A pair of violinists will be featured in the Symphony's Concert à la Carte series at the Art Museum. Artist-in-residence Christina Fong will perform on March 14 and acting concertmaster Marina Brubaker will be featured on March 28.

A graduate of Northwestern University, Christina Fong joined the Grand Rapids Symphony in the 1988-89 season as a member of the first violin section and was a featured soloist earlier this season on the Casual Classics series. Fong will be accompanied by Chicago pianist Paul Hersey in a performance of Charles Ives's Sonata No. 2 and Barber's Canzona, which the composer transcribed from the second movement of his piano concerto. Fong will be joined by her husband percussionist Glenn Freeman, to perform Michael Twomey's Memos for Timpani and Violin.

A graduate of Wichita State University and Yale School of Music, Marina Brubaker came to Grand Rapids last September and will serve as acting concertmaster of the Symphony through May, when she returns to her position with the Houston Symphony. Brubaker, who also was featured earlier this season on the Casual Classics series, has held positions with the Fort Worth Symphony and the orchestras of New Haven, Austin and Wichita. She will be joined for the recital by local pianist Richard Ridenour and her sister, Chicago Symphony violist Catherine Brubaker. The concert will include Stravinsky's Suite Italienne, an arrangement the composer made for violin and piano of part of his Pulcinella Suite, and Mozart's Duo in Bb for violin and viola. Both concerts begin at noon and are free.

On-the-Town
March 1991 (page 12)
by Melissa Madura

Women's History Month

The second Concert à la Carte will be held on March 27 and will feature violinist Christina Fong in a salute to the American students of Nadia Boulanger. Fong will be joined for this varied concert of all 20th-century music by a host of colleagues, including pianist Deborah Gross, who will double on the organ and as a speaker, violinist David Wheeler, violist Mary Jane Slawinski, cellist Karen Krummel, pianist Paul Hersey and violinist Diane McElfish, who also will serve as a speaker. Featured on the concert are Aaron Copland's Nocturne and his Ukelele Serenade (both written in 1926), Philip Glass's Solo Violin Music (Knee Play No. 2) from Einstein on the Beach (1976) and his Company (1984) and Donald Erb's Three Poems for Violin and Piano (1987).

Grand Rapids Magazine
February 1993 (page 46)

The Wrecking Ball
UICA/Race Street Gallery

The Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts has called the one-story brick structure on Race Street "home" for 10 years. This month, however, the institute vacates the premises in favor of temporary quarters on its way to a new facility in the Heartside district of Grand Rapids.

The last events UICA has scheduled at Race Street include its annual fund-raiser Jump Start, on Feb. 6, during which the works of more than 100 local artists will be auctioned.

On Feb. 12 and 13, Deanna Morse will present a benefit screening of her recent film and video work at UICA, to help underwrite moving costs. Morse, an associate professor in the School of Communications at Grand Valley State University, has exhibited her work internationally. Her animations are represented in various metropolitan collections and have been seen on Sesame Street and Romper Room.

The grand finale will be The Eviction Concert -- A Moving Experience, featuring Christina Fong's Music for Loud Violin. Accompanied by Nancy Benedetti's slide projections, the music includes the world premiere performance of Water from the Moon, a work commissioned by UICA from local composer Bob Shechtman.

It's sure to bring the house down.

On-the-Town
February 1993 (page 7)
by Melissa Madura

A Moving Musical Experience

Violinist Christina Fong and photographer Nancy Benedetti will join forces for a performance on February 15 titled Music for Loud Violin, or The Eviction Concert -- A Moving Experience, at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts' long-time home at 1064 Race Street NE. The event will be the last concert at UICA's Race St. facility, as the organization has been forced from its home by the expansion of Consumer's Power facilities. They will be moving into an interim facility in February, where they will launch a capital campaign to raise funds to renovate and occupy the former Harris Furniture building on Division St. More information about the interim facility and programming there will be included in the March issue of On-the-Town.

Fong has developed a program for the farewell event that she hopes will help weaken the walls before the wrecking ball has to do its job. An artist-in-residence with the Grand Rapids Symphony, Fong's concert will include works by two of this century's most influential composers, Philip Glass and John Cage. Performing on amplified violin in front of slides by Nancy Benedetti, Fong will play Glass's 1967 composition Strung Out and the late John Cage's 1985 work Eight Whiskus.

The concert also will include two premieres, a world premiere of Grand Rapids composer Bob Shechtman's Water from the Moon, and a U.S. premiere of Michael Nyman's Z00 Caprices. Shechtman's work was commissioned by UICA, the first time the local multi-disciplinary arts organization has commissioned a piece of music. The commission demonstrates UICA's commitment to providing support for innovative local artists in all genres. Michael Nyman is best known as the composer for the films of Peter Greenaway, including The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, The Draughtsman's Contract, Drowning by Numbers and Prospero's Books. The work that will be performed at the UICA concert, Z00 Caprices, is based on the score of Greenaway's film A Zed and Two Noughts.

The eclectic multi-media concert, which will begin at 8pm on February 15, should provide an appropriately contemporary atmosphere for a farewell to what has become Grand Rapids' most beloved alternative venue.

The Grand Rapids Press
February 14, 1993 (page F1)
by Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk

Fong to send UICA's Race Street era out with a 'Loud Violin'

Joshua and his hosts needed trumpets and seven days to blow down the walls of Jericho, but Christina Fong may manage just as well in two hours with a violin, an amplifier and four works by contemporary composers.

Fong's performance Monday evening at the Race Street Gallery is expected to bring the house down in more ways than one.

Unofficially dubbed The Eviction Concert -- A Moving Experience, Monday's program is the final event at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts' headquarters on Race Street.

"This performance should serve to weaken the structure in preparation for the wrecking ball," said UICA Director Marjorie Kuipers. Consumers Power Co., owner of the Race Street property, plans to expand its substation facilities at the site.

Titled Music for Loud Violin, the program of music for unaccompanied violin includes the premiere of Water from the Moon by Grand Rapids composer Bob Shechtman.

Earplugs, however, will not be necessary.

"It isn't going to deafen a person. It's certainly not as loud as a full band playing," Fong said. "But it is loud."

The concert also includes works by contemporary American composer Philip Glass, avant-garde composer John Cage, and film composer Michael Nyman.

Inspired by the remembrance of the past, Shechtman's latest composition is titled Water from the Moon.

"It's a Javanese expression designed to express something you can never have," Shechtman said. "I just thought it was a very poetic turn of language, so I thought I'd write a piece with that title."

Influenced by the mythical legend from Ulysses of the siren's song -- a sound of such beauty it lured sailors to their deaths upon rocky shores -- the five-movement work's first, third and fifth movements are lyrically expressive and make use of the amplifier's echo effect to create the illusion of hearing several notes played at once.

"I wanted Chris to be able to set some things in motion and then play against them." Shechtman explained.

The second and fourth movements were influenced by popular dances, the soft shoe and the jitterbug.

"The past is something one can never have," Shechtman said.

"Certainly in my life there were lots of siren's songs. And jitterbug songs I associate with big band music and my high school days."

A professor of music at Grand Valley State University, Shechtman was commissioned by UICA last fall to compose the work.

"I poke fun at the minimalists in this piece," he said. "I've minimalized jitterbug melodies. I don't know if it comes across, but hopefully I'll get some smiles."

Glass's Strung Out is one of his early compositions in the cyclical minimalist style he uses today. The title makes fun of the 1960s drug cliché and describes certain aspects of the composition.

"The music is laid out in a long, long line," Fong said. "It lasts about 20 minutes, and the violinist pretends to collapse at the end."

Cage's Eight Whiskus, written in 1980, is one of the composer's later works. Influenced by minimalism and "prepared piano" -- the avant-garde technique of placing objects on a piano's strings to alter the sound -- Cage elicits new and unusual sounds from the violin.

"It's prepared violin," Fong said. "You can't really prepare a violin like a piano, but there are strange attacks, and it's serialized."

Nyman, best known as the composer of such film scores as The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, The Draughtsman's Contract and Drowning by Numbers, uses a variety of musical elements in his works.

"He takes a lot of pop elements and things that are out there and treats them in a classical way," Fong said.

Three of the four works call specifically for amplified violin, and Fong uses a small microphone to amplify the natural sound of her Becker violin.

"You can amplify yourself so you sound like the room you want to be in," she said. The entire performance will be accompanied by simultaneous slide projections created by photographer Nancy Benedetti.

None of the works was composed with slide projections in mind, but Fong said the multimedia show adds to the music.

"I always try to use all forms of art when I perform," Fong said. "I don't think of the slides as interfering. I think of it as enhancing the qualities of the music."

In her fifth season with the Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestra, Fong teaches music at Grand Valley State University and plays with several local groups, including Ethnoeccentric, a new music trio.

Last year, Shechtman wrote a new piece for Ethnoeccentric and enjoyed it so much, he was pleased when Fong asked him to write Water from the Moon for this concert.

"I had been hoping to write a piece just for her," he said. "She's an amazing player. Imaginative, very open to new ideas."

Fong said she's excited to premier Shechtman's latest work.

"It's all amplified and slightly manipulated with reverb and echo," Fong said. "It's rhythmically free, and it's really a piece."

UICA is remodeling its new facility in the former Mutual Federal Savings and Loan Association building on Monroe Mall and plans to reopen in May. The current office telephone number will be transferred to the new location, Kuipers said.

Grand Rapids Press
February 16, 1993 (page B4)
by Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk

Fong engages audience in entertaining UICA farewell

Who says modern music is boring?

Not Christina Fong, nor Bob Shechtman, nor any members of the audience that filled the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts on Monday night.

An unaccompanied violin, an amplifier and music so new the ink's still wet on the page, made for an entertaining and enlightening farewell to an old home as the UICA prepares to move to a new site downtown.

Though there were several interesting pieces on the multimedia program, the premiere of Shechtman's Water From the Moon was the highlight.

An introspective work, the piece alternates three expressive, almost wistful movements called "Siren's Songs" with two movements that quote liberally from such big band jazz classics as In the Mood and I've Got a Gal in Kalamazoo.

Accompanied by photographer Nancy Benedetti's projected slides of the moon, the songs alternated from nostalgic and wistful to angry and demanding to resigned and accepting.

Fong deftly handled the demanding score that explored the full range of the instrument. Her conclusion on the third movement, titled Siren's Song II was particularly effective for its blend of powerful bowing leading to a gentle ending.

The second and fourth movements featured snippets of big band classics twisted in an unearthly fashion -- something like a space-age Glenn Miller with an attitude. One flaw in the performance was what probably was supposed to be a relaxed swing feel came across rather straight in Fong's playing. Violinists don't get much chance to swing. When they try, it generally shows.

The charm of the Grand Rapids composer's work was its use of the amplifier's echo chamber to setup chords and multiple-note effects not normally possible for one violinist to play. To his credit, Shechtman uses the echo, not merely as an attention-getting special effect, but as a serious compositional device. To her credit, Fong took great care to bring out the chords, giving the notes plenty of space to breathe and expand.

Philip Glass's Strung Out, a 1967 composition, opened the concert. The title is most appropriate, both for the droning repetition in its 20-minute length and for its reference to the 1960s drug subculture.

Former flower children who turned onto drugs and tuned into serious music in the '60s say marijuana seemed to make classical music go by slower. Glass apparently was after that pharmacological/musicological effect without actually having to pass out wacky weed and print the concert program on rolling papers. Still, the challenge for the listener -- who isn't on drugs -- is to stay interested. The task for the performer is to hold the audience's interest, and it's a challenge Fong met.

Benedetti's accompanying slides of various views of a strand of rope, were particularly effective here. The subtly changing shapes and patterns and differing angles and lighting gave an added insight to the performance.

