New Albion

7/4 · July 29, 2008

July 27, 2008

Minimalist Man Tries Organizing a Concert Series

By STEVE SMITH, NYT

IF Foster Reed had named New Albion, the record company he founded in 1983, after the unknown spot on the Pacific Coast where the English explorer Francis Drake landed in 1579, the notion of braving long odds to chart new territory would certainly resonate. Actually Mr. Reed named his label after a now defunct Sonoma, Calif., beer said by some to have been America’s first microbrew. A comparison could be made with his efforts to provide a consciousness-affecting alternative to products peddled by mainstream corporations.

Unlike its namesake the record label, which was long based in San Francisco, has survived for 25 years, promoting California composers to an extent unmatched by any other label. To commemorate the anniversary Mr. Reed is mounting an ambitious 10-concert series representing the early ’80s post-Minimalists with whom he is most closely associated — John Adams, Ingram Marshall, Paul Dresher and Daniel Lentz — as well as important forebears like John Cage, Terry Riley, Lou Harrison and Pauline Oliveros.

The series, which begins on Friday, features performers and ensembles that have recorded for Mr. Reed over the years, including the pianists Sarah Cahill and Margaret Leng Tan, the singer Joan La Barbara and the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio. Also included are several of the composer-performers who have joined the roster in recent years, like Stefano Scodanibbio, Stephen Vitiello and Erdem Helvacioglu.

The programming is precisely what you would expect. What comes as a surprise is where it is happening: not in San Francisco or even in California but at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. Mr. Reed, who moved to nearby Elizaville three years ago, is presenting the series in the Spiegeltent as part of SummerScape, Bard’s extensive performing-arts festival.

The idea for an anniversary event, Mr. Reed recently said over lunch in a stylish New York cafe, came while he was making a recording with the composer and music critic Kyle Gann, who teaches at Bard. Nancy Cook, the managing director of Bard’s Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts and Mr. Gann’s wife, mentioned that the Spiegeltent had openings for interesting programs during SummerScape. Mr. Reed started arranging the series in November, though he had long avoided that kind of activity.

“Everybody who I worked with had their own responsibility to do concerts,” Mr. Reed said. “I’d been a musician previously, so I knew what it was like to get the gigs and stuff like that. But I didn’t envision what I did as a label as being the artist-management side of it. That’s never been my interest. It’s always been about trying to imagine and create the most extraordinary records you could come across.”

The initial spark for New Albion came through Mr. Reed’s association with Ingram Marshall. Mr. Reed used an inheritance to record works by Mr. Marshall, including “Gradual Requiem,” in which Mr. Reed played the mandolin. John Adams, in his forthcoming memoir, “Hallelujah Junction,” compares Mr. Reed to one of Beethoven’s benefactors, calling him Mr. Marshall’s “personal Count Razumovsky, functioning in the role of performer, patron and funder for the work’s recording.”

Mr. Marshall, speaking by telephone from his home in New Haven, chuckled at the characterization. “It’s a pretty esoteric reference,” he said. “You have to know that Count Razumovsky was not only a wealthy patron but a musician.”

In 1982 Mr. Marshall talked to ECM, a German jazz label that had begun to record contemporary classical works, about recording some of his works, including “Fog Tropes,” a sonorous meditation for brass sextet and recorded foghorns. When those plans fell through in 1983, he and Mr. Reed made the record themselves. During the same session Mr. Reed recorded Mr. Adams’s “Light Over Water” for a limited-edition LP; he later reissued it with a recording of Mr. Adams’s “Shaker Loops” licensed from 1750 Arch, a defunct San Francisco label.

The albums signaled the advent of San Francisco’s post-Minimalist generation, composers who embraced unambiguous melody and dreamy, evocative textures. New Albion became the epicenter for composers and artists who were otherwise underrepresented on records, particularly Mr. Harrison. Most were connected to California. But when Ms. Tan, the pianist, approached Mr. Reed on behalf of Somei Satoh, a Japanese composer, he felt that Mr. Satoh’s esoteric Minimalism suited his label’s emerging aesthetic.

“I was thinking of a kind of lyrical orbit that starts with Debussy and works its way through history,” Mr. Reed said. A self-trained musician who made a folk-rock album in 1968, then studied literature at Goddard College in the mid-’70s, Mr. Reed approached notated music as an enlightened amateur with poetic sensibilities.

“It had to be really unusual and interesting, but at the same time it’s a kind of music that I want to hear a second time,” he said. “So it needs to have something in the realm of melody, narration, drama or color that will keep my head turned listening to it.” Departing from the spartan aesthetic prevalent in new-music circles, Mr. Reed presented his discoveries in elegant, eye-catching packages with clear, approachable liner notes.

Like the composers whose works he had promoted, Mr. Reed pursued an expanding range of interests, making discs of adventurous jazz, traditional music from Bolivia and North Sumatra, and medieval works performed by Ensemble PAN (Project Ars Nova), a refined early music consort. He issued notable recordings of music by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Virgil Thomson, neither of whom was Californian. A recording of “Rothko Chapel” by Morton Feldman, a quintessential New Yorker, became his top seller.

Ms. Cahill, the pianist, who has recorded music by Ravel, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Leo Ornstein and Mr. Gann for New Albion, praised Mr. Reed’s willingness to follow where his ear led him. “I’ve definitely been the beneficiary of that,” she said from San Francisco. “He doesn’t say, ‘Oh, no, Leo Ornstein doesn’t fit in at all.’ He listens to it and thinks, ‘Is this something I want to do?’ ”

If New Albion has wandered away from its geographical mooring, so has the scene it originally represented. “The whole East Coast-West Coast thing as a paradigm doesn’t work too well,” Mr. Marshall said. “I think it’s more Uptown-Downtown. You could say the West Coast is kind of Downtown. Geographically it’s not that important. We’re sort of a diaspora.”

Mr. Gann agrees. “The idea of California has sort of bled into the rest of the country, and geographically things are just not as neat as they used to be,” he said. “There are several different aesthetics across America, and there’s one that used to be associated with the West Coast. Maybe you can’t call it a West Coast aesthetic anymore, but it is certainly some kind of mellow post-Minimalist aesthetic that a lot of people were involved in.”

You could even say that Mr. Reed’s efforts have helped that sound to evolve. Christopher Tignor, a young New York composer whose electro-acoustic ensemble, Slow Six, recently released a disc on New Albion, said the label’s recordings influenced his stylistic development.

“I learned about art music by going to Tower Records and buying CDs,” he said. What attracted him to New Albion releases was the attractive cover art and a laid-back yet rigorous vibe he could relate to the post-rock groups he admired, like Slint. “They obviously were not studying that stuff,” he said, “but the influence trickles down in very obvious ways.”

For now the advent of Slow Six also represents a pause in the New Albion lineage: Mr. Reed is stepping away from the business, at least temporarily, to assess what place his artfully conceived, exactingly produced recordings might have in a download-driven world.

“I’m going to take my family to Argentina for three months,” he said. “I’m going to rent a house in a town that’s kind of like Sonoma, study Spanish, go to the library and walk around. And then after that, I’ll see what’s beckoning.”

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Edited July 29, 2008 by 7/4