‘I want to turn people on to this stuff ’
Chicago’s Frequency Fest is back, a week of noise-punk guitarists and microtonal music
Every February, the avant-garde of then and now, of here and elsewhere, settle into Chicago for an ecstatic week of sound-making.
That’s the closest thing to an elevator pitch as could be cooked up for the Frequency Festival, an experimental music festival now in its seventh year. Most of the action happens Feb. 21-26 at Constellation, plus offshoot performances at Bond Chapel in Hyde Park and Corbett vs. Dempsey gallery.
Music critic and festival organizer Peter Margasak has curated a concert series at Constellation with the same name since 2013, helping cement the then-new venue’s reputation as a haven for experimental music and sound art. The Frequency Series and Festival have even outlasted his time in Chicago: Margasak left the city in 2018 and now programs both remotely from Berlin.
“At some point, I hope there’s a certain level of trust in the festival,” Margasak says. “This is not a big-name festival, but I feel incredibly strongly about all these musicians and composers. I want to turn people on to this stuff.”
Usually, Frequency Festival’s only programming throughline is that there is no throughline. That’s kind of the point. Even so, Margasak says some themes emerged this year, however unintentionally, like the festival’s mini-focus on guitarists. Electric and noise-punk virtuoso Bill Orcutt opens the festival Feb. 21 with drummer Chris Corsano, with whom he remotely recorded 2021’s “Made Out of Sound”: Chicago-based folk/experimental wunderkind Eli Winter opens for the duo. Later, on Feb. 23, the hyperprocessed soundscapes of solo guitarist/vocalist/ composer Julia Reidy touch down in Chicago for the first time.
Familiar acts also return to the festival this year, like contemporary classical ensembles A.pe. ri.od.ic (Feb. 24, playing an
evening-length work by Magnus Granberg) and Ensemble Dal Niente (closing out the fest on Feb. 26).
On the deliberate end of the programming spectrum was the festival’s focus on Pascale Criton — a protégé of composers Gérard Grisey and Ivan Wyschnegradsky — whose music is under-celebrated on this side of the Atlantic. Margasak admits he didn’t know anything about Criton until he heard her music at a festival in Norway in 2018. Thunderstruck, he and a curator at New York City’s Issue Project Room began brainstorming to find a way to get her to the U.S. After fits and starts — including an October 2021 performance at Constellation that didn’t pan out due to COVID-related logistical complications — Criton and her collaborators, violinist Silvia Tarozzi and cellist Judith Hamann, will present their music in both cities this month.
Criton’s music is primarily microtonal, meaning it utilizes more pitches within an octave
than the 12 slices typical to Western classical music. Trained as a clarinetist, Criton says her interest in microtonality can be traced back to her childhood in Paris, retuning a sitar gifted by a family friend for fun.
“It was a pleasure to put the strings back in the right pitch, but I thought, ‘Well, this is very interesting like that (out of tune), also,’” Criton says, calling from Paris. “I’ve always been interested in this imaginary theater of sound.”
Coincidentally, Criton cites her own compositions for guitar — a significant slice of her oeuvre — as an important bridge to the compositions for violin and cello that will be heard at this year’s festival, which tune those instruments’ strings to intervals of 1/16th tones instead of their usual fifths. For string instruments, whose sound typically gets boosted by sympathetic resonance (adjacent strings vibrating from the pitches played on another string), Criton’s tuning upends the instruments’ intended acoustic properties and creates an
unusual sonic experience — like playing on a single “thick string,” in Criton’s words.
To an untrained ear, pitches just a 1/16th interval apart might sound nearly identical. But when sounded simultaneously, their ever-so-slight misalignment creates a phantom “beating” sensation, despite sounding only two pitches.
“It’s like a microscope on sound. It’s music of little differences,” Criton says.
Two of the three Criton works to be heard during the Feb. 25 show at Constellation are more accurately described as collaborative compositions. Criton worked closely with violinist Tarozzi and cellist Deborah Walker when creating the pieces, though the latter piece, “Chaoscaccia,” will be performed by Hamann instead — the first time it’s been performed by another cellist.
Criton will stop by the University of Chicago for a talkback about her music on Feb. 27, and Tarozzi and Hamann present an improvised set at Corbett vs. Dempsey the day before, on Feb. 26. Tarozzi’s solo will respond in real-time to the works of multi-instrumentalist Roscoe Mitchell, whose paintings are on display in the gallery.
“Most musicians that I’m interested in have multiple sides, so it would be silly to bring them all this way and not hear different sides of what they do,” Margasak says. “Nobody just does one thing.”
Neither does the Frequency Festival.
The Frequency Festival is Feb. 21-26 at multiple venues. More information at frequency festival-chicago.com