kaija Saariaho, will be heard at subsequent Evolution concerts this season. For more info, go to evolutionseries.org.

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In the space of 24 hours, two organizations offered Baltimore a hearty jolt of contemporary music, putting the spotlight on the late Luciano Berio and the very-much-with-us Christopher Theofanidis, two composers whose work has not enjoyed nearly enough attention in this city...

Last night, the Evolution Contemporary Music Series, founded and directed with great commitment by Judah Adashi and based at An die Musik, saluted Theofanidis, who recently left the Peabody faculty for Yale's. The program provided a fascinating sample of the composer's solo and small ensemble pieces, all of them reflecting the Theofanidis trademarks of refined craftsmanship, structural clarity and neo-tonal, unapologetic accessibility.

Pianist Kenneth Osowski gave a taut, vivid performance of All Dreams Begin with the Horizon from 2006; the strikingly lyrical third movement was played with particular sensitivity. The tightly woven Kaoru for two flutes, a 1994 work, found Rachel Choe and Kristin Bacchiocchi Stewart articulating the most angular and propulsive of lines in deftly synchronized fashion.

The unaccompanied violin work Flow, My Tears, written in 1997 as an elegy for Jacob Druckman (one of Theofanidis' teachers), is quite striking. The darkly romantic style is certainly resonant of the past, but the has its own clear, telling voice. The poetic mileage the composer gets out of a deceptively straightforward descending scale speaks volumes for his originality and communicative power. Violaine Melancon played the score with evident affection, vibrant tone and often exquisite phrasing.

In the second movement of Visions and Miracles, a 1997 piece for strings, Theofanidis does some lovely things with an ascending scale. I found that gently pulsating movement the most interesting of the three, but the whole work is easily engaging (in remarks to last night's audience, the composer said that writing a work with "three happy movements" was "almost embarrassing"). The Brunell String Quartet, featuring Peabody grad students, gave a spirited, if sometimes rough-edged, performance.

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In the space of about two hours last night, pianist Amy Briggs dove into the daunting field of modern American music -- at one point, nose-first (literally) -- and demonstrated the diverse richness of that repertoire in brilliant fashion.

Her concert, a presentation of the Evolution Contemporary Music Series at An die Musik, included a couple of premieres. Traces, by Augusta Read Thomas, is a series of stylistic fusions, suggesting what would happen if you crossed Scarlatti with Art Tatum, or Bach with BeBop. Briggs made a strong cases for these imaginative, often thorny keyboard etudes, especially the austere beauty of Reverie (a supposed mesh of Schumann and George Crumb) and the intense, vibrant complexity of Impromptu (Stravinksy and Chopin meet Thelonius Monk). This was the first public performance anywhere of the complete Traces, composed in 2006.

Like the Thomas work, David Rakowski's Piano Etudes pose any number of technical challenges, while attempting to provide a certain entertainment quotient. Briggs chose seven of the composer's nearly 90, sometimes cheekily-named Etudes, a sampling from the years 1997-2005. Absofunkinlutely conjures up boogie-woogie on acid; Palm de Terre (receiving its official U.S. premiere -- an "informal performance" is on YouTube) surrounds a gentle melody with misty harmonic clusters; Cell Division derives its glittery sonic coloring from the generic sound of a mobile phone being turned on; Chord Shark (an official world premiere, with an informal YouTube version) is like a thunderously dissonant variation on Chopin's C minor Prelude. Briggs delivered these and the remainder with abundant bravura, but her most distinctive feat came in a piece with a silly name, Schnozzage, that doesn't apparently aim for silliness. It calls on the pianist to articulate the melodic line with her nose, while her hands fill in subtle textures at either end of the keyboard. (Until last night, I was under the illusion that Peter Schickele had composed the only nasal keyboard piece -- and that one is intended for a laugh.) Rakowski was on hand to enjoy the dynamic performances of his music.

