Series to honor composer Bathory-Kitsz

Sep. 28—ELIZABETHTOWN — North Country residents will experience a four-day "DBK immersion" when Piano By Nature opens its 16th Season with "Singing Noise Colors: The Life and Time Signatures of Composer Dennis Báthory-Kitsz."

The engaging series runs Oct. 5 through Sunday, Oct. 8, and five events invite audiences of all ages on an incredible journey into the life and music of one very extraordinary living composer, who is a tireless advocate for contemporary classical music — sometimes referred to as "New Music" or "Nonpop."

DBK has earned numerous accolades from his peers, including 28 ASCAP awards. For six decades, he has been completely fearless in his compositions as he continues to explore new boundaries that many still dare not tread.

Piano By Nature's "Singing Noise Colors" kicks off similar events throughout North America and beyond honoring this extraordinary composer as he celebrates his 75th birthday in the 2023-2024 concert season.

DBK DAY

Thursday, Oct. 5, DBK Day will be held at at Willsboro Central School, where he will work with K-12 students exploring, creating, and storytelling through music. A PBN ensemble will help realize the student works alongside some of DBKs own works in an all-school assembly.

"I like demystifying things," he said.

"From the time I lived in New Jersey back in the 1970s to when I moved to Vermont in '78, I always did that with individuals, with people, with festivals. Then when I came to Vermont, I lived in a house next to the elementary school in this little town of 300 people. So, I would do fun things over there, and then I was hired. I had a six-year program of teaching kids music of all kinds, you know. It was really wacky. We built instruments. We learned how to do recording and learned how to sort of compose in any manner they wanted. One kid did a piano piece. Another one did a piece where home things like vacuum cleaners and mixers and so forth. It was really wild. It was a small town, so we had a lots of opportunity to do fun things."

DBK hopes this WCS engagement opens options for many of the students to explore creativity outside of the traditional music curriculum.

"That they can do stuff a little different," he said.

"They can make their own instruments and they can play unusual things. For example, we're going to do a thing called 'Paper Piece' by a composer by the name of Benjamin Patterson, which involves tearing, crunching crumpling, rumpling, and bumbling, sheets of paper of different kinds and sizes. It's sort of a a classic in the post-Fluxus movement back in the late '60s. It's a great piece because everybody has a good time. It's a huge mess, but it always gets recorded. So when we play back the recording, it sounds like a rainstorm. It sounds like a rainstorm is going and coming. It's fantastic."

The composer will introduce audiences to his theremin.

"Which is basically an instrument that you don't touch," he said.

"You move your hands for the pitches and the volume. I'm going to bring that along and three of the variety of instruments I built over time, which was basically made out of wires and tuning pins. So they can see how to make a little string instrument of various kinds. A couple of the performers from the concert will be there, and they will hear some of the stuff that I've written on paper with notes and so forth."

JERSEY ROOTS

DBK grew up poor with his mother and grandparents in New Jersey.

"We had no music when I was a kid," he said.

"We didn't have a radio or a record player or anything. My family got a radio when I was 12 finally. I was listening to the things that everybody else listened to. I listened to WABC out of New York, which was a big Top 40 station."

Then one day, he pressed the other button on the radio labeled FM.

"I didn't know what that was," he said.

"It just so happened on that radio, the tuning dial across from WABC-AM was WQXR-FM, which was a classical station. So, I started hearing this wild classical music. I had no idea what it was. I never heard a note of classical music in my life, and here was Siegfried's Funeral March by Richard Wagner. I said I don't know what it is, but I want to make that."

After that classical epiphany, DBK got a library job and spent his hard-earned 65 cents an hour to purchase cutout records at local department stores.

"I started listening and building a collection of these things," he said.

"Then I went to an encyclopedia,, and I learned a little about music notation. and finally I went to the high school band director and said, 'Can you teach me to read music?' He gave me one of those looks that said, 'Sure, you don't want to read music. You just want something for your college application.' I could see that in his eyes. He gave me the worst possible instrument you can give a kid, and that was the bass clarinet. It's heavy, and I walked to school, which was a mile. So I had to carry this big damn bass clarinet. I was absolutely dedicated to learning how to read music and how to play."

Right from the start, DBK started composing little pieces.

"Realize because I had no music as a kid, I didn't know that other kids didn't compose," he said.

"I thought everybody composed just like everybody wrote essays and stuff for classes. I thought everybody composed, so stupid me, brought this piece to my band director and I said, 'Can you look at it?' It was a piece for 17 instruments. It was this huge, small orchestra piece. He just looked at me and said, 'Did you write this?' I said, 'Yes-s-s-s.' The next week, he brought it back with corrections. With notes that said, 'You can't do this, you dumb 15-year-old!'

