Marti Epstein: Nebraska Impromptu

Music that follows in the tradition of Morton Feldman is perhaps best suited to live performance, an experience to share among an audience; but alone by the stereo, in a room with the windows open for spring air is good too. The release this month of the music of Marti Epstein features fine performances by all participants, notably clarinetist Rane Moore, whose rich and brilliant sound is heard on each track.

The works display the influence of Feldman and also Toru Takemitsu. They should be enjoyed in a spirit of contemplation and peace. These are calm explorations, invitations to dream, and journeys without goals. Three of the five pieces reference or respond to visual inspiration. Oil and Sugar, for clarinet, flute, violin and piano (2018), references a conceptual video of motor oil being poured over a mass of sugar cubes. Komorebi for clarinet, oboe and violin (2018), is the Japanese word for sunlight filtered through leaves. Nebraska Impromptu, for clarinet and piano (2013), was inspired by the landscape of Epstein’s childhood. A visual artist herself, she stretches her musical colours across great expanses of “canvas.”

The debt to Takemitsu is especially apparent in Komorebi, but Epstein is an original artist within this aesthetic realm, and for those who enjoy contemplative naturalist art, the performances are delightfully in tune and in synch. She allows remarkably long silences to divide and set off the swatches of sound, like negative space in a painting, allowing the listener to savour the previous moment before hearing the next.

— Max Christie, 7.16.2022

The Boston composer Marti Epstein offers us a collection of chamber works, where a handful of esteemed musicians highlight a songwriting approach that’s as expansive as her one time home state of Nebraska.

“Oil & Sugar” starts the listen with Rane Moore’s clarinet, Sarah Brady’s flute, and Gabriela Diaz’s violin interacting with warmth and mystery in the harmonic setting, and “Liquid, Fragile” continues with Mark Berger’s viola and Rafael Popper-Keizer’s cello adding much to the expressive and abstract dynamics that are often faint with a delicate beauty.

The title track occupies the middle spot, and pairs Moore’s clarinet with Donald Berman’s keys in the uniquely minimal climate where each instrument recruits its own distinct register, while “Komorebi” meshes clarinet, oboe and violin into a rare intimacy amid the slow rhythm and stirring harmonies.

The album exits on “See Even Night”, where clarinet, viola and piano interact for nearly 30 minutes as the textures flow evenly with much attention to timbre, space and structure.

Epstein has an impressive resume, and this portrait of the American Plains is yet another a high point in a catalog of work that’s been globally appreciated, as it should be.

— Tom Haugen, 8.06.2022

Composer Marti Epstein’s Nebraska Impromptu is a collection of works highlighting her writing for small ensembles featuring clarinet, played here by Rane Moore. The pieces on the album span 2001-2017; although each has its own individual sound, all share a consistent aesthetic based on the unhurried deployment of mostly quiet, discretely bounded events made up of tightly aggregated instrumental colors.

Oil and Sugar (2016), for piano, clarinet, flute, and violin is exemplary. The piece’s basic elements consist of a series of brief motifs within a restricted range of harmonic movement; Epstein intertwines them among the four voices in a way that dramatizes to good effect the timbral differences of the similarly compassed winds and strings. By relying solely on clarinet, oboe, and violin, Komorebi (2017) displays this effect even further. The title track, 2012’s Nebraska Impromptu for piano and clarinet, plays with contrasts of range rather than color, as the clarinet takes the role of middle voice in between the piano’s upper and lower registers. Liquid, Fragile (2010) for clarinet, violin, viola, and cello is a broken-textured piece that uses long silences as structural supports dividing gently drifting sonic events. The earliest and longest work represented, the twenty-seven-and-a-half minute-long See Even Night from 2001, is a subtly subtractive piece for clarinet, viola, and piano that begins with a relatively dense polyphony of short, repeating, overlapping motifs and then gradually develops through a simplification of lines and opening up of overall textures.

— Daniel Barbiero, 5.15.2022

There is something new under the sun with Marti Epstein and her Nebraska Impromptu (New Focus Recordings FCR 324). It is an album of music for clarinet and various chamber configurations, handled gracefully and winningly by clarinetist Rane Moore and the Winsor Music players. There are five works in all, written between 2001 and 2018.

