Author: spencer-peterson

In 2009, when young adults everywhere were happy just to be gainfully employed, Carl Anderson was trying to write the next pop-country megahit. The 22-year-old Virginia native was recruited as a ghostwriter by Ash Street Music after following his erstwhile girlfriend and collaborator Carleigh Nesbit down to Nashville. A few times a week, Anderson would meet with other songwriters to compose a chart-topper, which, in his words, often felt “pretty pointless,” and usually amounted to “hanging out for an hour and grabbing lunch somewhere.” Less than a year later, with a few industry contacts and co-writing credits to his name, Anderson pulled the plug on his ghostwriting career and moved back to Charlottesville. 

Singer-songwriter Carl Anderson, who debuted as a solo act last year with the EP 20-Something Blues, releases his first full-length, Wolftown, this Saturday at the Southern. Publicity Photo.

There was a time when giving up on Nashville dreams meant giving up altogether for a young singer-songwriter, but if Anderson’s first full-length album, Wolftown, is any indication, keeping his own name on his songs might have been the best career decision Anderson ever made. Recorded in a week at White Star Sound in Louisa, Anderson’s debut is a testament to the virtues of self-releasing. Why wait for a label or songwriting credit when you can put out something strong and let the support come to you?

Wolftown arrives almost a year on the heels of Anderson’s first EP, 20-Something Blues, whose hurtling title track casts youthful angst as a boxcar-jumping Dust Bowl narrative. Anderson admits that the song has become “more and more ironic in the year since it was written,” but as easy as its title is to bash, “20-Something Blues” is a cool, calculated, utterly un-whiney anthem to aimless early adulthood, and in the same vein, Wolftown is thematically youthful without being off-putting. The love songs want to buy her a ring, the quiet barstool lamentations simply want, but there’s a spareness to Anderson’s songwriting that gives these expressions an ageless quality. He would rather repeat a verse than mess up a good one, and whether this is risk-aversion or austerity, the results are what make Anderson’s brand of country so pleasant on the ears.

Anderson’s full band, which appeared with him at The Festy in October, shines most on “1945,” the liveliest song on the album. (No relation to the Neutral Milk Hotel track, but it’s similarly attention-grabbing and ear-wormy.) If Anderson were ghostwriting this song for anyone, it would be for a Being There-era Jeff Tweedy; it’s a punchy, fraught love lyric that whets your appetite for more like it, acting as a foil for the low-key, traditional country songs that make up the rest of Wolftown, of which “Don’t Stop Trying” stands out, recalling the muted urgency of Ryan Adam’s “Kindness.” 

In addition to playing bass in Anderson’s band, Stewart Myers of White Star Sound also produced the album, often recording with microphones set in chimneys and old radio horns. “We sort of approached everything backwards,” said Anderson. “We knew at the beginning that we were at risk of making a singer-songwriter album that sounded too much like one, so we wanted to mess up the sound some, without changing the essence of the songs as they were written.” At least on the first few listens, it’s hard to hear evidence of techniques like this on Wolftown. Aside from the other-worldly organ that opens up “Hold Me,” there isn’t anything there you wouldn’t expect from an alt-country singer-songwriter. But the upshot of Anderson’s controlled approach to making songs is the polish with which he pulls them off.

Wolftown, which is named after Anderson’s Madison County hometown, sees release this Saturday at the Southern, after which Anderson plans on doing some East Coast touring until he can afford to bring the band with him. And though it takes its name from where Anderson grew up, the album unfolds like a guide to writing understated country hits: keep it simple, tell a story, and get to the chorus, but not too fast. But at the heart of Anderson’s songs is an emotional urgency that might have slipped through the cracks of those Nashville hit-writing sessions. Which is why we’re glad to have him back.

