Flute virtuoso offers installment of epic project.
Chase offers installment of epic commissioning project
Claire Chase was a junior high flute student the first time she heard “Density 21.5,” Edgard Varèse’s 1936 modernist landmark for solo flute. To say it had an impact on her would be an understatement.
“I had never heard anything like it before,” she said during a recent interview. “I had an out-of-body experience, but it was an in-body experience.
“My teeth were rattling. My hair was on fire. I didn’t know what was happening to me — it was ecstatic and terrifying. And I thought, ‘This is the music I want to make. I don’t know how to do it, but I want to share it with everybody I love.’ ”
The revelation of that day helped set Chase, 39, on a path that would wind up making her a veritable icon of the contemporary music world. She’s a flute virtuoso of remarkable agility and range, bringing her performing gifts to bear on a wide array of new and recent music.
As the founder and (until last year) director of the International Contemporary Ensemble, widely known as ICE, Chase created an influential model for artistic collectives. She’s won a MacArthur Fellowship and the Avery Fisher Prize, and as of this fall she’s a member of the Harvard faculty.
And she’s still mulling over the impact of “Density.”
The fruits of that artistic explosion will be on display on Saturday, Dec. 2, when Chase undertakes a two-concert double-header dedicated to her massive commissioning program, “Density 2036.” Begun four years ago, it’s a decades-long project designed to create a
new repertoire of work for solo flute, and to culminate in the centennial year of Varèse’s masterpiece with a 24-hour marathon along the lines of Taylor Mac’s “24-Decade History of Popular Music.”
“I’ll be 58 at that point,” Chase reckons with a laugh, “and maybe my teeth will be falling out. But I should still be able to play the flute.
“Whatever shape I’m in, I’m just going to play everything that’s been written. It won’t even be a concert, more like a huge party.”
This weekend’s concerts, presented by Cal Performances at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, will also be live-streamed on the presenter’s website. It includes electronic sound design by Chase’s longtime collaborator Levy Lorenzo, and will feature guest appearances by percussionist Tyshawn Sorey and violinist-vocalist Pauchi Sasaki, both in works of their creation.
But most of it will be Chase onstage alone, performing recent music by Marcos Balter, Du Yun, Vijay Iyer, Matthias Pintscher and many others. And she’s excited about the possibility of a casual atmosphere.
“I love the idea that the performance space is open enough to allow for people to come and go. Some may sleep or lie down or walk around. To be honest, the idea of people sitting captive in seats while this happens doesn’t interest me at all.”
That blend of wild ambition and broad-beamed inclusiveness — combined with the tireless, steely will required to make her visions a reality — runs like a leitmotif throughout Chase’s career.
Raised in Leucadia, just north of San Diego, she began as a fairly traditional flutist until her encounter with the Varèse — with its atonal harmonies and non-traditional instrumental techniques — opened her eyes to other possibilities.
“I became totally obsessed with the piece,” she recalled. “It’s a hard piece for a 12-yearold — it’s not easy with braces to play those screeching high D’s.
“But I was determined to get it into my body, to memorize it and to share it. I wanted to play it at my junior high school graduation on the football field.
“And people say, ‘Oh, you were being so radical and contrarian, trying to alienate people with contemporary music. But it wasn’t that at all. I naively thought it would blow their minds, and that my fellow adolescents would think this was as powerful an experience as I found it.”
School administrators wound up having their say, and Chase performed the more traditional “Danny Boy” instead. But the idea had taken root.
As an undergraduate at the Oberlin Conservatory, Chase fell in with composer Huang Ruo — they worked side-byside in the school cafeteria — and soon found her calling as both a proponent of new music and a champion of self-directed artistic organizing.
The first flower of that double commitment came as a result of winning a $5,000 award given to a junior, with no strings attached. Chase decided she wanted to stage a new music blowout.
“This was 1999, and I decided to commission five new pieces in honor of the year 2000, and to put together a band and perform them.”
But that was only the start of her ambitions. Chase was also determined to draw a crowd, and listening to her describe the process today — in a flood of verbal eloquence shaped by seemingly endless reserves of mental energy — it’s easy to imagine how unstoppable her planning was.
“I wanted to record the concert, and disseminate it widely. And I wanted a standingroom-only audience, because it’s enough with the new-music concerts with five people and one of them’s your uncle who wonders why you’re not playing the Poulenc Flute Sonata.”
So she set to work. She commissioned pieces from friends, as well as relatively prominent composers like Pauline Oliveros and Harvey Sollberger. She and her colleagues went to schools and retirement homes to drum up attendance; they plastered the campus and the nearby town with flyers. In the end, 750 people attended the concert.
“We didn’t have a name at that point, but really that was the beginning of ICE. Because after I graduated, I moved to Chicago and I thought, ‘If we can get 750 people in a tiny college town, what can we do in a big city with more than $5,000?”
Chicago found out soon enough. The first ICE event, cobbled together in the middle of winter on a budget that was actually a paltry $603, replicated the Oberlin success on a larger scale. By the time Chase decided to relinquish the leadership of the organization last year, it had a million-dollar budget and was doing 150 performances a year.
That success has not been without its wrinkles. Most notably, a commencement address that Chase gave in 2013 at the music school of Northwestern University was both praised and criticized for her celebration of the “entrepreneurial” spirit in the arts. Some took it as a welcome call for self-empowerment; others took issue with the echoes of political and economic neoliberalism.
Today, Chase is quick to disavow any connections to neoliberalism, or to the word “entrepreneurial.” The goal, rather, was to insist that artists take responsibility for whatever part of the cultural biosphere they inhabit.
“I prefer to speak about advocacy and activism. What I don’t believe is that any young artist can afford to simply show up and play and not question what their contribution is — who they’re making their work for, and why and how. Even in a modest way, in an interior and philosophical sense, everyone needs to keep asking those questions and take responsibility for the contribution they’re making to the larger ecology.
“Like, how large is that ecology? And if we’re not including certain musics and people and practices and histories — well, why are they being excluded? And if we all start taking responsibility for that, then things change really fast.”