The music apparently spawned an interaction between a student and the composer, which I stumbled upon on FB but I lost track of when I went back to the newsfeed. It got my attention because it addressed what today's Modern music scene is all about, essentially in the composer's view (rightly) it is less and less about some kind of 12-tone Serialist High Modernism, but then in fact is in a wildly open post-one-thing world. Now any regular reader of this Blog knows I champion that very notion, that what one might hear today exists within a wide expanse of possibilities, and that nothing automatically can be assigned a status above another in terms of "currency." The discussion made me want to hear the album and I realized it was on my stack ready to be heard.

And as it seems plain to me and happily so, this collection of Marti Epstein chamber gems finds its own turf in an ever unfolding, lyrically yet fully tonal palette of brilliant sound color and rhythmically, gradually blooming contrapuntal open form. And the music is in line with the wide-open set of expectations of what one might find in any given collection of New Music these days. So three cheers for that.

So to my mind the five compositions presented here are as interesting and as introspectively encompassing as anything new out there today. Epstein responds to the many things now "in the air" in New Music without joining any particular school in some slavish way. We get processual and repetitive elements but not as a paradigmatic constant, no more than, say, a Modern poet might add reiteration to the substructure of unfolding without, say, committing to the absolute, almost ritual systematicity of a Gertrude Stein. The world has turned and we individually and collectively can take what insights we have gotten from the Modernist generations and move it further along expressively.

Perhaps we are in an age where the program notes are not an essential part of hearing what is going on. We can trust our now fully Modern-and-beyond musical senses to understand and appreciate what is being expressed. The press sheet mentions the influences of Webern, Feldman and Takemitsu as well as the American plains and Nebraskan vistas. I understand and concur--and if I might be so bold to suggest, there is a fragile, terse yet overarching beauty in classic Webern that of course never depended completely on 12-tone procedures, there was more there and Ms. Epstein has taken it to heart!

Each of the five works stands on its own in terms of structure, in terms of syntax and spacing. So we listen with gradually more enthusiastic responses to "Oil & Sugar" (2016), "Liquid, Fragile" (2010), the title work "Nebraska Impromptu" (2013), "Komorebi" (2018) and "See Even Night" (2001).

Rane Moore's clarinet work here is nothing less than magical. The spellbinding, ever renewing presence of clarinet and differing chamber combinations underscores Ms. Epstein's poetic luminosity, be it clarinet and piano, same with additional flute and violin, or with viola, and then clarinet, violin, viola and cello, or oboe and violin in tandem with clarinet.

Every piece has its place in the contemplative matrix, each revealing a slightly different musico-inventive acumen.

After a good number of hearings I am sold on all of it. Someone of the caliber and originality of Marti Epstein does not come along every day, of course. But we are lucky for such a revealing newness that emphasizes a togetherness more so than an "advancement" per se. It advances into itself. We are all the better for it. Bravo! Strongly recommended. Music for the present day and ages to come!

— Grego Applegate Edwards, 5.11.2022

The music of Marti Epstein longs for wide open spaces – which might seem like a strange choice for a composer who has been a mainstay in the Boston new music scene for 30 years. But expressing a need for silence and expansive landscapes while living in a cramped and fast-paced city environment feeds into the inherent dramatic arc of her work.

Marti describes her music as “sad” and “slow-paced,” but those descriptors miss a kind of nostalgic joy and energy that underlines everything she writes. Marti’s compositions live in a beautiful in-between state, never fully settling on one mood, style, or texture for too long. She says, “I know that there are people who think my music is too modern, whatever that means. And then there are other people who think it’s not modern enough.”a beautiful in-between state, never fully settling on one mood, style, or texture for too long. She says, “I know that there are people who think my music is too modern, whatever that means. And then there are other people who think it’s not modern enough.”

Even though she recently marked three decades of teaching harmony, counterpoint, and composition at both Berklee College of Music and the Boston Conservatory, the vast Nebraska plains of her youth still resonate as an influence. She says that those landscapes, along with the broad terrain of the American west she’s observed on cross-country train trips, have become a frequent source of inspiration for her writing. “A lot of people feel terrified of the wide open space and they get bored,” she says. “I suddenly start to feel open in my body when I’m experiencing that. And it’s something that’s not only visually beautiful to me, but kind of psychically beautiful to me.