Z00 Caprices, a 1986 work by English composer Michael Nyman, received its American premiere Monday, Fong said.

The demanding nine movement work is quite a stretch, calling for aggressive attacks, moments of of melodic lyricism and a great deal of stamina. The work also calls for the performer to make some sense out of movement subtitles such as Swan Rot, Bisocosis Populi and Vermeer's Wife Watches Prawns.

John Cage's Eight Whiskus, which opened the second half, is something of a study on how the violinist attacks the strings. The eight short movements focus almost entirely on color and timbre.

While Benedetti displayed slides of cats in various states of repose, Fong played a score that suddenly took on the aural characteristics of a cat snarling and scratching, creeping and stalking, batting a bit of yarn or unsheathing its claws. No doubt without the slides, many of the hearers would have misunderstood Cage's intent.

On-the-Town
April 1993 (page 5)
by Melissa Madura

Contemporary Concert

Violinist Christina Fong will be the featured soloist in the Grand Rapids Symphony's Concert à la Carte series on April 28. The Grand Rapids Symphony violinist, who is fast gaining a reputation locally as a champion of contemporary music, was featured recently in the final concert at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts' Race St. location. One of the most popular pieces on her Music for Loud Violin concert that served as UICA's farewell was Z00 Caprices by British composer Michael Nyman. A writer as well as composer, Nyman got his start composing contemporary music for an eccentric street band made up of medieval instruments. Although he is a prolific composer of opera, chamber music, vocal music and dance scores, Nyman is best known for his collaborations with filmmaker Peter Greenaway.

For her Concert à la Carte, Fong will team with Symphony colleagues pianist Deborah Gross and violinist Ion Corneanu to present three of Nyman's works. She will open with a U.S. premiere performance of his Miserere Paraphrase, which was written for Greenaway's film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. She will continue with Z00 Caprices, a virtuoso work for solo violin based on the film score Nyman wrote for Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts. The concert will conclude with the Michigan premiere of Childs Play, from the Lucinda Childs ballet Portraits in Reflection.

The concert will be held at Fountain Street Church at noon on April 28 and is free.

On-the-Town
April 1994 (page 48)
by Christopher Scapelliti

The Artist, the Composer, His Musicians, and Their Collaboration

UICA premieres works by Peter Greenaway and Michael Nyman

Surrealist painter and fantastical filmmaker Peter Greenaway once said, "research kills the imaginative excitement … too much concern with facts bogs you down with a desire to get things right and correct" -- a perfect explanation for the meandering thoughts and drippingly sensual imagery that mark the English director's impressive films. He has collaborated with composer Michael Nyman (who scored Jane Campion's Academy Award winner, The Piano ) on the films The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Prospero's Books, Drowning by Numbers, and A Zed and Two Noughts.

The work of this duo will make its Grand Rapids premiere in The Peter Greenaway/Michael Nyman Event, presented by UICA (Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts) on April 10 at 2pm. The show is a marathon live concert and film event with the short films of Greenaway and the live music of Nyman, performed for the first time in the United States by some of Grand Rapids' most progressive contemporary musicians: Gwen Faasen, voice; Christina Fong, violin; Mark Thomas, keyboards; and the musicians of UICA. The screening includes A Walk Through H, about the journey a soul lakes at the moment of death, "H" being heaven or hell; Vertical Features Remake, a mockumentary about the Institute of Reclamation and Restoration, which sets out to reconstruct a film by a recently deceased filmmaker; and Act of God, a chronicle of humans who have been struck by lightning. 

Grand Rapids Press
April 3, 1994 (page F4)
by John Douglas

Event features three film shorts never shown here

A very unusual event is taking place next Sunday at 2pm at the Ladies Literary Club, 61 Sheldon Blvd. SE. The Peter Greenaway/Michael Nyman event, a mixture of live music and motion pictures, will be sponsored by the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts.

On the screen will be three short films, by director Peter Greenaway, entitled A Walk Through H, Vertical Features Remake and Act of God. Greenaway makes very eccentric films, of which there can be no doubt if you've seen any of his feature films, such as The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, or The Draughtman's Contract. The three short films to be presented as part the program have never played before in Grand Rapids.

Composer Michael Nyman has often provided the music for Greenaway's films and, in fact, it's difficult to imagine Greenaway without Nyman. And Nyman was complimented several times this year on the Academy Award show for his score for The Piano.

Nyman's music, which is considered to be minimalist in structure, will be presented at this event before and in between the films, with Gwen Faasen providing vocals; Christina Fong on violin; and Mark Thomas on piano, along with a small group of musicians.

Grand Rapids Press
April 8, 1994 (page B8)
by John Douglas

Three movies showcase composing, direction

It's going to be an afternoon of music and movies Sunday in this program sponsored by the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts at the Ladies Literary Club, 61 Sheldon Blvd. SE.

Three short films by director Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and The Draughtman's Contract) will be presented at 2pm along with compositions by composer Michael Nyman performed live by a group that includes Gwen Faasen doing vocals, Christina Fong on violin and Mark Thomas on keyboard.

Nyman has long been the composer of choice for Greenaway and most recently composed the music for Jane Campion's The Piano.

Nyman also provides music for the three films included in this program:Act of God, A Walk Through H and Vertical Features Remake.

Act of God is something of a documentary (or is it?) on people who've been hit by lightning. If there is any truth in this film, it's downplayed by Greenaway in favor of wonderful visuals and subtle and not-so-subtle digs at the complacent British attitudes toward even a major event such as being struck by lightning.

A Walk Through H is very weird. It has something to do with ornithology but I can't say what. The film is made up almost entirely of shots of watercolors done by Greenaway which are supposed to represent maps collected over the years. Much of the content is supposed to be taken from a bird book written by Tulse Luper (more on him later).

The watercolors are really quite nice to look at, which is helpful since that's about all we see in the film. A Walk Through H does have some brilliant narration that seems to signify nothing. But it sounds like many narrations we've heard over the years in other educational films.

Tulse Luper pops up again in Vertical Features Remake but this time he's some kind of theorist who supposedly once made a film about his theory -- but it was lost. The film is remade by academics by using Luper's recently-discovered notes.

As soon as the film is remade, more information is discovered and the film has to be remade again. The problem is all the versions are rather boring. Vertical Features Remake is a satire on academic research and it will test the endurance of Greenaway fans -- of which I am one. I couldn't help hoping this one would be over soon.

On a purely intellectual basis, one can see from looking at these early films that Greenaway has always been fascinated by numbers. Plus the kinds of watercolors that appear in both A Walk Through H and Vertical Features Remake were evident in Prospero's Books, a recent Greenaway feature.

So -- Greenaway and Nyman. If you are well disposed toward them, you really should consider going to this showing to see if there's a point of satiation provided in an afternoon of minimalist presentations.

One thing is for sure. Greenaway and Nyman march to their own drummers.

Grand Rapids Press
May 12, 1994 (page D9)
by Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk

Musicians display their expertise in new works

There's no question that hearing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony or seeing Lerner and Loewe's My Fair Lady for the umpteenth time is fun -- so long as the performance is good.

What's exciting about hearing or seeing new works is the thrill of discovering something entirely new -- as well as hearing or seeing a good performance.

Violinist Christina Fong, one of the area's biggest champions of new music, and pianist Deborah Gross premiered two works by Grand Rapids composers Robert Shechtman and Roelof Alexander Bijkerk in the season finale of the Grand Rapids Symphony's Concert à la Carte series in Fountain Street Church.

In a sense, Shechtman's Sonata for Violin and Piano isn't all that new because he wrote it in 1964 at age 25. But Wednesday's program was the first time it was performed.

The two compositions couldn't be more different, which made for an interesting performance by the musicians, both members of the Grand Rapids Symphony.

Shechtman's 25-minute sonata, in two movements, is a largely atonal work that explores variations on melodic, harmonic and rhythmic fragments throughout. Somewhat spacious and atmospheric, it nevertheless had several sections that were quite intimate.

To the extent that the sonata wasn't full of fast tempos and blazing passages, it might appear fairly simple to play. Just the opposite is true. Shechtman called upon Fong to push at the outer limits of the violinist's bag of technical tricks with trills, harmonics and huge leaps from note to note.

Because there is little recognizable melody or harmony to carry the listener along, atonal works also demand the performers make up the difference with extraordinary musical interpretation to maintain interest. Both Fong and Gross met that challenge.

The opening movement, Refraction, featured several fine moments of melodic lyricism from Fong. The pair integrated the tricky rhythms in the spirited final section to bring the movement to a fine conclusion.

In sharp contrast, Bijkerk's Lullaby from Memories of Polynesia was a tonal work full of flowing chord progressions and a melodic line inspired by Native American music. Evocative and dreamy with little contrast or harmonic development, the composition painted a picture of the eternally constant forces of nature and spirituality.

Less of a technical challenge to play than Shechtman's sonata, Bijkerk's 1993 composition called for a deeper sense of interpretation more akin to enlightenment.

Fong and Gross offered a fine performance in their respective roles, Gross's accompaniment murmured gently while Fong's solo captured the essence of a dreamy lullaby.

No doubt some of the audience, depending on their tastes, preferred one of the works to the other. Since opportunities to hear new music are few and far between, Wednesday's performance was a real treat.

Grand Rapids Press
December 14, 1994 (page C9)
by Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk

Program pushed the envelope of holiday music

A darkened, candle-like cavern of a cathedral is in the contemporary mind, a long, long way from modern notions of Christmas.

Yet the program New Music with Mystical Choir, which transported the audience far from strobing blue-light specials and beeping cash registers, certainly captured the essence of Advent better than store speakers blaring Frosty the Snowman ever will.

Co-sponsored by the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, Tuesday evening's concert in the Cathedral of St. Andrew capped an exceptional year of new music for both UICA and the cathedral.

The program conducted by Mark Thomas, featured music by better known composers including Philip Glass and Henryk Górecki. But the two works composed by organist and director of music at the cathedral received the most favorable response from the audience. For my money as well, they were best of the evening.

Penetrating Laughter is a perfect title for Thomas's solo organ piece that opened the program. Inspired, according to the program notes, by the work of Japanese Zen painter and calligrapher Kazuaki Tanahashi, the movement from Thomas's larger work, Six Pieces for Organ, combines rolling arpeggios with percussive, rhythmic chords in a texture that suggests bells ringing and hands clapping.

A hypnotically uplifting work, Thomas's performance transfigured the listener with waves of sound that penetrated deep into the subconscious while, on the surface, the aggressive chords thundered with self-awareness. Together, they made for a satisfying listening experience.

Thomas's somber song In the Land of the Living featured the captivating voice of bass John Scheid together with the Cathedral Choir. Over a humming accompaniment by Thomas at the keyboard, the words from Psalm 116 floated beautifully from Scheid's resonant voice. Aside from a couple of forced high notes that really shouldn't be expected from a bass voice, Scheid sang poetically on the mystical text and the big cathedral was a wonderful setting for his equally big instrument.

In a clever bit of staging, the Cathedral Choir rose unexpectedly from the shadows of the choir loft to conclude the work with a choral setting of the text that was simple, almost child-like and really lovely.

The concert featured the Cathedral Choir alone on two a cappella pieces. John Tavener's The Lamb, and Henryk Górecki's Totus Tuus.

Taking its text from William Blake's Songs of Innocence, Tavener's brief setting is full of notes that clash as they pass by each other only to resolve into unisons.

Such a setting is quite difficult to sing in tune, and the choir sounded uneasy at first in its effort.

