(Liner notes for Caught By the Sky, on the OO Discs label)

A recording like this gets classified as "contemporary classical music," a dubious category, if you ask me, because it sounds so formal, and academic. Not that we shouldn’t have contemporary musical art -- that’s is a welcome and nourishing presence in the world. But for years, under the heading "contemporary classical music," the concept of new musical art dried out, turning parched and arid. It conjured images of the classical concert hall-- rigid silence, formal dress -- and seemed to promise not living music, but instead the lifeless dissonance that colored the landscape of too many contemporary concert works, bringing a chill to even the most hardened listener.
Caught By the Sky, of course, is nothing like that; the mere presence of Steven Schick and Maya Beiser -- two of the liveliest musicians around -- are guarantees that it won’t be (and so is the OO Disks label, in itself a guarantee of living art). Besides, there’s even been a revolt in the mainstream classical music world against old concepts of contemporary composition; things are looser, freer, and a lot more fun than they used to be, and some of the music sounds more truly contemporary.
But I don’t think I truly understood what "contemporary music" was, in an art context, until the summer of 1999, when I went to the theater festival in Avignon, France. This is an overwhelming event, with so many events (both official and fringe) that no one person -- no 20 people -- could hope to see them all. Still, I trudged through the hot, walled, old city, seeing two or three productions each day.
I’d noticed that Avignon included art music as well as theater, with a few small concerts tucked away in a small corner of the festival. As the centerpiece of these events, they’d recruited a composer whose name I didn’t know, but who turned out to represent the old style of classical contemporary stuff. The programs he’d arranged were full of serial works by the likes of Webern and Stockhausen, which are good music (dissonance and atonality only turn sour in the hands of academics) but rather limited in artistic range.
I couldn’t help but contrast that to what I heard at the theatrical productions. Nearly all of them had music, and I’d almost never know, when a performance began, what style the music was going to adopt. The scores could be anything from classical to techno, with excursions into sounds from many countries of the world (Mexico, Brazil, you name it), along with unpredictable hybrids. One play I saw had music played on the accordion, blending cabaret and operetta into an irresistible mix of frayed, happy fragments. Another play had structured sound instead of music, with dialogue and audio effects woven into a compelling stream of dark sonic wonder that lived on the border between muttered speech and chaos.

And here, I realized, was a definition of what "contemporary music" really is. The Avignon theater artists had figured it out for me, by choosing things they liked from all the music available everywhere on earth. Nobody told them which styles were "art," and which weren’t; they knew, instead, what worked for them, and what they liked-- and that’s what they used in their productions.
This, I thought, is also what contemporary art musicians most naturally should do, and it’s exactly the approach Steven Schick and Maya Beiser adopted here. They’re classical instrumentalists, but they’re not bound by the traditions of classical music. To begin with, there isn’t much repertoire for cello and percussion. But Schick and Beiser wanted to play together-- their strength, Schick says (and it’s obvious to anyone who hears them play) is their intimate musical rapport. So that’s where they began, and, starting there, they went out to find their own music. Or, rather, they brought their music into existence, by inviting composers to write it for them. This music came, both in spirit and in literal fact, from all over the world.
That’s wonderfully appropriate, because if contemporary art music is going to be truly contemporary, its doors have to be thrown wide open. So Schick and Beiser start here with traditional music from the Loba people in Africa, originally played by three musicians on a large xylophone. New Zealand composer Jack Body transcribed it for western instruments, and then Schick and Beiser -- taking an active role in finding music for themselves -- arranged it for marimba, cello, and an extra percussion beat that Schick renders with bells and rattles attached to his ankle. He dances to play these, which brings an extra touch of sheer physical verve to his performance, and also takes him beyond old-school classical percussion. His motto, and Beiser’s, might be: "Our musical interests range very widely, and we make music any way we like."
Thus both musicians sing, with rich intensity, in Chinary Ung’s Grand Alap, and also intone spoken sounds, some of them syllables from the Khmer language, giving the music the spacious, focused feeling of a ritual. Khmer is a natural choice for Ung, since he’s originally from Cambodia, though the non-western influence on the music itself is from India, with an opening section inspired, Ung says, by the "exposition passage in a raga."
Franghis Ali-Zadeh’s Habil-sajahy also arrives from an unexpected part of the world, the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, which is Ali-Zadeh’s home. She took her inspiration from Habil Alieyv, a virtuoso on the Azerbaijani kemanche (a kind of violin; the title of the piece means "in the style of Habil"), and then evolved an improvisatory form from the structures of local folk music. Here the cello and percussion imitate Azerbaijani instruments, including the kemanche, as well as drums, and two kinds of lute.
Finally, George Lewis brings us home to America, but not to anything like a concert hall, or even an alternative art space. What we get from his piece, starting with referees’ whistles right at the beginning, is basketball, with the voices and rhythms of kids in the black community, with black history not far in the background. This powerfully demonstrates how widely contemporary art music can, and should, range -- though the best demonstration of all is the entire CD, which quite apart from any cultural ideology is, just as music, absolutely irresistible.