December 18, 2012
by Steve Smith

CHICAGO – Business was brisk on Sunday afternoon at the Empty Bottle, a homey bar and a celebrated alternative-music nightclub in the Ukrainian Village neighborhood here. As 1 p.m. approached, patrons lined the bar and milled around throughout the club space, cradling beers and coffees. Above the bar an ancient rivalry was unfolding: the Green Bay Packers were overpowering the Chicago Bears.

As it happened, the television screen offered the only sign of conflict in a club bustling with luminaries and followers of the growing Chicago contemporary-classical music scene.

All were on hand for the latest installment of the (Un)Familiar Music Series, initiated this season at the Empty Bottle by Doyle Armbrust, the violist of the Spektral Quartet as well as a freelance music critic for Time Out Chicago. (Full disclosure: I am an editor for Time Out New York; the New York and Chicago publications are separate entities; and Time Out had no involvement in this event.)

A characteristically busy freelance musician, Mr. Armbrust is a well-connected pillar of the Chicago new-music scene, whose vibrancy he means to showcase in his series. But what made Sunday’s concert especially noteworthy, apart from its four-hour duration and densely packed program, was its cause. The event, titled “(Re)New Amsterdam,” was meant to raise funds for New Amsterdam, a vital New York record label and fledgling concert presenter that specializes in artists whose work cuts across myriad aesthetic disciplines and styles. A flourishing concern formed in 2007 by the composers William Brittelle, Judd Greenstein and Sarah Kirkland Snider, New Amsterdam secured nonprofit status in 2011. This year it moved into a new 3,000-square-foot facility in Red Hook, Brooklyn, meant to be an administrative center and a space for rehearsals and concerts.

When Hurricane Sandy hit, the new headquarters endured calamitous losses, including vintage musical instruments, all financial records and an estimated 60 to 70 percent of its CD stock. Ruined drywall and toxic mold deterred quick recovery. Friends and supporters sprang into action, making donations through a Web page that described the extent of the damage.

In Chicago the composer Marcos Balter, whose music was included on a New Amsterdam CD, approached Mr. Armbrust last month with the notion of mounting a benefit concert. Few of the performers that Mr. Armbrust contacted had direct ties to the New York institution. Many represented musical sensibilities at odds with the eclectic, pop-savvy postclassical style New Amsterdam has helped to foster. But Mr. Armbrust assembled an eager cross-section of Chicago’s new-music artists.

As he greeted the audience at the Empty Bottle on Sunday, Mr. Balter noted that the date, Dec. 16, was Beethoven’s birthday, and shared a fitting quotation: “Beethoven said that ‘the foundation of friendship demands the greatest likeness of human hearts and souls.’ ” Artists involved in new music, he asserted, are at the core very much alike, despite stylistic differences.

“We’re all saying the same thing: that investing in the future of music is vital to this art form that we chose as our profession,” Mr. Balter said. “And we also learn very, very quickly that this is not a task that can be done by one single individual. It’s really a collective task; we need one another to exist. In many ways that’s especially true in Chicago, and that’s probably what defines our scene more than anything that I can think of: we are a family.”

New Amsterdam, he said, represented distant family in need of assistance.

The diversity represented among Chicago’s close-knit clan was evident. From a powerful opening account of Joan Tower’s stately “Copperwave” by the Gaudete Brass Quintet, the program encompassed winsome lyricism from Access Contemporary Music and Fifth House Ensemble; modernist rigors from Ensemble Dal Niente; whimsical performance art from members of eighth blackbird; buoyant Bartok duets played by Chicago Q Ensemble; and a hard-grooving rendition of John Cage’s “Third Construction” by Third Coast Percussion; ending with nightclub-friendly electronica.

Chicago composers, too, were well represented. The flutist Janice Misurell-Mitchell offered a strident textual tirade inspired by Occupy Wall Street. Ensemble Vulpine Lupin performed “Gravity of Shadows,” a mesmerizing study in tenebrous shades and timbres by Morgan Krauss, a young composer from Columbia College. Grant Wallace Band, a quirky trio of conservatory-trained composers, followed with spidery original bluegrass songs, featuring ambiguous harmonies and high-lonesome yelps.

How much money was raised — including more than 100 paid admissions, plus on-site donations and proceeds from a silent auction of signed New Amsterdam CDs and original score pages by composers like Augusta Read Thomas, Nico Muhly and Mr. Balter — will not be tallied for a few more days, Mr. Armbrust said. But beyond its altruistic goal, he said, “(Re)New Amsterdam” seemed to represent a crystallizing moment for its participants.

“While I think we all got into this in the first place simply to do whatever little bit of good we could do for New Amsterdam, the end result of all this was really something incredibly positive for the new-music community here,” he said. “We all love to hear each other play, but it’s not often we all get to be in the same room doing it.”

In a telephone interview on Monday Ms. Snider expressed regret that no New Amsterdam representatives were able to attend what she described as “an extraordinary gesture of solidarity and support.” That many of the concert’s participants had represented divergent aesthetic styles made an impression.

“To find out that all these people, who we haven’t necessarily worked with, or whose programming isn’t necessarily that similar to what we do, were willing to support us was just incredible,” she said.

“At the end of the day all of our differences aren’t necessarily that important. It’s a really hard, strange world to try to make a living in, and maybe we all do just value the diversity that exists, and we’re willing to fight for it.”

Read the original article here.

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