David Smooke's Requests was also performed in the presence of the composer. This work from 2003, written for Briggs, exploits her technical elan and gets additional color from having her tap on the instrument. A lot of kinetic action is packed into this short and sweet score. Other highlights of hefty program included two more 2003 items: Nico Muhly's Quiet Music, with its tapestry of thick, yet ever-lyrical, chords; and Bruce Stark's elegant, shimmering Waltz. I also admired Briggs' straightforward way with Philip Glass's Modern Love Waltz, but the Waltz No. 1 by the late rocker Elliott Smith, in Christopher O'Riley's lush arrangement, needed more tonal warmth to unleash the bittersweetness of the haunting tune.

This turns out to be quite the week for contemporary sounds. Tomorrow night at the Contemporary Museum, the provocative Mobtown Modern group presents a program of vocal works by Jacob ter Veldhuis, Ken Ueno, Missy Mazzoli and others who "have taken the vocal cords to their outer reaches and beyond." Should be fun.

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Baltimore Symphony Orchestra music director Marin Alsop was hailed -- and hailed and hailed -- last night as a champion of living composers during a nearly three-hour event presented by the Evolution Contemporary Music Series that drew a standing-room-only crowd to An die Musik. Two of those composers, Christopher Rouse and Kevin Puts (who has studied with Rouse), were on hand to join in the praise during a pre-concert discussion with her and, later, in remarks to the audience before their works were performed…the remarkable concert balanced works by Rouse and Puts with those by two other composers whose music Alsop has long advocated, John Corigliano and John Adams.

The sensational violinist Tim Fain, who gave a memorable performance with Alsop and the BSO in December, played the heck out of Arches, a 2000 score by Puts. Extraordinarily kinetic and virtuosic, the unaccompanied piece also has a strong emotional core, suggesting something Bach might have written were he to pop back up today (subtle references to Bach flash by in the first movement). Fain is quite the fiddler, as effortless in taming technical challenges as he is compelling in the way he shapes phrases organically and creates an extensive range of tone colors as he goes. Mesmerizing.

Rouse's Compline, a 1996 work inspired by time spent in Italy, progresses in mood from "giddy tourist" stage (his description) to something spiritual. Scored for flute, clarinet, harp and string quartet, the music creates an inventive, involving sound world. Along the way, reiterative motor rhythms are deftly employed, but not for typical, minimalist purposes. There is drama, as well as energy, in that propulsion, leading at the end to a chant-like section that creates a clam, if not entirely settling, effect. An ensemble of musicians drawn from Baltimore and beyond performed the piece effectively.

The first half of the program opened with Corigliano's Etude Fantasy of 1976, a brilliantly organized exercise for solo piano that combines harsh dissonance, haunting melodic ideas, thunderous outbursts and hushed reflection. Michael Sheppard had the daunting music well in hand and tapped deeply into its expressive undercurrents. Adams, most familiar in his orchestral or operatic guises, was represented by one of his chamber works, Road Movies, a sporty vehicle from 1995 that puts violin and piano through intricately timed paces. The infectious minimalist motion of the score came through neatly in the performance by violinist Courtney Orlando and pianist Ken Osowski. The well-chosen repertoire reaffirmed the reasons why Corigliano, Adams and Rouse became such established composers, and why Puts is well on his way to joining them.

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Nothing much to report, sorry to say, about Benjamin Kim's recital Thursday at An die Musik. This recent winner of a big international competition in Munich, Germany, played like, well, a competition winner -- technically polished (minus a memory slip), interpretively underpowered. Perhaps it was just a case of a talented pianist having an off night.

It was a different story the next night, when An die Musik's intimate concert room was turned over to the Evolution Contemporary Music Series and a program called "A New Songbook" that delivered a stimulating sample of vocal works from the past 27 years. (Full disclosure: I participated, however unmemorably, in a pre-concert panel discussion.)

Founded and directed by An die Musik's composer-in-residence, Judah Adashi, the Evolution project has added a welcome dose of newness to the local concert scene. This particular venture was rich in unusual experiences.