The 36- voice choir sang better in Górecki's Totus Tuus, a hymn of praise to the Blessed Mother that the composer wrote in 1987 for Pope John Paul II's visit to Poland. Again the choir was confronted with simple musical lines that are easy to sing by themselves but that clash when put together. On this hymn the singers gave a more secure and heartfelt performance.

Narrator Bob Shechtman and violist Christina Fong joined the choir for an enlightened performance of the closing section of Philip Glass's A Madrigal Opera. The chamber opera has no particular text, so Shechtman recited guidelines for achieving spiritual serenity set down by the 16th century mystic St. John of the Cross.

The repetitive text calling for a denial of all worldliness as the price for spiritual union with the divine was an excellent counterpoint to the brittle choral accompaniment and steady drone of the viola.

The longest work on the program was four movements of Olivier Messiaen's La Nativite du Seigneur (The Nativity of our Lord) for solo organ. Messiaen's arhythmical music is a challenge both for performers to play and audiences to listen to, and Thomas gave a fine reading of what is a rather cerebral work.

The long, slow movement titled Eternal Purposes simmered with tension bubbling below the surface of imagination while the lowest pedal notes weighed in with chest-rattling rumbles. The even longer movement, The Word, is almost achingly slow, yet Thomas's rabidly shifting palette of tonalities and voicings made for an interesting performance.

The next movement, Jesus Accepts Sorrow, came as a harsh wake-up call. Full of piercing pain and penetrating anguish, it concluded with a satisfying, triumphant resolution.

It's rare these days to hear live performances of serious music from composers who aren't dead Europeans, and it's a pleasure to hear it performed so well.

On-the-Town
January 1995 (page 6)
by Christopher Scapelliti

New Music

The Sum of Its Parts

New music in West Michigan takes on new proportions this month with the U.S. premiere of Michael Nyman's Yamamoto Perpetuo.

It may have taken his memorably haunting score for The Piano to put avant-garde composer Michael Nyman on the pop-culture map. But here in Grand Rapids, violinist Christina Fong has been tending to his music well before Jane Campion's Academy Award winning film hit theaters in late 1993. Since 1992, Fong has performed all of the U.S. premieres of the British minimalist's works for solo violin and violin with piano -- each one taking place under our very noses.

A violinist with the Grand Rapids Symphony, Fong will continue her streak on January 11, when she performs the U.S. premiere of Yamamoto Perpetuo,Nyman's 1993 work for solo violin, at Fountain Street Church. Fong's concert takes place as part of the GRSO's Concert à la Carte series, a forum that puts the spotlight on the symphony's individual performers. Her concert is especially noteworthy for emphasizing new, classically oriented music -- a genre responsible for palpitations among a throng of soft-hearted classicists.

"Maybe I'm just an experimentalist at heart," Fong says, explaining her musical selection. "In college [at Northwestern University] I volunteered to play new music that no other violinists would. I figured that in the Concert à la Carte series, I can do new music and it will be associated with the symphony; so maybe people won't be so terrified of going to it."

Fong is among a small group of area musicians and composers helping to push classical music's envelope by performing the works of modern, "experimental" composers, like Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt, and Nyman. Though registering as mere blips of creative seismic activity, these efforts have had the combined effect of awakening a growing number of open-minded enthusiasts to music's evolution.

Like much of the new music being presented these days, Fong's selection of Nyman is not without controversy. A former music critic (he coined the term minimal music to describe the late 1960s musical movement), Nyman has become a visibly handy target for the musically effete. His work, critics complain, is derivative and formulaic. In fact, Nyman's music is rife with references to other works, including neo-Renaissance pieces to 1950s rock. But then that's nothing new. Everyone from Mozart to Vaughan Williams drank eagerly from the folk and popular culture of their day.

Then why such animosity toward Nyman? "I think whenever anything is revolutionary or new, the establishment is going to rebel against it, because it's against the status quo," says Fong. "With Nyman especially, people think, 'Oh, it sounds like pop music.' If the music has any remote connection to what's popular, a lot of the classical establishment push it away. It's a superiority thing."

Nyman's foray into composition began in 1976, when, for a production of Italian librettist Carlo Goldoni's Il Campiello, he arranged eighteenth century Venetian popular music for an eccentric street band of medieval instruments. In short order, Nyman's idiosyncratic style was in demand by the equally eccentric film director Peter Greenaway, resulting in a relationship that has lasted over ten films.

It was in Greenaway's 1989 film, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, that Fong first heard Nyman. "The music really stuck out in my mind," she recalls. A friend at Yale helped her track down the composer through a "who's who" book. It was 1992, and Nyman told her he had just finished recording the score to Prospero's Books.

"This was before The Piano, which of course pushed him over the edge in popularity," says Fong. "I was able to get a lot of this music sent to me, probably because I had contacted him before he became so popular. Needless to say he is no longer listed in the 'who's who.'"

Nyman's distinctive style -- simple tunes and chord progressions, an insistent beat, and loud dynamics -- is evident in Yamamoto Perpetuo. "It's so long and so involved, it sort of encompasses all of his styles," says Fong. "It has the neo-Renaissance style of the music he wrote for Greenaway's films and more of his 'minimalist' style from The Piano."

While sour-faced critics stew over Nyman's popularity, only time can sort out the composer's historical significance. For now, Fong isn't going to wait. "I think two elements must exist for music to live on," she says. "They are incredible craftsmanship and original style. I've found them in Nyman's music and I'm willing to play pretty much anything he's written."

Grand Rapids Press
January 12, 1995 (page E7)
by Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk

Christina Fong shows you're wrong to think classical means centuries-old

It doesn't have to be old to sound good.

Sometimes it's hard to explain that to people who think classical music ended with the demise of gas lamps, hooped skirts and buggy whips.

Yet violinist and new-music enthusiast Christina Fong reminded listeners that contemporary composers have interesting things to say as well in a Grand Rapids Symphony Concert à la Carte recital Wednesday afternoon in Fountain Street Church's Chapel.

Premieres are uncommon, yet Fong went three-for-three in the new-music department with first performances by Nathan Barber and Arved Ashby and a North American premiere by Michael Nyman.

The highlight of the program was Nyman's Yamamoto Perpetuo, a lengthy work for unaccompanied violin.

Best known for his score for the Academy Award winning film The Piano, Nyman is a scholar, critic, conductor and composer whose minimalist-influenced music ruffles the feathers of the blue bloods in the classical music establishment. But his short phrases and bouncy rhythms, which bear a resemblance to pop music, have found favor among the great unwashed.

In Yamamoto Perpetuo, Nyman uses a traditional Japanese folk melody as a point of departure for a set of variations, thus combining a static Oriental melody with the Occidental compositional device of development. The multifaceted work occasionally is quite subtle. At other times, the rip-roaring sections resemble a Japanese hoe-down.

Generally harmonized throughout, Nyman calls upon the performer to be a mini-orchestra unto himself, and as the work progresses, Nyman raises the difficulty level to a high degree.

Fong gave an impressive performance, playing the pizzicato passages with kyoto-like delicacy, and attacking boisterous variations with vim and vigor. Her phrasing was excellent, and her command of the violin's upper harmonics, outstanding.

Whether it's through training or inclination, many string players are sectional musicians who are better suited to fitting into an ensemble than performing as a soloist. Though Fong is a member of the Grand Rapids Symphony, she has the aggressive, gutsy technique of a genuine solo artist.

Though many of the variations in Yamamoto Perpetuo are quite interesting, the work lasted over 30 minutes, which is too long for my taste. If Nyman intended the length and repetition to convey a sense of endlessness, he went on about 10 minutes longer than he needed to make the point.

Ashby's For Morton Feldman featured the unusual combination of violin, piano and a single handbell. Inspired by the music of Feldman, Ashby's provocative seven-minute work proved a unique blend of progression and stasis. On a small scale, the motives and phrases appeared to move forward in a linear fashion, but as a whole, the piece was rather cyclical and endless.

Fong, accompanied by pianist Deborah Gross and percussionist Glenn Freeman, gave a mesmerizing performance that achieved a fine balance between the two extremes of harmonic motion and melodic rest.

The program opened with Nathan Barber's more cerebral 5 minutes … precisely, an interesting work for violin, piano and clock. Actually, the sound of a small grandfather clock on stage was dubbed by a metronome, but the point was made that the piece would last exactly five minutes. Regular pulse of the clock contrasted with periodic outbursts in the violin and piano, which also generally were opposed to each other. In short, there was a whole lot going on.

Grand Rapids Press
January 13, 1995 (page B5)

Art series explores healing (at UICA)

7:30pm Friday: The Words and Sounds of Healing, a program of music and literature presented by nine writers who will read their works and music by area composers dealing with the healing and grieving process.

Writers whose works are to be heard are Miriam Pederson, Annamarie White, Anne Reynolds, S. Butler Robinson, Carolyn White, Jackie Bartley, Linda Albert, Harry Dietermann and Cullen Bailey Burns.

The composers are Will Gay Bottje, Roelof Bijkerk and Debby Topliff.

On-the-Town
December 1995 (page 17)
by Christopher Scapelliti

New Music!

Michael Nyman, Arvo Pärt and Henryk Mikolaj Górecki Starring in Attack of the Killer Post-Minimalists!

Their talent was too huge! Europe was too small! Now they're climbing to the top of America's classical music charts and heading straight for Grand Rapids! This month local musicians give them their due, courtesy of the Grand Rapids Symphony.

Long before there were records to sell and record sales to keep track of, composers earned their fame the hard way: one concert at a time. Unfortunately, the hard way has remained the only way for all but a few modern classical composers. Up until five years ago, a warm, breathing classicist didn't stand a chance of earning widespread attention. Those who did -- the John Cages, the Philip Glasses -- found their fame liberally doused with the vitriol of outraged purists determined to claim the classical form as their own life-supported vegetable.

But change is in the air. Over the past few years, composers of new, classically based music have begun to shine, first as dim flickers on the periphery of popular conscience, and, lately, as a few roaring flames. The evidence is in the record charts. Recent recordings of music by Polish composer Henryk Górecki have orbited the top spots in Billboard's classical music charts for months at a time. Even casual listeners have become familiar with the work of British composer Michael Nyman, courtesy of his score for the 1993 Academy Award winning film The Piano.

This popularity comes as no surprise to Christina Fong, principal violinist with the Grand Rapids Symphony. A dedicated follower of new composers (she routinely scours New York newspapers for evidence of neoclassical life), Fong, along with her local contemporaries has been staging concerts of new music in Grand Rapids for years, each enjoying greater attention than the last.

This month, Fong takes the torch in hand again, with pianist Deborah Gross, to perform Living European Chart-Busting Post-Minimalist Composers, featuring the complete music for violin and piano of Górecki, Nyman, and Estonian composer Arvo Pärt.

If the ambitions of such a title seem to border on pretentious, think again. "These are the top selling composers in classical genre," Fong points out. "All three of them do very well on the Billboard charts."

So many Europeans. So little time.

What the charts fail to explain is why America is experiencing an explosion of European talent unseen since rock and roll's British Invasion of the 1960s. "They're really the only people writing in this post-minimal style," Fong explains, "even though minimalism is an American innovation that ironically the majority of American composers have rejected."

While mass popularity is far from the goal of the post-minimalists, they have doubtlessly struck a nerve in the culture. The earliest evidence of this was in the late 1980s, when the Hilliard Ensemble's recordings of Pärt's Passio and Arbos hit the top 25 on the classical music charts. In 1993, the London Sinfonietta's recording of Górecki's 3rd Symphony spent eight months at number 1 to become the tenth-best-selling classical recording since Billboard began the chart, in 1964. The biggest of all was Nyman's score for The Piano, which has stayed in the top 10 of Billboard's crossover chart since July of 1994.