Nebraska Impromptu, Marti’s latest album released in April 2022 on New Focus Recordings, is a portrait of her relationships to locations, specific instruments, and performers. As much as Nebraska Impromptu is about the midwest, it’s also about the community of music makers in Boston that Marti has built up around herself. Most of the performers are local, and the album was produced by conductor Jeffrey Means, founder of Boston’s Sound Icon.

The centerpiece of Nebraska Impromptu is Marti’s professional relationship with clarinetist Rane Moore, the Co-Artistic Director of Winsor Music. “Rane sort of made all these pieces her own, even the ones that weren’t written for her, because she brings a deep understanding of my music to her performances.” That sentiment speaks to Marti’s commitment to working with musicians who can bring a personal touch to their performances. “I think that this is the thing that every composer needs, should want, should try to cultivate, et cetera, because we are nothing without not only committed performers, but without good performances of our music.”

The album’s title track expresses Marti’s love of being immersed in sweeping physical landscapes through wide musical spacings; the duet between Moore and pianist Donald Berman features the piano exploring both highest and lowest registers, while the clarinet sits firmly in the middle. This idea of composing with a visual impetus has become an important aspect of Marti’s creative process. Some of her compositions, like her 2011 work Troubled Queen based on the Jackson Pollock painting of the same name, have a direct relationship between music and visual art. But on Nebraska Impromptu, the relationship between the two mediums is not always such a direct parallel.

For example, Oil & Sugar was initially inspired by a video project of the same name by Kader Attia, a silent film that shows stacked sugar cubes slowly disintegrating into motor oil. Marti says, “To watch what happens to the sugar when the oil is melting — it is really beautiful. It turns out [Attia’s] video has a very specific political meaning talking about the colonization of countries whose main product is sugar by countries whose main product is oil…I wasn’t aware of that when I first saw the video and just thought, ‘Oh, my god. I hear music when I’m looking at this.’”

A 2020 recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, Marti has recently been commissioned by local new music groups like Hinge Ensemble, loadbang, and Sound Icon. Last season, the BSO Chamber Players featured her work Komorebi for oboe, clarinet, and violin on a program that also included pieces by Jennifer Higdon and Shulamit Ran. And in January 2022, Navona Records released a studio recording of her opera Rumpelstiltskin performed by Guerilla Opera, who gave the work its world premiere in 2009.

But despite Marti’s status as a composer with high profile accolades and frequent performances of her music, she still feels an underlying sense that these accomplishments have been hard won. She began her composition studies in 1978 at The University of Iowa, transferred to the University of Colorado in 1980, then pursued a Master’s degree at Boston University. For all that time, Marti remembers that she was only one of two non-male students — and often the only non-male composer in any given program. “For a while it was really exciting to be the only one, and then after a while it started to be clear to me that that is a very short-lived euphoria,” she says. “It’s much better to be not alone, to have others with you.”

Our field has begun to move towards a more equitable scenario for people of different genders, but historically, funding and other forms of support have been geared toward young and emerging artists. While this mentality is well intentioned, it often creates a situation where older artists are unable to access opportunities. It also sends the message that if composers haven’t achieved a certain level of success before aging out of composition competitions and calls for scores — usually around age 30-35 — then they might as well give up. But this flies in the face of countless canonized composers who didn’t write their best works or gain notoriety until late in their lives.

Ageism is a barrier that Marti feels she is facing now. “When I was younger, I was looked over probably because I was non-male. But now that I’m older, I’m overlooked in favor of the much younger women. This is a thing that keeps happening, and sometimes I’ll say, ‘Oh, did you ever consider asking me to do this?’ And I’ll be met with, ‘Oh, I never thought you would’ve been interested.’ I have been interested for 40 years, you know?”

Despite her justified frustrations with the music industry, Marti is also grateful for how many opportunities she’s been given in her career. Not many composers achieve what she has, and she’s well aware of this. She still loves composers like Bach and Beethoven, but also sees a future where composers from the classical music canon can coexist with living composers. “I think the answer isn’t to not perform [Bach and Beethoven] – the answer is to make the room bigger.”