Troy is Burning may be the first play written by an undergraduate to make it into the UVA Drama Department’s main-stage season in 25 years, but its first step toward production was just another day in the undergraduate grind for fourth-year student Matthew Minnicino. Last spring, Minnicino needed something to bring in to a playwriting workshop, so he decided to rewrite the beginning of a play he wrote in high school. The class was impressed, as was UVA associate professor and head of playwriting Doug Grissom, so Minnicino rewrote his entire script over the course of the workshop and an ensuing independent study with Grissom, which culminated in a few staged readings with students and local actors. After what Minnicino refers to as “a number of lucky coincidences and a lot of outside encouragement,” his retelling of the fall of Troy was selected for UVA Drama’s 2011 production season.

This Wednesday night, one of the youngest playwrights ever to set the stage at the Helms Theatre debuts with one of the oldest stories in the Western canon. In Troy is Burning, Minnicino re-imagines the final days of the Trojan War with modern voices and post-modern anachronism. “Point of interest,” says Agamemnon to his Greek cohort in an early scene, “Tomorrow, we will have been fighting this war for exactly 10 years. And we’re almost out of shrimp fried rice.” 

If jokes like this come off as flippant given the source material, it’s because Minnicino isn’t out to prove anything about his classics knowledge. Though he owns multiple translations of The Iliad and The Aeneid, Minnicino is more interested in “getting the soul of the thing right” than making good on obscure classical references (although the script does that in full). “The question I wanted to get at, is why was that story told back then, and how does that relate to why it’s being told now?” he said over the phone last week. “How are the issues they were dealing with thousands of years ago related to the issues that I want my audience to deal with?”

Often, Minnicino probes the horrors of war via witticism, only to later unleash them on his characters to greater irony and effect. When Deiphobus tells an insecure Helen of Troy he thinks she’s the most beautiful woman in the world, she avers that “That’s also technically true,” but her final reconciliation with her vengeful husband is a shade away from heartbreaking. And while musings on war from the mind of a 22-year-old may be hard to take seriously, Troy is Burning avoids overstepping its bounds by focusing its energies on complicating larger-than-life characters and examining the nature of myth. As the Hours explain to Pyrrhus, “To be here. To never get here. To always be here. To be born here. To die here. This is Troy, son of Achilles, where you will live forever.”

In what must be an attempt to lighten an overly tragic season, the publicity for Minnicino’s show bills it as a satire, and although Troy is Burning has a cheeky streak, it adroitly follows a path laid out by the great tragedians. “The story of the fall of Troy is not a lighthearted romp,” Minnicino said. “The comedy is there to keep people realizing that tragedy is mixed with comedy all the time. That’s just how the world works. The absurd is often juxtaposed with the dark elements of our lives.” 

Whatever his plays become known for down the road, Minnicino has been a gregarious presence in the UVA Drama and English departments for the past three-and-a-half years. Every undergraduate theater junkie seems to know him, or know a good story about him (this writer once saw him play violin in a shirt, tie and boxers in a wordless one-act prelude to another student’s thesis performance). 

As an actor, Minnicino was either precocious or presumptuous enough to try out for a supporting role in his own play, and gifted enough to land it. For Minnicino, acting in the show while UVA professor and head of acting Richard Warner directs has been an eye-opening process. When, in his second year, Minnicino wrote and directed a full-length student-produced play called Persephone, he found that occupying both roles didn’t give him enough critical distance from what he had written, and that his actors didn’t have enough freedom to interpret their characters. Minnicino said the current process has allowed him to “find the balance between the story I wanted to tell and the story that was performable,” and that working with Warner and the actors on tweaking and interpreting lines has allowed Troy is Burning to take on meanings that he didn’t have in mind when writing and workshopping it.

The first stage direction in Troy is Burning is a directive to “embrace confusion.” And this is something that Minnicino and his explosive play have in common: They revel in multifaceted roles.

Live music is the great unifier. Whether it’s Madonna singing “music makes the people come together,” or John Cage describing a composition by Lou Harrison (“Listening to it, we become an ocean”), the common denominator of concerts both lowbrow and high is the promise of becoming part of something bigger than yourself.