All of which begs the obvious question: If Nyman and his contemporaries are so popular, why does it take individual performers, like Fong and Gross, to bring this music to concert going audiences? It's a question Fong has asked herself many times. "One thing I find ironic in new music today is that it's the record companies who are the ambitious and creative, risk taking organizations. It's really the most expensive thing to put on, but they're willing to take the risk. Unfortunately performing organizations are not quite as ambitious."

Nor are they necessarily any more successful than Fong when it comes programming. In recent years, Fong has often seen better attendance at her concerts of new music than she has seen at concerts of traditional works. "I think the market is out there but somehow we're taught that this [music] offends people. It's only been in the last forty or fifty years that the musical establishment has started thinking this way -- 'we don't want to offend this musical benefactor, who don't want to offend the people who give us this grant.' But it's clear in the a record sales that there's a market."

A Post-Minimal Christmas.

Given the month's holiday nature, Fong has arranged the program around Górecki, whose music is built upon Poland's religious and folk culture. For Fong, the inclusion of Nyman and Pärt was natural, not only for their chart success but for their compositional style as well. "Like Górecki, Nyman and Pärt have sort of combined minimalism and elements from medieval and renaissance into their music.

Fong and Gross's concert opens with Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel (1978) and closes with his Fratres (1980) both of which represent his "tintinnabuli" style, in which the composer builds upon one tonality. At the program's center is Nyman's On the Fiddle (1993), three works based on his scores for films by British director Peter Greenaway. Of the three composers featured, Nyman has garnered the most controversy for freely cross-referencing everything from neo-renaissance to 1950s rock in his compositions.

The two oldest works on the program are Górecki's Variations, Op. 4 and Sonatina in One Movement, Op. 8, both written in 1956. "The two Górecki pieces are in a folk style, which is his early style," Fong explains. "He based a lot of his music on Polish folk music."

While the post-minimalists continue to pound the charts, they still have one thing in common with the composers of old: the live concert is still as vital as ever to building an audience. Says Fong, "About forty years ago Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Copland were recorded all the time, and the classical music establishment performed and endorsed their works. I feel that I'm carrying on that tradition."

Columbus Alive
April 3, 1996 (page 12)

Arved Ashby and Christina Fong: A Program of European Post-Minimalists brings an evening of contemporary music to OSU's Weigel Auditorium this Friday. Showcasing the spare, harmonic works of such composers as Henryk Górecki, Michael Nyman and Arvo Pärt, OSU professor Ashby and guest artist Fong will coax the stirring music from the violin and piano.

Columbus Guardian
April 4, 1996 (page 25)
by Tracy Zollinger Turner

Giving it up for Good Friday

Lent and "post-minimalist" music -- peanut butter and jelly? Ohio State University professor of piano Arved Ashby thinks so. That's why he and guest violinist Christina Fong will celebrate Good Friday by performing a program of works composed by European post-minimalists Henryk Górecki, Michael Nyman, and Arvo Pärt. It will be the first time many of the works have ever been played in Ohio.

The duo will play Górecki's early Variations and Sonatina in One Movement. The Polish composer is widely known for his Third Symphony (The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) -- one recording of the piece has recently become one of the best-selling classical discs in history. They will also play Nyman's On the Fiddle (Nyman wrote the soundtrack to the film The Piano) as well as Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel and Fratres.

Other Paper
April 4, 1996 (page 29)

It's modernist mania Friday night at 8 in OSU's Weigel Hall, 1866 College Road North, when Christina Fong, who's a violinist with the Grand Rapids Symphony, and pianist Arved Ashby -- a professor of music history at OSU -- team up to play the music of Michael (The Piano) Nyman, Henryk Górecki and Arvo Pärt. All of these guys are popular modern classical music composers. Go on -- be adventurous. Besides, it's free.

On-the-Town
May 1996 (page 6)
by Paul Samra

New Music

Henryk the Great

Grand Rapids Rolls Out Its Best For Polish Composer Henryk Górecki

It's not surprising that the music of a man who grew up just miles away from the Nazi death camp called Auschwitz should have a distinctly melancholy air.

But Polish composer Henryk Górecki has moved beyond mere lamentation, rousing the modern listener with liturgical orchestrations rooted in spirituality. From his bold exploration of atonal and avant garde music in the 1960s to his more recent purveyance of mystical, hypnotic works -- like the 1992 release Symphony No. 3 (Elektra Nonesuch Records), one of the best-selling classical CDs of all time -- Górecki has woven a connecting thread of hope and endurance.

"The man fulfills everything emotional and endearing about music," says Mark Thomas, a composer and the former music director of the Cathedral of St. Andrew in Grand Rapids. "He hits it right it on the head." Now music director for the Cathedral Church of the Immaculate Conception in Portland, Maine, Thomas returns to Grand Rapids this month to perform Górecki's Cantata for Organ as part of the St. Cecilia Music Society's An Evening With Henryk Górecki. The concert -- featuring performances by Thomas, the St. Cecilia Youth Chorale, the Grand Rapids Youth Symphony, among many others -- will be attended by Górecki himself, who will speak about the pieces performed.

Thomas, who's been studying Górecki for twelve years, last performed the composer's work in June 1994 as part of the Music For Sacred Space concert at St. Mark's Episcopal Church. Thomas's reverence for the Polish artist -- as well as his own efforts to popularize new classical music in the Grand Rapids area helped sow the seeds for this month's visit, which was made possible through the cooperation of St. Cecilia, the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, and the Lira Ensemble, Chicago's Polish/American musical organization of which Górecki is a frequent guest.

Given the fact that the elusive composer is averse to traveling, the Grand Rapids visit is quite a coup. Add to this the sheer weight of Górecki's reputation, and you have the makings of a spectacle.

"So much of what we call 'new music' has had bad connotations over the years," says Thomas. "It's generally known as that disparate, way-out 1960s stuff that turned people off. But it's perhaps Górecki more than anyone else who's brought it to its full fruition, made it accessible in a very moving, exciting way."

Recent history tells us differently. Up through the mid 1970s, Górecki's strong emotional appeal was eclipsed by fellow Polish composers Pendereski and Witold Lutowslowski, whose ornate notational works remained in vogue and were studied largely throughout Europe. While the two basked in their celebrated academic circles, touring the continent with an entourage of musical aesthetes, Górecki remained in his native village of Katowice, working the land and attending mass with his countrymen.

"The result, I think, is an acute sense of spiritual strength and caring that comes through his music," says Thomas, "of cultural perseverance in the face of Nazi and communist aggression, [as well as] of care, responsibility, and healing. Górecki is a man for his people, and his artistic vision of hope has touched the world, catapulting him to a greatness guys like Pendereski never knew.

While Thomas cites the past decade as Górecki's most accessible, melody-oriented period (recordings of his work have stayed at the top of the Billboard charts for a year and a half), his own contribution to this month's concert will be an older, darker, and more convoluted selection from 1968 titled Cantata for Organ.

"What strikes me most about Górecki's more recent music is the building of these huge, anticipatory gestures," says Thomas. "The music hangs and floats in simple tonal fields that grow as he staggers them. He creates a culminating anxiety that's sonorously beautiful."

By contrast, Cantata for Organ is "a big, wonderful mess," says Thomas, "full of dissonant chords and misleading melodies. It's violent, loud, and full of terror, yet still has that great element of spirituality found in all his work."

Thomas, who's studied the sheet music but never actually heard a recording of the rare piece, can't hide his apprehension about playing it in front of its creator. "My worst fear is that he'll stop me halfway through and say, My God, what are you doing? But heck, at least then I can say I've been tutored by Górecki."

In addition to the Cantata, the concert will feature two unpublished, unrecorded Górecki compositions performed by the St. Cecilia Youth Chorale called Two Songs of Tuwim. The songs -- one concerning seasonal change, the other playful birds -- are a capella works for treble choir that take their inspiration from the works of Polish poet Jullian Tuwim. "The first is so sad and deep at times I can barely lift my hands," says Paul Caldwell, director of the chorale and artistic director for St. Cecilia. "But the other is funny and very animated. This is music that washes you in contemplative sound. Both are trance-inducing. And you'll find yourself humming the stuff as stress relief."

Also on the program is the Calvin College Campus Choir and Capella performing Górecki's Amen, an a capella number influenced by the polyphonic choral works of sixteenth century composers Palestrina and Thomas Luis de Victoria; the Grand Rapids Youth Symphony Orchestra performing Górecki's Three Pieces in Old Style; Christina Fong, principal violinist with the Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestra, performing Górecki's Sonata in One Movement, Opus 1 and, with pianist Arved Ashby, Variations for Violin and Piano; and flutist Ed Clifford and mezzo soprano Linn Maxwell Keller performing various works by the composer.

St. Cecilia's concert may prove an unprecedented musical event in Grand Rapids as it brings together such a variety of elements from the community to honor a world-renowned composer in the flesh. "The sound," promises Caldwell, "will roll around in St. Adalbert for days after."

Grand Rapids Press
May 2, 1996 (page B8)
by Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk

Tribute is well received by master himself

There's a rumor out regarding last year's unexplained disappearance of Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the celebrated American atheist: She heard a recording of Henryk Górecki's music and discovered God.

All right, I made that up. But many who have heard the Polish composer's music have noticed the deep spirituality within it, which raises the question of where that spirituality comes from.

Those who have heard and been moved by Górecki's music, such as the million-selling 1992 recording of his Symphony No. 3, filled the Basilica Church of St. Adalbert Wednesday for An Evening With Górecki.

With the 62-year-old composer in attendance, nearly 400 area musicians participated in the program that drew upwards of 800 people for 90 minutes of contemporary music that was written within most of their lives.

"For a composer, it is the greatest joy that someone wants to play his music, and someone wants to listen to his music," Górecki said, through his translator, Lucyna Migala, at the end of the program.

Górecki's most captivating voice seems to be in his choral music, and the two choral works on the program captured the essence of the evening.

The St. Cecilia Youth Chorale, directed by Paul CaIdwell, was given quite a challenge with Dwie Piosenki (Two Songs). The first song,The Year and Misery, is bleak and as repetitive as the inevitable change of the seasons.

With the bouncy Bird Gossip, a humorous depiction of a squabble between barnyard birds, the chorus met the challenge of declaiming the nonstop patter in the difficult Polish language while producing a sound such that you almost could hear bells ringing and a harp strumming behind the voices.

Górecki himself, seated in the middle of the audience, smiled broadly and applauded vigorously the performance of the 24-year-old songs.

Singing in English a text from Shakespeare's Hamlet, mezzo-soprano Linn Maxwell Keller's voice was angelic and ethereal in the deeply spiritual Good Night, In Memoriam Michael Vyner, written in 1990 in memory of one of Górecki's leading advocates in England.

Alto flutist Ed Clifford offered a haunting obbligato, and pianist Mary Scanlan and percussionist Glenn Freeman contributed atmospheric accompaniment.

Clifford and Scanlan also offered a satisfying performance of Górecki's For You, Anne-Lill a duo for flute and piano. The somberness was weighty at the beginning and end while Clifford deftly handled the lightening fast passages in the middle.

Violinist Christina Fong and pianist Arved Ashby were featured in two other early works. With the extended Variations Górecki shows himself to be a vigorous young man as well the offspring of an old culture, and Fong and Ashby brought out and balanced both qualities, giving a heroic performance of the final variation.

Organist Mark Thomas, former music director of the Cathedral of St. Andrew until last July, returned to Grand Rapids to open the concert with Górecki's Cantata for Organ.

Nothing resembling the slow, graceful arches of the Third Symphony, this work is a jarring, jolting array of clashing intervals and colors that is at once dramatic and tragic.