Eminent soprano Phyllis Bryn-Julson came out of retirement -- vocal artistry of her magnitude shouldn't be allowed to retire, anyway -- to deliver a riveting account of Gyorgy Kurtag's complex, unaccompanied Attila Jozsef Fragments. Another unaccompanied piece, Bernard Rands' Memo 7, turns art song into performance art, and soprano Bonnie Lander took full advantage of the theatrical possibilities in this brilliant atomization of an Emily Dickinson poem. Lander also took a wry romp through Life Story, a delicious Tennessee Williams text set to edgy music by Thomas Ades. Andrea Moore's lovely soprano uncovered the interior beauty of scores by Joseph Schwantner and, especially, Osvaldo Golijov.

The dark lyricism in John Harbison's Simple Daylight emerged tellingly in soprano Leah Inger's performance. Ryan Scott Ebright brought a thin baritone but abundant expressive understanding to David Del Tredici's retro-romantic Matthew Shepard.

The program's keyboard-accompanied works, all presenting their own considerable challenges, were divided up by five excellent pianists: Adashi, R. Timothy McReynolds, Patricia Puckett, Daniel Schlosberg and David Witmer.

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Baltimore doesn't have a thriving new music scene, but it got a welcome boost with the arrival last year of the Evolution Contemporary Music Series at An die Musik, run by composer Judah Adashi. For its season-opening concert Friday night, the series offered a heady and hefty sampling of American piano music from the past 25 years. I caught the first half of the program, which included two particularly impressive achievements.

It was rewarding to hear the specially constructed, 30-minute suite from Michael Hersch's two-hour work completed last year, The Vanishing Pavilions, inspired by poetry of Christopher Middleton. But the complete score, premiered last month in Philadelphia, deserves a local airing -- and soon.

Hersch played the suite, which gripped the ear right from the opening movement, its downward slicing motive reflecting the lines, "So the flashing knife will split memory down the middle." With the occasional insertion of familiar harmony amid the thick, forbidding dissonance, Hersch's writing is fresh and astonishingly powerful -- like his playing.

Another fascinating discovery was the Sonata Andina from 2000 by Gabriela Lena Frank. Its inventive use of Latin American folk elements produces many a vivid effect, particularly when the pianist is called upon to do rhythmic clapping and tongue-clucking. Lura Johnson-Lee's performance had exceptional vitality, color and impact.

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Like prophets, some composers don't get heard often enough.

British-born Nicholas Maw, a longtime Washington resident and faculty member at the Peabody Conservatory, should be a household name here. This composer of uncompromising seriousness, extraordinary imagination and uncommon expressive weight is hardly ever acknowledged locally.

That may be changing. Next season, Washington National Opera will present his compelling Sophie's Choice, conducted by Baltimore Symphony Orchestra music director-to-be, Marin Alsop. Meanwhile, An die Musik made a welcome acknowledgment of the composer with a 70th birthday celebration Tuesday night. (His actual birthday was Nov. 5.)

The Piano Trio from 1991 grows from a sinewy melody into a maze of complex harmonic ideas, strikingly diverse colors and deep emotions, finishing up in a defiant, affirmative burst of tonality. A minor rough patch aside, the Monument Piano Trio performed it with polish and depth.

The Old King's Lament (1981), delivered superbly by Fred Dole, is a tour de force for double bass, full of vivid imagery, ending with a pitiful wisp of sound, like a stifled cry in some endless night. Maw's Sonatina for Flute and Piano from 1957 is a compact yet eventful score in a confident, distinctive voice. Adriana Potoczniak and Li-Tan Hsu played it elegantly.

Roman Canticle (1989), for baritone, flute, viola and harp, achieves a Mahler-like lyricism. Ryan Scott Ebright's slender voice left some of the music unfulfilled, but he phrased sensitively, while the fine instrumentalists captured the many subtleties of Maw's inviting sound-world.

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