"So, he just let me continue writing and he looked at my pieces. It wasn't until I got to college that I learned not everybody wrote music. So, that's how I got into it. I fell in love with this thing that I heard on the radio. Then, of course, I started Stravinsky.

"The first jazz I heard, believe it or not, was John Coltrane's 'Ascension.' It's a wild, avant-garde rocket that goes on for 40 minutes, and I just fell in love with it. I said, I want to do that, too. Between Stravinsky and Coltrane and a few other composers, I was totally entranced and I wanted to do it."

DBK attended Rutgers University that he said had the "world's worst music department."

"Then," he said.

"There were only six music majors in my class. At the time, it was small and very intellectualized. There was no opportunity to study as a composer. So, I just studied theory. It was largely a bad experience, except for my conducting instructor and my theory instructor. But, it was pretty bad. I got out of there in 1970, and I was relieved to leave and I never wanted to go back into academia."

By day, DBK drove a delivery truck and started his own ensemble in Trenton.

"It was a rusting city in south-central New Jersey," he said.

"It's just blehhh. At the time, it was pretty bad. I started my own ensemble, and then we started growing and we started an arts cooperative. We ended up with about 60 members, and we did avant-garde festivals and all kinds of stuff."

POP-UP PERFORMANCE

On Friday, a Pop-Up Performance, 3:30 p.m. at the Champlain Centre Mall in Plattsburgh will be hosted by Rawson Family Pianos. A PBN ensemble and DBK will perform an afternoon sampling from the upcoming concert programs and be available for some fun and interesting chats on the nature of composition.

"One of the things that I'm good at is writing quickly, writing small pieces fairly quickly," he said.

"So, I used to do at the festivals variously that I had in New Jersey and Vermont, I used to do this thing called 'Music While You Wait.' In this case because of the nature of the spot and everything, we have to get their stuff in advance. But I will open the box and pick out the things (poems) at 9 o'clock in the morning. By 3:30 in the afternoon, I will have the pieces done. They will be rehearsed and they will be performed."

INFORMANCE

On Friday, Oct. 6, an Informance will be held at 7 p.m. at the Hand House, 8273 River St., in Elizabethtown.

Led by the composer himself and with a PBN ensemble, this relaxed and interactive "deep dive" performance will showcase specific works to demonstrate some of the compositional pathways DBK has followed over the past six decades. Conversation will highlight history, music, math, rural issues, and encourage a dynamic Q&A.

"It gives me an opportunity to talk about each piece," he said.

"They will present the piece, and I will talk about. There will be questioning. It will be interactive. It will be fun. That's talking and interacting and getting responses and reactions and seeing what people think of stuff and see I can communicate what my intention with the pieces was and whether or not the reception and the intention match, which is always a question."

CONCERT I

On Saturday, Oct. 7, at 7 p.m. at the Hand House, an evening program features DBK's works performed in combinations from solo to quartets, from acoustic to electronic, vocal to instrumental.

"It includes some piano music and songs and also includes electronic music, I prefer to say electroacoustic because everyone of my pieces develops out of original acoustic sound," he said.

"It's not purely electronic. It's modified electronically, but the source material is electroacoustic."

DBK's electro edge was honed in the "intermedia" air of the late 1960s.

"There were a lot of composers doing this stuff," he said.

"When I was buying these cutout records at the department store, there were pieces by Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Morton Subotnick and other people. I had met Pauline Oliveros did electronics in college in '68. So with all of this sort of stuff around me, I started doing electronic music by raiding the Princeton dump for parts. And, I built stuff. It was a goldmine for people looking for technology because they were wealthy. They threw things out rather than repair them, so I was able to pick up tape recorders. I was able to pick up equipment that I could just rip the parts out of and make private little synthesizers for myself."

As a kid, DBK tore things that didn't work in his household apart. Sometimes, he left the device on and touched things to see what would happen.

"Besides me getting shocked, which happened a lot," he said.

"Then as a high schooler, I got an RCA tube manual and read it to figure out how tubes worked. Then solid-state stuff was happening at the time, too. So there were these little discarded transistor radios, and I played with those. So eventually, I got a feel for how electronics worked and I got some books on it and read them. I was able to build these little circuits out of these parts I got from the Princeton dump.

CONCERT II

On Sunday, Oct. 8 at 3 p.m. at the Hand House, an afternoon program of DBK's works will be once again performed in combinations from solo to quartets, from acoustic to electronic, vocal to instrumental.

"It's different material but it's the same format, electroacoustic pieces will all be while the audience is sitting down, during intermission, and while they are leaving," he said.

"A couple of the pieces are the same, but for the most part, they're different in the two concerts, so that people can come to both concerts and hear new material. The oldest piece on the program is on Saturday's program and that's from 1967, a solo piano piece, straight up to 2021. That's the last dated piece they're doing."

Email: rcaudell@pressrepublican.com

Twitter@RobinCaudell