The strings of the Grand Rapids Youth Symphony, under John Varineau, performed Górecki's Three Pieces in Old Style, an older work that nevertheless hinted at Górecki's more recent compositions.

The reverberation in the church is a bit strong for strings and tends to shortchange the inner voices, but Varineau and the orchestra captured the mesmerizing nature of the outer movements while giving a friskiness to the dance like middle piece.

The Calvin College Campus Choir and Capella, under the baton of Sean Ivory, joined together to close the evening with Górecki's popular Amen, a popular work. "We all know our world is a much more beautiful place because you are in it," Caldwell told Górecki and the audience during the concert. Amen.

On-the-Town
November 1996 (page 7)
by Christopher Scapelliti

New Music

The New Noise

From Bach To Nine Inch Nails: Welcome To Totalism

The problem started with Eating Living Monkeys. The modern musical work by New York composer David Lang was slated for a Grand Rapids Symphony concert during the orchestra's 1989-'90 season. Like most new compositions undertaken by regional orchestras the piece was safely tucked away among the concert's more conventional fare, where, presumably, it wouldn't draw too much attention to itself.

No such luck. Well before the concert date, the symphony-going public was getting unruly. Christina Fong, the GRSO's principal violinist and newly appointed associate concert master, recalls: "There were [ticket holders] who called up and complained before they even heard the piece, just because they couldn't get past the title. People were saying they wanted their money back."

The reaction was especially ironic, considering that Lang's title was meant to show how absurd stereotypes result in cultural biases. "He thought this title was the epitome of such an exaggeration," explains Fong, "the notion of a culture eating living monkeys. It was a tribute to how things can get so blown out of proportion due to people's ignorance."

"I did find it ironic that people were condemning this thing, when the whole idea of it was to bring that kind of ignorance to light."

To add to matters, the orchestra made short shrift of the piece, focusing its rehearsal efforts instead on the program's showcase works. "It was a prime example of not taking a new piece of music seriously." notes Fong. "It was blown off during rehearsals and not performed terribly well at all."

Now, some six years later, Fong has a chance to, among other things, right the wrongs of the past. Having established a reputation for local performances and premieres of works by contemporary composers -- including Arvo Pärt, Michael Nyman, and Philip Glass -- Fong will join local musicians this month to present New York Noise: The Totalists, a noon hour concert featuring works by Lang and contemporary composers Michael Gordon and Lois V Vierk. The concert will be the first music event in West Michigan devoted to the music of totalism, a movement that embraces a kitchen sink of influences, ranging from classical works to contemporary music forms.

Where minimalists like Nyman or Pärt have informed their work with references to past cultural movements, the totalists are noteworthy for drawing inspiration equally from academia and last week's grunge-rock release. Like the post modernists, they love the range of styles available and harbor no clique mentality with regard to musical institutions. In that way, the totalists are truly an American phenomenon, appropriate to our melting pot culture.

Mark Swed, a journalist who has followed and written extensively about modern composers, explained the rise of totalism in a recent online article: "This is the music of a new generation of composers … who grew up in a musical world unlike anything previous generations had known. By the time they came on the scene, the big battles of 20th-century music had already been fought. … Music from all eras and all cultures had become handily available on recordings. But pop, as every kid growing up in America well knew, was the world's real and inescapable music; the backbeat, the universal language of the global village."

The first evidence of the movement came in 1987, when Lang and Gordon co-founded Bang On A Can, a festival for new music in New York City. The festival is unique in that it has always made room for a variety of genres, whether it be the established music of the "uptown" academics or the avant-garde experiments of the "downtown" crowd.

"That's exactly the opposite of orchestras," says Fong, "which I honestly think try to trick people into hearing a new piece by hiding it on the program. It's almost like they have the mentality of, If you're good and eat your peas, you can have your dessert. It's not really conducive to creative and honest programming."

Fong pulls no such punches with this month's concert. Opening with Lang's 1981 composition Illumination Rounds (performed with pianist Deborah Gross), she'll work her way through Gordon's 1992 composition Industry (written for solo cello and electronics and re-scored for for solo violin for this performance). For the finale, Fong and Gross will join with Robert Byrens, viola, and Stacey Bosman, cello for Vierk's River Beneath the River. The most established of the concert's composers, Vierk has based many of her works oh her own principles of "exponential structure," in which elements of time and pitch movement change exponentially with the emotional thrust of the music.

In many ways, Vierk's principles underscore the totalists' bottom line: it's about being open to all possible options. Says Fong, "That notion really isn't anything terribly new. I think most composers throughout history have been in touch with what's going on in society, and I think they develop an intuitiveness that can result in a great deal of activity; unlike universities and orchestras, where people get stuck in a system."

"And I think that once you get yourself in touch with society, not only are you going to appeal to and get an idea of what the organic part of society is about; you can also figure out what the organizations are about. Whereas sometimes, when you're in the machine, you can no longer figure out what's going on because you miss the big picture."

Lanthorn
February 13, 1997 (page 11)
by Melissa Vandenbroek

Fong to play Philip Glass

The Artist-Faculty Series continues this month with violinist, Christina Fong on Feb. 20 at 4 p.m. in the Louis Armstrong Theatre in the Calder Fine Arts Center.

Fong will present a multi-media concert featuring the complete works for solo violin by Philip Glass. This is a first-ever performance of this caliber for Grand Valley State University.

Fong, a violin instructor at Grand Valley, is also a member of the Faculty Quartet, the Grand Rapids Symphony, and Next Generation, an ensemble that represents civic and educational concerts throughout West Michigan.

Philip Glass, Musical America's 1985 Musician of the Year, has written for opera, orchestra, film, theater, dance, chorus, as well as his own group; the Philip Glass Ensemble.

A graduate of the Juilliard School, Glass has written music for diverse artistic projects, such as the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

This is the first complete performance of Philip Glass's works for unaccompanied strings.

Grand Rapids Press
February 16, 1997 (page F6)
by Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk

GVSU's Christina Fong presents string works by Glass

Composer Philip Glass has created more than seven full-length operas, four chamber operas and a half dozen film scores.

The Metropolitan Opera commissioned him to write The Voyage, which the company presented in 1992 on the 500th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the New World.

CBS Masterworks, now a division of Sony Records, offered Glass its first composer recording contract since Aaron Copland, and his records have sold by the tens of thousands.

Yet despite those successes and more, the pioneer minimalist composer remains something of an outsider in most classical concert halls.

Christina Fong would like to change that.

"I think he's the most important composer of the late 20th century, in that he came up with a completely original method of composition," she said. "Very few of the great composers didn't do something groundbreaking that changed the direction of music."

Fong, a violin instructor at Grand Valley State University, will perform an entire program of Glass's solo music for violin and viola on Thursday at the university in Allendale.

"Everything he's ever written for solo strings," Fong said. "Two of them will be highly amplified -- like to rock concert levels."

Glass, a native of Baltimore who studied at the University of Chicago, The Juilliard School and with French composer Darius Milhaud at Aspen, Colo., showed early promise as a modernist composer during his student days in the 1950s and 1960s.

But in the 1960s, while studying in Paris with legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, Glass had the opportunity to work with renowned Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar.

The influence of Indian music, particularly the fluid, non-linear expression of rhythm, inspired Glass to repudiate his earlier music and develop a new technique of composition using tonal melodic material in a droning, hypnotically repetitive process.

Glass's landmark works include his 1976 Opera Einstein on the Beach and film scores such as Koyaanisqatsi. With his Philip Glass Ensemble, using amplified keyboards, voices and wind instruments all fed through a mixer, the composer has performed for nearly three decades, giving some 100 concerts a year and appearing in such unlikely venues as NBC-TV's Saturday Night Live.

Although the Cleveland Orchestra commissioned him to write The Light, Glass's music rarely is performed by American orchestras.

"The Grand Rapids Symphony, like most other orchestras, has yet to perform anything by Glass," said Fong, who is associate concertmaster of the Grand Rapids Symphony.

But Glass, who turns 60 this year, has produced a body of work that deserves equal treatment to other major American composers, such as Aaron Copland or Leonard Bernstein, according to Fong.

"When Copland was alive, we played a lot of his music. When he was in his 50s and 60s, we played a lot of his compositions," she said.

"Glass's orchestral composition is a lot more extensive than either of those composers, and he's already written much more orchestral music than either of those composers," she said. "At the rate he's going, he'll probably write 10 or more symphonies."

As a composer who has revolutionized contemporary music, Glass still is considered rather avant-garde in many circles. But with some 30 years' worth of work and development behind him, Glass's music should no longer be considered something new.

"This isn't new music. It's only new because it isn't heard," Fong said. "I look at this as old music. Three of the pieces I'm going to perform were written before I was 4, so for me that approaches classical music."

A member of the Grand Rapids Symphony since 1988 and an instructor at GVSU since 1990, Fong was named associate concertmaster of the symphony last year. She also performs with the GVSU Faculty String Quartet, the Grand Rapids Symphony's Calder String Quartet, and the Next Generation Sextet.

A graduate of Northwestern University with bachelor's and master's degrees in music, Fong has given North American or Michigan premieres of new works by composers such as Arvo Pärt, Donald Erb, John Cage, Michael Nyman and Henryk Górecki, among others.

She met Glass for the first time last summer at a Buddhist retreat.

"He gave a talk, and I did get to talk to him several times, and I got to play for him," she said. "He's a fascinating person. He has a very intellectual mind, and he's very complicated, but he's also really down to earth."

Grand Rapids Press
February 21, 1997 (page B7)
by Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk

Fong on Glass makes for violin show like no other

Never have I been to a violin recital where they passed out earplugs at the door.

Nor have I been to a concert where nearly half the audience had walked out by the end of the program.

Such is the kind of afternoon you'll get when you put Christina Fong to work playing the music of Philip Glass.

Fong, a violinist and violist, presented an extremely rare performance of the complete works for unaccompanied strings by the revolutionary minimalist composer on Thursday afternoon as part of the Grand Valley State University Artist-Faculty Series in the Louis Armstrong Theater. The amplified sound of violin and viola, bits of pre-recorded dialogue and lighting effects made for an unusual multimedia performance for an audience that began with about 200.

But at the center of it all was a talented musician playing solo works by a brilliantly unorthodox composer.

Glass, who turns 60 years old this year, remains a controversial figure in music. Time magazine once dubbed him the world's greatest living composer, and he is widely admired for such works as his massive 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach, which has been heard all over the world, including the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

While Glass has won many crossover fans from pop/rock music, his non-linear, hypnotic, repetitious style of composition, heavily influenced by non-Western rhythms and values, still is discounted by many classical musicians.

Enjoyable, if overlong

Personally, I enjoy his music, though an hour and 45 minutes worth for a solo string instrument did become tedious.

Fong, unquestionably, is an accomplished musician. Associate concertmaster of the Grand Rapids Symphony, she has the smooth, flowing technique necessary to evoke the tranquil lull in a piece such as the Opening from A Madrigal Opera.

While it might seem easy to play the steady drone of arpeggios that Glass so often uses, it actually takes more concentration and stamina than performing more familiar fare.

On the other hand, performing Glass's music still requires an organic sense of musicality that, say, a computer just couldn't reproduce. With a work such as Gradus, originally composed for soprano saxophone in 1968, Fong capably communicated the repetitious rhythmic quality while bringing out the pentatonic melodic character of the piece.

Just as Glass's music poses challenges for the performer, it also takes some practice for the listener to get the hang of. One can't hear his music in a linear fashion, listening for a progression from beginning to end with assorted climaxes and denouements along the way. Rather, the listener must suspend his sense of forward motion and the steady progression of time and attempt to experience the music in the moment.