Composer Sergei Tcherepnin (pictured) collaborated with artist Woody Sullender on what Sullender calls a “structural gesture at looking at music as a verb.” Sullender is best known for his experimental banjo performances, which explore the identity politics of playing the instrument.

Of course, for every mosh pit there’s a back row full of people who aren’t as enamored with the ego-dissolving experience of joining a crowd. Some of us are born active audience members, and some have audience participation thrust upon us. Last week at The Bridge/PAI, I fell into the latter category, when Sergei Tcherepnin handed me a jury-rigged electronic soundbox in the middle of an experimental performance with fellow Brooklyn-based artist Woody Sullender. 

In a press release, Tcherepnin and Sullender described their show—which had its first performance at Solloway Gallery in Brooklyn on November 4 before being brought to town by UVA PhD students Kevin Davis and Chris Peck—as a means of “considering music not only as content but also as social activity,” through constructing “a site for listening, touching, and direct engagement with sonic material. As objects and bodies are reorganized in space, musical and physical structures emerge and disappear.” Heady stuff, and though the duo began its show with no introduction save for a suggestion that we move our chairs from the middle of the room, the “objects,” it soon became clear, were a number of speakers embedded in cardboard boxes, fed by an analogue synthesizer (the Serge Modular Music System, which was developed by Tcherepnin’s father, American composer Serge Tcherepnin). 

The “bodies” reorganizing in space would be ours, as we slowly followed the duo’s lead, arranging the speakers into stacks, opening and closing their cardboard shells to vary the levels of the droning, sonic wind that bellowed from each. When first handed one, I glanced around at my fellow attendees, milling about in the dimmed space of the Bridge, and held it up to my ear like a conch shell, listening to waves of synthesized violins build and crash.

Tcherepnin and Sullender flitted about purposefully, adjusting levels on a laptop, building and balancing box forts, occasionally leaning flattened boxes against stationary attendees. The pair worked almost reverently, stopping every so often to give one of us a nod for holding a box or keeping a stack from falling over. Eventually, a tangible beat rose up from the sonic wind, and we found ourselves standing around a mountain of cardboard boxes that was belting out a techno remix of “Siberian Knights” by Electro 22.

Sullender, when pressed, assured me that he wasn’t very interested in “getting didactic” about an experimental piece in its infancy, but called the performance a “structural gesture at looking at music as a verb.” If Sullender and Tcherepnin’s piece was a single verb, it could be one as schmaltzy and feel-good as “cooperate,” but nonetheless the effect was powerful: abstract art inspiring tactile, human gestures of group synergy. The techno continued when the lights went up, and the piece didn’t technically end until the conversation died, which was undoubtedly a ploy to keep us from feeling the need to applaud. If none of us thought to, it’s because we didn’t feel like an audience.

In 1958, composer John Cage gave a lecture titled “Indeterminacy” that would be remembered as a milestone in post-war avant-garde composition. Sitting at a desk in front of an auditorium of people, he read a series of randomly ordered one-minute stories to the accompaniment of electronic scratches, distorted recordings of music and the occasional mashed piano chord. According to choreographer Bill T. Jones, whose latest work is based on “Indeterminacy,” Cage was effectively teaching composers to “get their own taste out of the way.”

Choreographer Bill T. Jones leads rehearsal for a work-in-progress showing of Story/Time, the capstone to his UVA residency.

In Story/Time, which previewed at Culbreth Theater last week as the capstone to Jones’ three-year UVA residency, Jones sits at a desk and reads 70 one-minute stories while the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company moves around him as a large LED keeps time. For the piece, Jones wrote a total of 140 stories about his life and choreographed a dance for each. Before the company begins rehearsing for a single performance, 70 of the vignettes are picked in random order, and a dance is created from what Jones calls a “menu of movement events,” around which UVA composer Ted Coffey arranges music from a palette of experimental sounds.  