— Clover Nahabedian, 9.08.2022

This album of chamber music for clarinet—two quartets, two trios, and a duo for clarinet and piano—takes its name from the duo, Nebraska Impromptu. Boston composer Marti Epstein wrote it as an evocation of her childhood in Nebraska and memories of its landscape. Other works take off from the Japanese word for dappled sunlight shining through trees (Komorebi), a video at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art of “a large block of sugar cubes over which motor oil is poured” (Oil & Sugar), and a phrase from Night’s aria in Purcell’s The Fairy Queen (See Even Night).

These diverse inspirations imply a wide-ranging imagination, and Epstein, who is a professor at the Berklee School of Music and its newly merged partner, the Boston Conservatory, can look back on a prestigious career and elite associations. She studied with Oliver Knussen and Hans Werner Henze in the 1980s. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow and was twice a fellow of the MacDowell Colony. This is my first encounter with Epstein’s music, but it has received performances at a high level internationally, including with the San Francisco Symphony and Frankfurt Radio Symphony.

Heard without the accompanying bio, Epstein’s clarinet music is so spare and rarefied, its gestures so minimal, that it isn’t surprising that her chief influences include Morton Feldman and Anton Webern. I almost need to say no more. Single pitches, bare scale fragments and arpeggios, elided tones, and close harmonies predominate. The materials are so simple, in fact, that for me, the chief appeal of this album lies in one area only, Epstein’s ear for timbre. Clarinetist Rane Moore is asked to blend with other instruments—flute, oboe, violin, viola, cello, or piano, drawn from the Boston-area ensemble Winsor Music—much more as a tint in a controlled color spectrum than as a soloist. There is no fast music or technical display. The greatest challenge, I surmise, comes when Moore is asked to play at the softest dynamic very high or very low in the instrument’s register.

Phrasing as such isn’t called for, but the tiny, often isolated gestures in Epstein’s scores are as minutely calibrated as those in Webern’s most minimal works. I confess that I wish there was more to listen for, but no one can deny the beauty and exquisite craftsmanship on display. I hear three distinct modes that these works operate inside (although the composer no doubt has conceived of many subtleties that escape me). The first is repetitive, closely knit motion within a compressed scale, as displayed in Oil & Sugar, scored for clarinet, flute, violin, and piano. The second mode consists of very short, gem-like aphorisms spaced between marked silences, as in Liquid, Fragile, where the clarinet is joined by a string trio (violin, viola, cello). Finally, there is the Feldmanesque mode of the longest work here, See Even Night, which lasts 27 minutes and involves three players—clarinet, viola, and piano—in extended near-stasis as very small gestures get reduced even smaller until silence is tapered into at the end.

The difference between the simplistic and the rarefied is defined by context. If you knew nothing in advance about the cultural context of Webern and Feldman, their music might make no sense and even seem random. We are decades past the origins of both composers, so their music is embedded in contemporary music culture as firmly as Mozart and Beethoven are embedded in mainstream music culture. There’s no going back, and yet Epstein’s idiom, as respected and rewarded as it is, needs a tuned-in mind and sympathetic ears. Expect haikus, not an epic. Without close attention, a sensation of sonic wallpaper can set in.

Fanfare’s readers already know where they stand in relation to Webern and Feldman, which will serve as almost an unerring guide, I think, to how they will respond to this release. The performers are close colleagues of the composer and often were kept in mind when individual pieces were written. Therefore, the performances are close to ideal, as is the recorded sound. A fulsome essay by Robert Kirzinger, well known in Boston as annotator for the Boston Symphony, is frustrating, because brief, cogent descriptions of each piece are juxtaposed with the kind of cloying praise that results when the writer is too close to the composer or else too eager to please.

— Huntley Dent, 8.26.2022

“You can take the girl out of Nebraska, but you can’t take the Nebraska out of the girl,” the Berklee College of Music’s Marti Epstein once said, describing the expansive, deliberate pacing of many of her compositions. That sense — open, uncertain, alive to possibility — suffuses “Nebraska Impromptu” (New Focus Recordings), a collection of chamber music for clarinet composed during the first two decades of the 21st century. The longest piece here is “See, Even Night” for clarinet, viola, and piano, which has the drawn-out aura of a Morton Feldman work but with a lullaby-like sense of wonder all its own. Rane Moore plays everything with a keen appreciation of Epstein’s idiom.

— David Weininger, 12.28.2022