Role of the audience

The challenge for the audience is to be mentally prepared at the beginning for that kind of sonic experience because you can't suddenly switch it on several minutes into a piece. I suspect that mental fatigue is what led people to start sneaking out of the darkened theater after a couple of selections. Either that or they felt dinner calling.

The performance of Knee Play 2 from Einstein on the Beach proved to be a highlight of the program in more ways than one. While dressed in a long white robe, hidden upstage behind a scrim with offset lighting, Fong dug in with the very loud and energetic amplified violin solo, accompanied by a spoken audio track of pre-recorded, non sequitur phrases and the bright glare of strobe lights that jarred the audience out of its complacency.

The program opened with a work titled 1+1, a mesmerizing drone for solo percussion, accompanied by equally repetitions surreal images projected on an overhead screen that set the stage for the performance.

It's difficult to say how Glass's music will be regarded in the future. But Fong deserves credit for a well played, thoughtful presentation of music by a composer who has changed the course of classical music within our lifetimes.

Lanthorn
February 26, 1998 (page 10)
by Laura Miller

Faculty violinist performs multi-media concert

Thursday, Feb. 26, Christina Fong performs a free concert of solo violin compositions by renowned composer John Cage. The concert begins at 4 p.m. in the Performing Arts Center Recital Hall.

"Don't expect Beethoven, Brahms or Bach ... but something very electronic sounding," said Fong, adjunct instructor of violin at Grand Valley.

The program includes Cage's One⁶ [A,B,C], One¹⁰, and Glenn Freeman's Violin and Vacuum. The pieces will be performed simultaneously with One¹¹, an accompanying film.

Fong is hesitant to disclose information about the "multimedia event."

"Part of an artist's tool is to leave things hanging," she said. "Music is not about words alone."

As well as working for Grand Valley, Fong is currently the associate concertmaster of the Grand Rapids Symphony and plays in the Next Generation Sextet, a string quartet with electronic percussion.

Fong has held several orchestral positions across the country and has performed premiers of compositions by composers such as Philip Glass and Igor Stravinsky.

Fong has performed numerous other pieces by Cage and is recording this selection of "number music" for her "first commercially available recording."

"As far as I know, it's the first time these pieces have been performed together (as a pair) in a single concert," Fong said.

Cage wrote 45 "number pieces" as a culmination of his career. They represent his rethinking about music's essential nature and its relation to the performer and listener.

the Paper.
May 7, 1998 (page 7)

Mother's Day Benefit Concert

The Grand Rapids Federation of Musicians and the Professional Orchestral Musicians Association will present a scholarship benefit concert on May 10. The concert, which will include works by Prokofiev, Mendelssohn, Philip Glass and others, will be held at 3pm at Trinity United Methodist Church, 1100 Lake Drive in Grand Rapids.

The concert will help fund two music scholarships offered by the federation. It also will help a new scholarship.

The federation has given more than $32,000 in scholarships to 144 music students since 1961, says the GRFM's Jason Economides.

The GRFM is a non-profit organization of more than 350 professional musicians who are involved in a wide range of music, including jazz, rock, theater, country, folk, ethnic, chamber and classical.

The objectives of the organization are to protect the general interest and welfare of its members, to promote good faith and fair dealings between its members and employees and to promote the use of live music.

The program will include chamber works by familiar composers: Sergei Prokofiev's Overture on Hebrew Themes for clarinet string quartet and piano; Felix Mendelssohn's Sinfonia No. 9 for strings and Philip Glass's A Madrigal Opera for viola and electronics. Also on the program are pieces by lesser known composers Herman Goetz, Peter Warlock and Nigel Westlake.

Grand Rapids Press
May 9, 1998 (page A8)
by Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk

Mother's Day concert is benefit for music scholarships of note

In more than 30 years, the Grand Rapids Federation of Musicians has given away more than $30,000.

But the organization would like to give away more.

Members of the musicians' union and Professional Orchestra Musicians Association, the players' association of Grand Rapids Symphony musicians, will hold a benefit concert Sunday afternoon to raise money to fund music scholarships offered annually to area high school and college students.

"The union has given out over $32,000 since 1961 to 144 music students," said Jason Economides, violinist with the Grand Rapids symphony.

The GRFM annually awards the Robert Madura Scholarship, a $600 prize, to an outstanding orchestral string player chosen by audition for study at a summer music program. Madura, who died of leukemia in 1989, was principal cellist of the Grand Rapids Symphony.

The union Local 56 also awards a number of Donald D. Armstrong Scholarships to high school juniors, based on recommendations of their music teachers. The $100 prize, which also is for summer music study, honors the former director of music for the Grand Rapids Public Schools.

But the money doesn't go as far as it used to.

"Six hundred dollars seven years ago was a good amount, but it's not the same today," Economides said.

The 90-minute program on Sunday will include such works as Prokofiev'sOverture on Hebrew Themes for clarinet, string quartet and piano; and Mendelssohn's Sinfonia No. 9 for strings.

More eclectic works will include Nigel Westlake's Omphallo Centric Lecture for four marimbas, and Philip Glass's A Madrigal Opera for viola and electronics, the latter performed by violist Christina Fong.

Union officials also hope to raise money to begin a new scholarship fund in memory of John Kik, a former president of the Grand Rapids Federation of Musicians, who died in 1994.

the Paper.
October 29, 1998 (page 15)

books/calendar

Sun. the 1st

Embellish Handbell Choir: at Trinity Lutheran Church, 2700 E. Fulton St. The local handbell choir and guest artist, GR Symphony violinist Christina Fong, will perform Music Of The World, which features music from Tibet, Indonesia, Germany, Africa, Japan, the United States and Native America. The concert also will feature the premiere performance of an arrangement of Suite for Violin and Gamelan, arranged by Embellish founder Carl Wiltse. 4pm. Free.

An open-ended touch of Glass

This weekend, fans of the music of Philip Glass have a rare opportunity to hear his unrecorded work A Madrigal Opera of Mind, thanks to the Tibetan Cultural Center.

Christina Fong (violin|viola) and Glenn Freeman (electro-percussion) will perform the 1980 composition at the center on Sunday at 3 p.m., with all proceeds going to the center in aid of the Kalachakra for World Peace 1999.

Glass describes this intriguing piece as "a chamber opera with an unspecified story line," and elaborates, "My idea was to write a musical/dramatic work that could, with different direction, be realized with different narrative context." Each incarnation of the piece therefore has a different title, causing a certain degree of confusion among concert-goers. This time around, it's being given a concert performance, with a slide show of current conditions in Tibet.

The choice of venue is far from coincidental; Philip Glass was director of Tibet House in New York for may years, and still helps produce their annual benefit concert at Carnegie Hall. This benefit performance was arranged after an invitation from Takster Rinpoche, elder brother of the Dalai Lama. Glass's continuing work on behalf of Tibet, says Glenn Freeman, "is bearing fruit in many ways, and it's great to be playing a small but active role in all this."

Christina Fong is a violin instructor at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, and associate concertmaster of the Grand Rapids Symphony Orchestra. Her acquaintance with contemporary music is thorough. Besides having presented North American or Michigan premieres of work by (among many others) Stravinsky, Pärt, Glass, Cage, Górecki and Morton Feldman, she is to perform the world premiere of Michael Nyman's On The Fiddle for violin and strings with the Grand Rapids Symphony in January 1999. She and Freeman are agreed on Glass's stature in the music world.

"Philip Glass is the most important living composer of recent history," says Fong. "He's like Mozart or Bach because he came up with an original composition structure."

Some of the musical elements, according to Freeman, are similar to those heard in Koyaanisqatsi, Glass's acclaimed collaboration with film-maker Geoffrey Reggio, which comes from the same period. There is some "eastern influence," but, Freeman remarks, "with Glass I always felt this was not always an auditory influence but a philosophical one." These less tangible elements, he feels, can nevertheless be heard in the final result.

A Madrigal Opera is an unconventional and risky piece, even for such an innovative composer. But, says Glass, "for those who have the nerves for it, having an open-ended piece of this kind can be very exciting.

Bloomington Independent
November 12, 1998 (page 19)
by Peter Schimpf

Tibet seen through rare Glass

Considering the popularity of composer Philip Glass, it seems odd that there aren't that many opportunities to hear his work performed, particularly the operas. There are a few reasons why. First of all, Glass's music requires a tremendous amount of concentration and stamina, as the performers are required to play extremely repetitious patterns for long periods of time. Another reason is that Glass's music often requires a somewhat unorthodox instrumentation, including synthesizers, and electric string and wind instruments.

Glass's 1980 opera A Madrigal Opera is even further removed from the repertory because of its lack of libretto or story-line. Glass states that it is "a chamber opera with an unspecified story line ... my idea was to write a musical/dramatic work that could, with different direction, be realized with a different narrative content." A new and original realization is precisely what musicians Glenn Freeman and Christina Fong, in collaboration with photographers Kathryn Culley, Sonan Zoksang, Nancy Jo Johnson and Katie Murphy, presented Sunday afternoon at the Tibetan Cultural Center.

The original score for A Madrigal Opera was written for six voices (singing only solfeggio syllables), violin and viola. Freeman transcribed Glass's score for violin|viola, performed by Fong, and for his own instrument, electro-percussion (essentially an electric marimba). Freeman explained that this is keeping with the composer's own practice, as Glass transcribed his 1984 opera Akhnaten from full orchestra to chamber ensemble.

Freeman and Fong planned to perform the work in concert format; that is, without any story. They instead incorporated the photography in the form of a slide show depicting people and places in Tibet, along with narration.

To a certain degree they succeeded. The title of this production (which also varies, depending on the performance) thus changed from the originally advertised A Madrigal Opera of Mind to The State of the Tibetan Nation -- A Madrigal Opera . The performance took place inside a large, comfortable room, furnished with chairs and couches. The projector screen was placed in a corner, and at either side sat Freeman and Fong. All the lights were turned out, aside from a few candles and the musicians' stand lights.

Only 20 to 30 people were present, which was a shame considering the rare nature of this performance. Many in attendance sunk back in their seats, closed their eyes, and slipped off into a meditative state. Freeman noted that they had to keep their volume lower than they would have liked, because the narration had to be heard, and he observed that a higher volume would produce a completely different effect. This would have been more desirable, as the somewhat unpoetic narration seemed to intrude on the aesthetic created by the music and some fine photographs.

Glass's music is always recognizable: various textures made up of repetitive scale and arpeggio passages flavored with rhythmic and harmonic shifts. This effect is only successful when the musicians are attentive and accurate, as both Fong and Freeman were. Fong in particular was most impressive, playing virtually without rest for the duration.

The sound of Freeman's electro-percussion bore little resemblance to a percussion instrument. By electronically manipulating the sound, Freeman's instrument sounded much more like a keyboard synthesizer, often an essential timbre in Glass.

The timing of the slide presentation with narrative coincided with shifts in the music's texture. The photos mainly depicted places in Tibet, with an emphasis on the people, and the suffering that they endure under Chinese occupation.

The overall mood in Glass's music for A Madrigal Opera is forlorn seriousness. The subject of Tibet was appropriate, considering Glass's own interest in Tibet, which manifested itself most recently in his soundtrack for the film Kundun.

If not for anything else, the musicians should be commended for the effort of producing a work which is of quality and rarely performed. I believe the omission of singing voices, which I'm sure adds a tremendous dimension to the score, was unfortunate. But considering what they worked with, they produced an effective, worthwhile production.

the Paper.
December 31, 1998 (page 16)
by Serena Donadoni

movies/music

Grand Rapids Symphony

If you've seen the movie The Piano, you've already been introduced to the music of Michael Nyman.