If Jones is getting his own taste out of the way in channeling Cage, he’s doing it at a time when his taste has never been so publicly lauded. In 2007, Jones received the Tony Award for Best Choreography for his work on Spring Awakening, and last year he received it again for Fela!. Though retired from dancing, he still leads the ever-acclaimed Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, which he started with his late partner in 1982. At age 59, 17 years after receiving a MacArthur “genius” grant, Jones is still relevant in the world of experimental dance, a domain that requires reinvention with each new work. With Story/Time, which, like Cage’s modernist project, is both formally random and strictly structured, Jones changes the game by playing it with dice. 

“It’s said that Cage didn’t give a damn about audiences,” said Jones, leaning against a table in the Culbreth Theater lobby between rehearsals for Story/Time. He is warm and generous with interviews, and has a way of letting your simple questions lead to his open-ended, contemplative ones. “I do care about them. Because I’m a showman, I want to offer something with emotions and connections. So can you have it both ways? Can you employ a system that supposedly frees you from your tastes and expectations and at the same time hope it’s going to land in a pleasing way?”

The stories that make up Story/Time are frank, clear-eyed anecdotes from Jones’ life, as precise, lyrical and aphoristic as prose poems. The experience of being hit pell-mell with one after the other, while trying to figure out their relationships to the complicated, often beautiful dances on-stage, suggests that Story/Time is a piece about memory and the construction of meaning. One story about Jones’ early life ends “Gus Jones, my father, used to say ‘You live and learn. You die and forget it all.’”

In another story, Jones tells of being taken around Charlottesville by an old driver, and describes the way the man brandished a green apple and “closed his eyes soulfully before taking the first bite.” After the show, Jones noted that he had made sure the Charlottesville story made its way into this showing of Story/Time, and that this hedge against random order wasn’t the only one in the show. “John Cage is my invisible mentor,” said Jones, “but that doesn’t meant I have to follow slavishly. We push back a little bit. Sometimes I roll the dice and it says we do this order or have this many people on stage, but after working on the piece for about a year I’m beginning to push back, making more aesthetic decisions based on intuition. In other words, in a more traditional way.”

Recurring acquaintances and subjects run through Jones’ stories, a few of which  reflect upon his relationship to Cage. One of the final ones in the show told of how, when Jones began composing the pieces for Story/Time, he felt as if he heard Cage’s voice even while he was writing. “Eventually,” the vignette ends, “I stopped hearing his stories, and this disturbed me.” For the audience, as well as for Jones, Story/Time is about coming to know someone through his art. Jones isn’t afraid to make himself vulnerable, and his troupe follows him into even the darker regions of memory with gusto and virtuosity. There is a certain dissonance between the narration and the dancers interpreting it, but during occasional minute-long intervals of silence, the piece is allowed to breathe, the movement becomes the focus, and Coffey’s composition gets to lead, either through eerie stretches of ambient noise or full-on techno movements. When the clock hit 70:00, Jones looked up from his script, gave the audience a short, charged stare, and the lights went down abruptly.

While Story/Time continues to take shape, Jones has been asked to produce a piece about “a major rhythm and blues star,” and has been talking with “a major hip-hop star” about collaborating on a Broadway show. For those who want to speculate, Jones said of the unnamed hip-hop star: “He’s done sold-out stadiums, he’s done fashion, and now he wants to do Broadway. I appreciate what he does, I appreciate the mash-up, but so many of these guys flex these big media muscles and get caught up in the flow of new product, new product. I want to say ‘Can you slow down for a moment, can you be small and direct?’”

In a way, “small and direct” is exactly what Jones is in Story/Time. He sits down and tells sharp, poignant stories for an hour and change, letting his dancers complicate their meanings and allowing the overall sense to arise organically. “I do it,” he said, “because I want to know what it means to do it. And is there an audience for it? Well, we’ll see.” If last Friday’s turnout for the final show in the three-year tour of Serenade/The Proposition is any indication, Jones has nothing to worry about.