June in Buffalo: A creative explosion

Every summer, Buffalo becomes a key locus for new music as the June in Buffalo festival brings some of the most skilled musicians in the world to take part in one of the country’s most vibrant new music festivals.

Organized by UB’s Center for 21st Century Music, this year’s festival, held May 29 through June 7, boasted 16 concerts with nearly 80 exciting new works performed — half of those by the 30 emerging composers in attendance. Indeed, June in Buffalo (JiB) prides itself on providing such young artists with the opportunity to hear their works performed and get invaluable feedback from some of the field's most prominent artists.

This year, JiB celebrated two important milestones: the 40th anniversary of its founding and the 30th anniversary of David Felder’s tenure as artistic director. Felder restarted the festival in 1986 after years of dormancy, with a new vision aimed at helping younger artists hear their works realized. Since then, the festival has continued to grow and flourish.

“We’ve probably done performances of around 700 or more young composers’ pieces,” Felder said in a recent interview with Edge of the Center, the Center for 21st Century Music’s blog, “And those performances and the help that we’ve given to people over the years, I think has been really important to the profession.”

With such an extensive and rich history, JiB is the oldest American festival of its kind and emerging composers have benefited from its singular excellence throughout the 30 years of Felder’s leadership.

“It is invaluable for us to work with professional musicians and hear our works performed at a high level,” says Weijun Chen, a UB PhD student whose work, “Memos,” was performed by the New York New Music Ensemble (NYNME). For a young artist like Chen, being able to rely on the strong musicianship of such an established ensemble allows him to focus on getting his compositional ideas across effectively.

Other ensembles participating in JiB included the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Ensemble SIGNAL, the Slee Sinfonietta, Talujon Percussion Ensemble and the Meridian Arts Ensemble. The Meridian has attended the festival regularly for many years, initially as part of an emerging ensembles initiative in which Felder invited newly formed groups to be resident ensembles at JiB. This year, the Meridian — featuring UB faculty member Jon Nelson on trumpet — performed several dynamic brass works, including Felder’s “Canzone XXXI” and Charles Wuorinen’s “Brass Quintet,” in addition to “Chocolate Android Proton Thrust,” a new work composed for them by UB PhD candidate Zane Merritt.

With a knowledge of the particular specialties of the Meridian, Merritt was able to tailor the piece specifically for the ensemble. The Meridian focuses “on traditional treatment of musical materials that are somewhat exploded in terms of virtuosity and to a certain degree rhythmic complexity,” he explains. Like Chen with NYNME, Merritt was able to explore a particular area of musical territory he might not be able to with other performers. His piece “is essentially a study of relating timbre, dynamics and articulation to form,” he says. “Those elements gradually gain clarity and insistence, manifesting over pulsations of different tempi.”

In addition to the six resident ensembles, JiB featured nine faculty composers, an impressive roster that included Felder, Martin Bresnick, Brian Ferneyhough, Bernard Rands, Augusta Read Thomas, Roger Reynolds, Harvey Sollberger, Steven Stucky and Charles Wuorinen. Many of these composers have had extensive histories with the festival — though as Allan Kozinn points out in a recent Wall Street Journal article, “It would be hard to name more than a handful of major composers of the past 30 years who have not appeared on (JiB’s) faculty roster.”

Rands, for instance, co-founded the Summer Composers Institute with Felder in the early 1980s, a small conference that helped lay the groundwork for what eventually became the revamped JiB. Sollberger, a skilled flutist and conductor, has been a frequent guest — both as a faculty composer and performer — since the festival was restarted in 1986. This year, he contributed a retrospective article on the festival's last three decades, recounting some of JiB's most significant moments. Thomas initially came through the festival as a student composer before returning years later as a member of the faculty, a testament to the way in which JiB helps younger artists gain experience and establish themselves.

The works of these faculty composers were featured in JiB's evening concerts, while the composers themselves gave morning seminars and consulted with participant composers in master classes. “I am always eager to show my works to professors and peers, not to find confirmation but to collect ‘data,’” says Chen. “Then, at the end of the day, I sit down and do some ‘data mining’ for my future projects.”

This year’s festival also marked the second year of the June in Buffalo Performance Institute, an initiative first piloted with JiB in 2013 and one of many diverse initiatives spearheaded over the past 30 years as contributions to the field of contemporary composition and performance. Led by director and UB faculty member and pianist Eric Huebner, the Performance Institute invited young performers with an interest in contemporary music to take part in master classes, lessons and seminars with some of the strongest performers in the field.

Tyler Borden, a recent UB graduate currently pursuing a PhD at the University of California, San Diego, was one of the 15 young artists who took part in the institute, presenting several intrepid works, including “Come Round” by Jacob Druckman and “Emptying the Body” by Fernanda Navarro.

“Druckman’s piece is undeniably American in its ‘meat-and-potatoes’ approach to rhythms and pitches, with very few frills: elegant and intricately constructed, yet dynamic and powerfully concise. This piece demanded a great amount of concentration and knowledge of the score from each performer,” Borden explains. Meanwhile, Navarro’s piece “focuses on the physicality of the performer’s actions — scraping the strings with your fingernails, hitting the body of the instrument with hand and bow. She drew attention away from cerebral conceptions relating to pitch and rhythmic relationships and brought a kind of drama to the actual movements of the performer, which was exciting and quite visceral in its own right.”

For several decades, June in Buffalo has been a major force on the new music scene and continues to bring artists together in the creation of new and adventurous works.

“It allows young composers and performers to find each other, bounce ideas off each other and facilitate the growth of a new generation,” Merritt says.

Adds Chen: “JiB is only a week long, but its impact on me will surely last for years to come. I cannot wait for JiB 2016.”