Now you can hear the first live performance of his On The Fiddle for violin and orchestra when the Grand Rapids Symphony presents the world premiere during its Casual Classics Series on Jan. 7, 8. & 9.

While On The Fiddle is available on CD and portions of the piece can be heard in feature films, the Grand Rapids concert is the live debut of the work in its entirety.

With Associate concertmaster and championed violinist Christina Fong as soloist the orchestra is gearing up for a fresh performance after usually being sustained by music of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Nyman is known for blending the sounds of 17th-century composers with the harmonies and rhythms of 1950s pop music.

Associate Conductor John Varineau will lead the concert series, titled A Classical View of Pop. Varineau and the orchestra will use anecdotes about the composers to show how popular music and culture impacted the classical pieces.

Varineau says people who view orchestral music as stuff that was written 200 years ago will be in for a surprise when turning out to hear Nyman's work.

"This is a great example of minimalist music as influenced by pop music," says Varineau. "The distinguishing feature here is lots of repetition and very gradual change."

Varineau says he's only half joking when he says Nyman's work is "based on the same three chords as rock and roll."

The program also will include Grieg's Holberg Suite, Shostakovich's Ballet Suite No. 1, and Milhaud's Le Bouf sur le toit. Audience members will have a chance to rub elbows with Fong, Varineau, guest artists, and members of the orchestra at a complimentary reception following the show.

The concert will be performed at 7:30pm Thursday, Jan. 7, at St. Cecilia's Music Society, at 8 pm Friday Jan. 8 in the same location, and 8pm Saturday Jan. 9 at West Ottawa High School in Holland.

Grand Rapids Press
January 3, 1999 (page B3)
by Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk

Symphony spotlights works by Nyman, Glass

When associate conductor John Varineau invited the Grand Rapids Symphony's associate concertmaster to be a soloist on this year's Casual Classics Series, he knew he wouldn't end up conducting some violin concerto that had been gathering dust.

More likely, the ink on the page would still be drying.

Christina Fong this week will give the world premiere performance of Michael Nyman's On The Fiddle for violin and orchestra.

"John said I was free to pick any piece I wanted to do," Fong laughed.

But Varineau had a pretty good idea what he was gelling himself into.

"Chris is a real champion of this style of music which she calls post-minimalism," Varineau said.

Besides Nyman's 16-minute work for violin and orchestra, Fong will perform composer Philip Glass's Echorus for two violins and orchestra featuring Grand Rapids Symphony concertmaster James Crawford.

Nyman, known for his film scores to movies such as The Piano, and Glass, composer of the operas Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha, are two of the best known composers in contemporary music.

Nyman's long list of works includes the scores to film director Peter Greenaway's films The Draughtsman's Contract and A Zed and Two Noughts, while Glass is composer of the chamber opera The Fall of the House of Usher which Opera Grand Rapids performed in September.

Yet the two remain unfamiliar to many fans of more traditional classical music.

"They're two of the composers who are most significant in the world right now who have been completely neglected in the orchestral world," Fong said. "This is the first time the Grand Rapids Symphony has done either of these two composers."

Nyman and Glass, whose "steady-state" compositions involve simple harmonies, repetitive melodies or rhythms and static structures, are a long way from Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.

Yet they're equally far from their contemporaries such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, who favored 20th-century atonal and serial techniques.

This weekend's Casual Classics, A Classical View Of Pop, will explore how popular music has influenced serious music through the centuries.

"Composers often times echo or are influenced by popular music," Varineau said.

"I'm trying to break down the barrier between pop and classical music. I'm also trying to show that's an artificial barrier."

Nyman's On The Fiddle, a 16-minute work for violin soloist and orchestra, is drawn from the scores of three of his films, A Zed and Two Noughts, Prospero's Books and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.

"He took music from all three films for On The Fiddle," Varineau said. "It's portions of those three film scores and reworking the music."

The Grand Rapids Symphony program also includes Edvard Grieg's Holberg Suite, Darius Milhaud's Le Boeuf sur le toit and Dmitry Shostakovich's Ballet Suite No. 1.

Shostakovich's suite is a set of melodies the Russian composer culled from his earlier scores.

Fong, who joined the Grand Rapids Symphony in 1988, was appointed associate concertmaster in 1996.

As a soloist, Fong has premiered new works by composers Arvo Pärt, Henryk Górecki and Mark Thomas. But she also played new works by non minimalist composers Donald Erb, Lou Harrison, John Cage and Robert Shechtman.

"There are many minimalist composers I don't like," Fong said. "There are a lot of good craftsman who aren't good composers. They lack soul or originality or personality. The kind of things you can't describe in person."

Though minimalism strikes some ears as bordering on mindless repetition composers such as Nyman and Glass distinguish themselves in the way they use material in different ways.

"They sound radically different from each other in the same sense that Shostakovich and Copland sound different," Fong said. "Not only are they two of the most significant composers today, people actually like their music."

the Paper.
January 7, 1999 (page 19)
by Scott VanderWerf

Modern Sounds
Symphony to premiere piece by noted film score composer

The Grand Rapids Symphony with violinist Christina Fong and associate conductor John Varineau will highlight works by renowned post-minimalists Michael Nyman and Philip Glass this weekend in both Grand Rapids and Holland.

Two of the most significant composers alive, Nyman and Glass rarely are featured in the orchestral world, an environment that perpetuates the works of the great long dead composers.

"Something happened back in the '70s," says Fong, who has premiered works by Nyman and performed the works of some of the great composers of our time: John Cage, Morton Feldman, Arvo Pärt, Henryk Górecki, Lou Harrison and Glass. "It became that only some people were supposed to understand some music. People lost perspective about what is new … what people like to listen to … and became more concerned with the technical, more about the way the machine works instead of the being aware of what is organically happening in society."

The symphony and Fong will perform the world premiere of Nyman's On The Fiddle for violin and orchestra and a new Glass piece titled Echorus.

The Nyman piece brings together themes from three separate film scores that he composed for director Peter Greenaway (A Zed and Two Noughts,The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, and Prospero's Books ). The recent Glass composition Echorus is dedicated to Edna Mitchell and Sir Yehudi Menuhin.

"(Echorus) was to evoke feelings of peace and compassion, and I think when he refers to compassion, he is referring to the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism, which he has been a practitioner of 20 years or so," Fong says. "I think it is interesting that the piece is dedicated to Yehudi Menuhin, who is often known as the humanitarian gentleman of classical music … for him (it) isn't just about self glorification or glorification of the arts."

Glass, like Nyman, has also had an extraordinary relationship with distinguished filmmakers, most recently Martin Scorsese with the film Kundun.

"They are like co-authors or co-creators, like Stravinsky and Diaghilev or Prokofiev and Eisenstein … they co-author or co-create a work," says Fong. Greenaway's films in particular flow in ways predicated on Nyman's scores.

Both artists are structuralists that complement the other in ways that go past many Hollywood director/composer relationships.

"At some point, real artists -- for whatever that means -- instead of just being craftsmen, they become an artist," Fong says. "Where their craft is a means to the art … for Greenaway it is the film making, for Nyman it is the music, but in many ways, it goes beyond the craft."

Grand Rapids Press
January 8, 1999 (page C5)
by Jeffrey Kaczmarczyk

Symphony shows that pop can be a fine art

The program was billed as A Classical View Of Pop.

That takes some explaining.

I'd describe Thursday's Grand Rapids Symphony concert as unfamiliar music that's fun to hear.

No more explanation necessary.

Back after a two month break from the Casual Classics Series in St. Cecilia Music Society's Royce Auditorium; associate conductor John Varineau treated the audience to five mostly unfamiliar and eclectic works all influenced by popular music of the day.

Popular is good.

Associate concertmaster Christina Fong, a committed champion of new music, was guest soloist for the world premiere performance of Michael Nyman's On The Fiddle, a three movement work culled from three of the English composer's film scores.

Technically, or technologically, speaking, the piece has been played in a studio and recorded. But strangely, it's never been performed in front of a live audience.

Best known for his scores to a such movies as The Piano, the classically trained ex-rock musician turned eclectic composer weaves post-minimalist flavored music that's a bit like "One Hundred and One Strings" meets Bruce Springsteen, as quiet, mesmerizing passages suddenly erupt into driving rock riffs.

Over the steady accompaniment of the Grand Rapids Symphony, Fong grew forth some lovely, song like melodies. Especially in the third movement, drawn from the Peter Greenaway film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, Fong commanded the stage with a performance alternately passive and passionate that inspired bonhomie in the orchestra.

For an encore, concertmaster James Crawford joined Fong to give the North American premiere of American composer Philip Glass's Echorus for two violins and string orchestra.

With Glass's more repetitively structured music, the soloists complemented each other like twins, introducing the beautiful, meditative harmonies before handing off to the orchestra to elaborate with subtly changing, peaceful variations.

In the second half, Varineau led the Grand Rapids Symphony in Dmitry Shostakovich'sBallet Suite No. 1 and Darius Milhaud's Le Boeuf sur la toit Ballet for Orchestra.

The former work is based upon such familiar dance forms as the waltz and polka, while the latter often sounds like the silent movie score for a Keystone Kops film set in Latin America.

With the Shostakovich ballet, Varineau led the lyrical waltz with a distinctively Russian duality -- light and merry in melody in the upper winds and strings, heavy and foreboding in the double basses and timpani.

The movement marked playful waltz had an enchanting, wide-eyed, child-like simplicity, and the gallop was full of gusto.

Milhaud's Le Boeuf sur la toit or The Ox on the Roof, a pantomime set in a tavern, features decidedly rollicking Brazilian rhythms and wonderful melodies that frequently wander into the uncharted musical water of polytonality.

Through the fantastically colorful performance, Varineau and the orchestra wove images of such characters as a boxer, a bookie, a dwarf, a fashionably dressed woman and a police officer in the noisy and nefarious setting of an American speakeasy during Prohibition.

The program opened with Edvard Grieg's Holberg Suite Op. 40, a warm diversion for a cold evening.

Based on such baroque dance forms as the sarabande and gavotte, the work for string orchestra nonetheless is full of romantic expressiveness. Consequently, the stately sarabande was more interesting than the typically staid 17th century version.

Varineau gave the movement dubbed Air a pleasant shape while decorating the entire piece with bright, shimmery tonal timbres from the spirited prelude to the effervescent rigaudon.

Toronto Globe and Mail
May 22, 1999 (page C9)
by Colin Eatock

Open Ears festival opens minds to adventurous new music

Sounds Unfamiliar

A park, a hotel and a derelict department store are among the venues for Kitchener's ambitious new-music event.

Abandoned buildings often have a ghostly quality, and the old Goudies department store in Kitchener is no exception. For a decade this former hive of activity contained nothing but darkness and an eerie silence. It was that very silence that led composer Peter Hatch, the 42-year-old artistic director of Kitchener's Open Ears Festival of New Music and Sounds, to select it as a performance space.

"You can't hear any noise from the street in here, and yet it's right downtown," he said in a recent interview, standing inside the cavernous building. "And it has a great acoustic -- a three-or-four-second reverb time." He clapped his hands to illustrate his point, making the dingy walls ring with the noise.

Now in its second season, Open Ears makes a point of bringing people to unusual places to hear adventurous new sounds. On Wednesday -- the opening night of the six-day festival -- Goodies served as a concert hail for a contemporary music program by the locally based Penderecki String Quartet. Tomorrow night, the building will turn into an opera house for the Canadian premiere of Philip Glass's Madrigal Opera, The State of the Tibetan Nation -- a most unusual opera, as it requires no singers, just a violinist/violist, a percussionist and a narrator.

Throughout the festival, the erstwhile department store is also home to the Sonic Playroom, created by sound artist Gayle Young with sculptors Reinhard Reitzenstein and Mary Catherine Newcombe, open free of charge during the day. "It's an interactive installation -- a sound sculpture that is performable by the public," Hatch explained.

