Past Project: In Plain Air (2018)

 

On May 17, students from the Charter High School of Architecture + Design joined composer Phyllis Chen and collaborator Ranjit Bhatnagar to help fabricate pipe whistles, custom instruments based on the design of the wood pipes in Opus 150. After touring Christ Church and exploring the organ with organist Parker Kitterman, the CHAD students crossed the street to Neighborhood House to talk to the artists about designing and building instruments and to assemble laser-cut wood components into whistles of various lengths. The slow-drying wood glue meant many of the whistles could not be played during the workshop, but the students will be back in September: the Mobile ICE Organ will appear in one of Chen's movements for In Plain Air.

FringeArts: How does this project fit into your larger career?

 

Phyllis Chen: I have been a pianist since I was five but this has been my first opportunity to explore the organ. As a composer I have gravitated towards cheap, miniature and small objects as musical instruments so working with this new state of the art organ has been a new direction for me, despite it being in the keyboard family. As I enjoy playing and composing for small instruments, finding the organ has begged me to think more about the place in which it lives and how it is part of its surroundings. This has led me to think of ways of incorporating the community and the performers into the space itself.

 

FringeArts: What creative opportunities did you find in composing for Christ Church’s new organ, its bells and its space?

 

Phyllis Chen: While touring the innards of the organ, we saw the various sizes and materials used in creating the pipe whistles.  I saw the opportunity to create some of the smaller pipe whistles and make a miniature mobile organ with ICE performing different pipe whistles by blowing in them. I collaborated with a long-time instrument-maker friend of mine, Ranjit Bhatnagar, where the two of us designed and experimented with different materials to create miniature pipe whistles.

 

FringeArts: What role does the audience play in the piece? What should they know coming in to fully open themselves up to the experience?

 

One of the things that was told to us early on was that this organ is really for the people. I found that to be very exciting and somehow different than what one would think of when hearing about a new organ going into a church. I can’t really say anything to calibrate anyone’s expectations, but for me, I find this event to be a celebration for its “birth” so to speak, and all the people it will bring together in the next century.

 

Read the full interview on the FringeArts blog, here.

Inspired by artist Isaiah Zagar’s colorful mosaics at Philadelphia's Magic Gardens, In Plain Air composer Phyllis Chen collaborated with the Philadelphia community to create over 400 feet of music box strips. On July 8, Magic Gardens cohosted a free public workshop where participants contributed their own one-foot section to Chen’s music box mosaic. Together we explored music boxes, enjoyed performance demonstrations by Chen, and created music by drawing on and punching holes in special music box paper.

 

Strips created during the workshop appeared in the world premiere performances of In Plain Air in September 2018.

The Esther Wideman Memorial Organ

 

At the center of In Plain Air is Christ Church’s new C.B. Fisk pipe organ, Opus 150, dedicated the Esther Wideman Memorial Organ in May 2018. Fisk, working with Christ Church director of music and organist Parker Kitterman, designed a three-manual, 3,099-pipe mechanical action organ that is housed within the church’s historic 1837 organ case by Henry Erben and a new Chaire case on the gallery rail. The process, from design to completion, took three years, including a six-month voicing period, during which Fisk craftspeople, working ten hours a day, six days a week, finely calibrated the instrument to the acoustics of the Christ Church sanctuary.

 

An exciting aspect of commissioning Phyllis Chen and Nathan Davis was giving the artists the opportunity to compose their first work for pipe organ. Between September 2017 and April 2018, as the instrument was installed and voiced, Chen and Davis made regular visits to Philadelphia, working with the organ during its many stages of coming into being. Some movements of In Plain Air were informed by the artists’ experiments and observations during that time.

 

Kitterman, who shared his deep knowledge of organs and organ music with Chen and Davis, was essential to the process of creating In Plain Air and played the organ in the premiere performances on September 22 and 23, 2018.

 

This video by Four/Ten Media tells the story of the Esther Wideman Memorial Organ and In Plain Air’s role as a standard for performances and projects to come.

 

History + Music paired artists-in-residence International Contemporary Ensemble with Christ Church historians for music and storytelling that explored the Revolutionary figures and architecture that inspired In Plain Air composers Phyllis Chen and Nathan Davis.

 

Participants listened to rehearsals, met the artists, and experienced short talks on Christ Church’s iconic bells, its history of grand pipe organs, and famed parishioner Francis Hopkinson—celebrated as a musician, organist, signer of the Declaration of Independence, designer of the American flag, and all-around polymath—whose three-century-old musical inventions and compositions directly inspired several In Plain Air movements.

 

 

Nathan Davis sat down with Christopher Munden and Alyssa Kerper of FringeArts to talk about the pieces that make up In Plain Air and the process leading to the world premiere performances.

FringeArts: How does this project fit into your larger career?

 

Nathan Davis: I have long been fascinated with instruments, such as the organ, that place intermediary mechanical steps between the performer and the sound production. Ten years ago I wrote a piece for Phyllis called “The Mechanics of Escapement” for toy piano and clock chimes that are played by pulling long cords. And other pieces of mine explore the relationship of distance, separation, and communication. This project takes that one step further: the organ is a vast mechanical instrument. My work here is partly on the components of the machine (air, bellows, valves, keys, etc.) and their correlation with the instruments that the organ emulates.

 

FringeArts: How does it fit into International Contemporary Ensemble's mission?

 

Nathan Davis: The project is closely tied to its multiple missions of creating and commissioning new work, building new audiences, and connection with place. 

 

FringeArts: What are some of the musical inspirations you bring to the movements?

 

Nathan Davis:

 

“Inside Voice”: A 10-minute section inspired by the Fisk Organ in a transitional state of becoming. During my November trip to Philadelphia to work with it during installation, many of the ranks were in place, but some were not. Therefore the keys would always produce air through the system of hoses, but when certain stops were engaged (those with no pipes installed) they produced only filtered white noise. It is a wonderful sound, but one that is not playable on the finished organ. Instead, the members of ICE, using their instruments to produce air sounds, form a metaphoric human bellows that is played using virtual valves created electronically. A glimpse inside the workings of a living instrument, this was a moment that will not happen again—or at least not until 150 years from now when this organ is in an advanced state of decay.

 

“Bellarmonic”: Also in November I made detailed recordings and samples of the eleven bells in the Christ Church tower, with the help of my ICE colleagues. In bypassing the carillon mechanism, we are able to make longer sounds that aren’t dependent on the single attack of a clapper. With these I am creating a piece for these bells, closely mic’ed, so that the audience can have the rare and extraordinary experience of hearing these wonderful and historic instruments as they actually sound in the belfry, rather than at a distance. In this piece, I am hoping to evoke something of the “Bellarmonic” which was theorized and prototyped by the same Francis Hopkinson, trying to build on Benjamin Franklin’s glass “armonica”.

 

“Proof Notes”: The slowly shifting harmonies of this work for organ and ensemble of sustaining instruments is inspired by Hopkinson’s process of tuning the harpsichord.

 

Read the full interview on the FringeArts blog, here.