Space City New Music Festival looks to take event to new heights
Martin Quiroga Jr.’s goal is not small.
Through his weeklong Space City New Music Festival, which kicks off its second year Monday at the Midtown Arts and Theater Center Houston (MATCH), the 32-year-old composer and educator wants to demystify contemporary instrumental music.
Easier said than done for a diffuse genre whose inscrutability is, in many respects, its calling card. In the public sphere, this music rarely ventures beyond the rarefied realms of academia, niche performing-arts groups, film scores and perhaps the efforts of adventurous pop artists like Björk or Radiohead.
Still, in a big city like Houston, Quiroga figured live performances along those lines would be relatively easy to find. That wasn’t the case two years ago, when he returned to his hometown after receiving a master’s degree from the University of Oregon. Eventually, he found a concert of Brian Eno’s music being put on by Zach and Jacob Gutierrez, fellow percussionists he knew from his undergrad days at the University of Hous
ton.
“Afterwards, I walked up to them,” recalls Quiroga, who grew up in the Galena Park/Jacinto City area. “I’m not known to think small sometimes, so I said, ‘Hey, we should do something together now that I’m back.’ They said, ‘Well, what are you thinking?’ ”
Quiroga originally suggested putting on a ballet, but the brothers hesitated. He suggested a music festival instead.
“Their interest was piqued,” he says.
But why a music festival? Why not? Plenty of people are willing to take a chance on pop music they’ve never heard before, Quiroga figured. Recalling similar events back in Oregon, he surveyed Houston’s cultural scene and thought he saw an opening.
“I love rap,” he explains. “I grew up listening to it, and you always hear ‘Rap from the ’90s, the ’80s, is the best; today’s rap is garbage.’ I feel like that’s the same mentality with people about contemporary music, that it was good and now it’s bad.”
A wide range
All told, SCNMF’s five concerts will feature the works of more than a dozen composers, performed by this year’s resident guest artists: Bostonbased quartet HUB New Music; percussionist/composer Cameron Leach; and a handful of other guests.
Scheduled for Thursday, the “Tomorrow’s Trails” program will be exclusively world premieres; more will follow during the next night’s “Unfiltered Notes.” The July 14 closing concert will highlight the music of guest composer Shih-Hui Chen, a professor at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, including a piece written specifically for the festival.
Quiroga says he and his staff are happy to handle things on the administrative end and leave all the aesthetic decisions to the artists.
“I think what really matters is these artists are expressing themselves in ways that not all of us can understand,” he admits. “I’m not going to lie to you and say that I understand it completely as well. My main goal is to give them a platform to do so.”
This year’s field of composers represents several different nationalities, plus a few from here in our area. Their ages are similarly diverse.
“Our youngest this year is 18, just graduated from high school, and our oldest I think is near their 40s or 50s,” says Quiroga. “But they’re (all) actively writing music.”
Also, just how fresh must the pieces at this new-music festival be in order to qualify as “new”? Although all of this year’s compositions happen to have been written within the last four to six months, Quiroga explains, there’s no real cutoff date.
“If somebody wanted (to submit) a piece that they wrote three, five, seven, even 10 years ago, then why not?” he says. “If this is their chance to do it, then let’s make it happen as best as we can.”
The Gutierrez brothers, who perform as the ensemble 3G Percussion (and were last year’s featured guest artists) remain close at hand: Jacob as artistic director; Zach as executive director; and Sarek, their older brother, as development director. Quiroga will be putting his college stage-production experience to good use by running lights all week.
“A lighting technician does not run cheap nowadays,” he smiles. “And those costs have to be absorbed somehow.”
Embracing unexpected
Getting a fledgling festival off the ground has had its share of challenges, Quiroga admits, but at least one thing was easy: Most of the artists and composers he asked to participate in the festival were happy to oblige.
“Nowadays, it seems kind of audacious to just ask random people to help you with things,” he notes, “but most of the time people were willing to do so.”
He also hopes the audience will share his enthusiasm for hearing a piece of music performed for the first time, and the rush that comes from embracing the unexpected.
That first listen, “you don’t know what’s going to happen, and so it’s the surprises that always get you,” Quiroga explains. The moments where a piece is slowly building up, building up, it’s getting there and then (there’s) just a moment of silence.
“You’re just suspended,” Quiroga adds. “Those are the moments that you remember.”
If all else fails, it’s hard to go wrong with a free concert. Quiroga admits the turnout for last year’s inaugural SCNMF was a little lighter than he’d hoped, so he’s hoping to broaden this year’s potential audience by not charging admission to Saturday night’s concert at South Main Baptist Church.
On tap is a performance by Daryl Robinson, former SMBC artist-in-residence and now director of organ studies at UH’s Moores School of Music; and more world premieres, including “Apollo,” British-born composer James Whitbourn’s musical rendering of a manned spacecraft’s flight to the moon.
In a sense, Quiroga views Saturday’s concert as the festival’s version of the old “Field of Dreams” maxim: “If you build it, they will come.”
“I think, if anything, we just need to present it to people,” he says. “The people who want to find it are going to.”
As for the future of his event, Quiroga readily admits he’s playing the long game.
Considering the repertoire at the top of the orchestral food chain has been notoriously slow to include modern compositions — especially anything written after World War II — he’s betting that at least some music fans among today’s young doctors, lawyers and coders will become the patrons of tomorrow. If his theory holds, a few faces at this week’s festival could well want to bankroll a new concert hall, or at least a new piano concerto, somewhere down the road.
That’s what Quiroga is hoping, at least.
“I mean, that’s the reality,” he says. “And so in a lot of ways, over time, if we’re able to attract young professionals, who knows what (pieces) they’re going to be asking for in the next 20, 30 years?”