As if in answer to the all-too-common problem of the public failing to notice, much less attend, most new music concerts, Hatch put together a series that Kitchenerites could scarcely avoid. The festival opened with bells ringing in six downtown churches and a performance by alphornist Michael Cumberland from atop the Farmers' Market. Other in-your-face performance venues include Kitchener's modern City Hall Square, the spacious green of Victoria Park, and the Walper Terrace Hotel, an old downtown landmark. As well, West Coast sound ecologist Hildegard Westerkamp is taking audiences on "soundwalks" -- guided and interpreted aural tours of the city.

It's a wide-ranging festival, even by the eclectic standards of contemporary music, and the diversity is deliberate: "The three themes of the festival are concert music, electroacoustics and sound ecology," Hatch said.

By combining these three elements he's created a hybrid, full of ideas and approaches he acknowledges are drawn from other music festivals around the country. Open Ears audiences can take in a formal new music concert by the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony tonight, just as they might at the Winnipeg Symphony's annual festival.

Then, tomorrow morning, they can experience a Deep Listening Workshop with meditative music guru Pauline Oliveros -- the sort of thing often experienced at the biennial Sound Symposium in St. John's, Nfld. And in a format common to many jazz festivals, there's a late night Twilight Sounds Series, featuring various forms of improvised music, acoustic and electronic, in Victoria Park's pavilion.

Open Ears' eclecticism is also the result of several local organizations coming together to create the festival. The Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony (for which Hatch serves as composer-in-residence) is a leading force behind the event, with additional contributions from local contemporary music groups Numus and Viva Voci. Opera Ontario is new to the series this year, with a double-bill of chamber operas from Quebec performed tomorrow afternoon in the studio theater of Kitchener's Center in the Square concert hall.

The result is a festival that, according to Hatch, makes sense for Kitchener -- a city of 185,000, lacking what he called "a hard-core new music audience." Not content with presenting to a few elites he hopes to attract 6000 people to Victoria Park tomorrow night to hear Montreal electric guitarist Tim Brady accompanied by fireworks. "When you get out of the concert hall you get rid of preconceptions. People are more open to new ideas in a new environment."

Hatch believes so strongly in his unorthodox venues that he was almost apologetic for putting tonight's Kitchener Waterloo Symphony program -- featuring works by Hatch, R, Murray Schafer, Christos Hatzis and Boyd Macdonald -- in a well appointed concert hall. "We're using the Center in the Square for that one," he sighed. "I still haven't found a good alternative space in town for an orchestra."

Detroit Free Press
May 30, 1999 (page 3E)
by Mark Stryker

The State of the Tibetan Nation: A Madrigal Opera

Philip Glass calls his stage works operas, and if some are conventionally structured, others bear little resemblance to your mother's Puccini. His 1980 "Madrigal Opera," which lacks a libretto, is an empty dramatic vessel. changing narratives with each new production.

Christina Fong and Glenn Freeman have reinvented the opera as a political statement about the Chinese occupation of Tibet and called it "The State of the Tibetan Nation: A Madrigal Opera."

Freeman has reconfigured the original score (six voices, violin, viola) for just two instrumentalists -- himself on electronic percussion and Fong on violin and viola. The music accompanies slides and narration. As popular and influential as Glass's pulsating minimalism has become, we rarely hear it live in metro Detroit. 8 p.m. Thursday thru Sunday, 1515 Broadway in Detroit. $15. 1-313-965-1515 or 1-248-548-9888.

Metro Times
June 2, 1999 (page 45)
by Norene Cashen

Ruminations on Glass

It is said that Philip Glass gained an interest in the people of Tibet as he composed the score for the film Kundun.  The Tibetan story now finds itself in the latest manifestation of the composer's adaptable "Madrigal Opera," which holds an open place for a narrative. Violin virtuoso (and adjunct violin instructor at Grand Valley State University) Christina Fong, will team up with Glenn Freeman June 3-6 at Detroit's 1515 Broadway for a benefit performance of State of the Tibetan Nation: A Madrigal Opera by Philip Glass. Fong will play violin and viola, and Freeman will play electro-percussion against a backdrop of projected slides and text. Pairing the "forlorn seriousness" of Glass's opera with images and meditations on Tibet is sure to provide an electrifying and enlightening experience. Fong has performed music of John Cage, Igor Stravinsky Arvo Pärt and other composers and is considered one of the state's leading performers of New Music. Proceeds from the event will benefit the Gaden Tehor Tibetan Buddhist Monastery of India and is sponsored by Detroit's New Music Society. The State of the Tibetan Nation: A Madrigal Opera by Philip Glass will be performed Thursday through Sunday at 8 p.m. tickets are $15. For more information call 313-965-1515 or 248-548-9888.

the Paper.
September 30, 1999 (page 17)
by Scott VanderWerf

Music Options

Christina Fong: John Cage One⁶ and One¹⁰ (OgreOgress)

This music opened me right up! As if my sternum could be cut with sound, as if a note could pierce membrane, or a harmonic create a third ear! Cold, precise, electric, this disc by Grand Rapids violinist Christina Fong left me -- at times -- trembling, anxious, intoxicated, overall in a trance.

Fong is the associate concertmaster of the Grand Rapids Symphony, a Grand Valley State University instructor and a bold explorer of 20th-century compositions. These are some of American composer John Cage's "number pieces" that he composed during the the last five years of his life. Representing his final project, this is a worthy epilogue to a body of work that has redefined the concept of sound, silence and listening that has made Cage the most important American composer of this century.

On this disc, silences are filled with the ambiance around me changed to notes, tones ringing, then back to silence. Liberated modularity results in a dynamic of liberated sound. Some phrases are quiet, almost muffled; some cut like the razor. This is difficult music, and yet if one surrenders to the experience, actively listens with a receptive mind open the rewards may be many. Throughout, I was as ever changing in my reactions as the changing timbre and attack. By the end, my physical being was filled with an energy, leaving my mind buzzing with possibilities.

You may find this disc at Schuler Books & Music and Harmony House.

In Unison
October 1999 (page 4)
by David Prudon

As is evident by the picture above, Associate Concertmaster, Christina Fong is a unique individual. Answering most of my questions with brevity, sometimes with a hint of sarcasm, the 35 yr. old violinist opened her world to me to share with all of you. I started by asking Chris about her well publicized passion for new music.

DP: You've made quite a reputation for yourself as a champion of new music. Why the special interest in this particular style of music?

Chris: I wouldn't call new music a "style" of music. There is plenty of so-called newer music that many and most would rather never hear, much less perform.

DP: What do you tell someone when they ask how you got hooked on playing the violin and being a performer?

Chris: Chance-Karma.

DP: What port of the Orient are your ancestors from?

Chris: Mostly the land, except for my maternal grandfather and great grandfather who spent a great deal of time at sea. Seriously, I am not terribly interested in my ancestral origins because most of my ancestors (like everyone else's) are currently dead. I do keep in touch with most of my family and that means my very extended family, including cousins, aunts, uncles and even second cousins, second uncles. This in-touchness with so many is really thanks to email.

DP: Do you think that this period of economic prosperity for Grand Rapids Symphony will continue?

Chris: I guess I'm not all that interested in money or economics. Don't get me wrong, I want my "fair share" and my colleagues to have their "fair share" as well, but I'm more interested in the artistic "prosperity" of the organization as whole. Sometimes musicians are not getting their "fair share" when compared with management and conductors. This "fair share" also applies to programming. If we and orchestras at large continue to program all dinosaurs or new stuff meant to sound like dinosaurs, we are on a treadmill to nowhere. On the other hand, like I said before "I'm not all that interested in money … " In the "grand" scheme of our world at large, like the atrocities happening to Tibetans due to Chinese occupation, the genocide in Rwanda and unfortunately countless more tragedies, we in Grand Rapids, and we as musicians are in the big picture VERY lucky.

DP: How long have you played with the GRSO? Do you plan to live here until retirement or would you like to move elsewhere someday?

Chris: Bazillion years. I don't make plans.

DP: How long have you and Glenn been married? Will you ever have children or is that not part of the master plan?

Chris: Bazillion years plus one. I don't make plans.

DP: If you could listen to only 3 orchestral pieces for the rest of your existence, what would they be?

Chris: TOO many, and I don't think I can even narrow things down to three composers, so I will narrow it to three living ones: Philip Glass, Michael Nyman and Michael Gordon.

DP: Are there things about you that you would change if it was possible?

Chris: Sure. I'm constantly changing; it's the non changing that is an impossibility.

DP: Are there CDs available of your performances of new music?

Chris: Yes, my first commercially available CD is two of John Cage's "number pieces." That is, the world premiere recordings of One⁶ (one for the 6th time) and One¹⁰ (one for the 10th time), now available everywhere online (CDworld, CDnow, CDuniverse, etc.) and locally at Aris, Schuler's and Barnes & Noble. Two recording projects now in progress are a CD of unrecorded early Michael Nyman works (also premiere recordings) and a CD of Grand Rapids-based composer Bob Shechtman's works, which I recorded this past summer.

Grand Rapids Press
October 14, 1999 (page B9)

best bets for going out tonight & tomorrow

Madrigal Opera

Local musicians and artists will present a multimedia performance of The State of the Tibetan Nation: A Madrigal Opera, by contemporary American composer Philip Glass, at 8 tonight and 9pm Friday in the recently opened Total Sphung coffee house at 428 Bridge St. NW.

Local musicians include Christina Fong playing five string electric violin/viola and Glenn Freeman performing on electro-percussion. Narration will be provided by Angie Forton, The Sloth and other surprise guests. The performance will include visual images of Tibet by photographers Kathryn Culley, Sonam Zoksang, Nancy Jo Johnson and Katie Murphy.

An offering will be collected at the free event to benefit Tibetans in exile.

Grand Rapids Press
December 9, 1999 (page E6)
by Rich Berry

Versatile musician

As part of its Local Composers Series, the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts features the music of Matthew Plichta at 7:30pm Friday in the UICA Theater, 41 Sheldon Blvd. SE.

Plichta plays rock with Milkhouse, a Grand Rapids rock group that recently released the CD Culture Spread.

He has also collaborated on classical works with noted area musicians including violinist Christina Fong, percussionist Glenn Freeman and classical guitarist Paul Vondiziano.

the Paper.
December 9, 1999 (page 15)
by Jay Bennett

Chamber Made

Local composer stretches boundaries of classical music

Matthew Plichta is caught in a culture that celebrates dead artists and often ignores the living ones. Composing classical music in the United States usually assures the composer anonymity and an under appreciation by the masses.

That's why artists like Plichta need programs like UICA's Local Composers Series for rare opportunity to put their music in front of the public.

"In Europe, there's a feeling of cultural immediacy," says the 34-year-old Grand Rapids composer and musician. "They really want to know what's going on currently. Here we don't have the attention span."

That's exactly why the Grand Rapids native knows his presentation Friday, Dec. 10, at the UICA Theater is, in several ways, a make-or-break proposition.

"This show will be evidence if it's going to fly," says Plichta, who's been composing chamber music since his days at the acclaimed music school at the University of North Texas in the late 80s and early 90s. "It's a personal stepping stone."

It helps that Plichta recruited such established professionals as Grand Rapids Symphony associate concertmaster Christina Fong and local classical guitarist Paul Vondiziano to perform his compositions.

"It's a huge thrill to have someone like Christina to embrace what I've written," says Plichta, who wrote the piece music|electronic|repetitive for Fong and electro-percussionist Glenn Freeman. "She's always helped me out. We both share a love for the music of John