Sean Friar among Present Music’s “Multitude”
Present Music ends its season with a multitude of pieces, including an electric guitar premiere by Sean Friar.
Composer Sean Friar. Photo by Frank Wojciechowski.
Multitude, coming Friday (May 24), is one of Present Music’s three-ring circus concerts. A dancer (Mauriah Kraker), art installations (Brooke Thiele, Lilly Coyle, Emily Sheider) including a “wall of cupcakes,” a post-concert party (with rock/ska band Something to Do), a singing cellist (Leah Coloff), composer-vocalist Ted Hearne, and a guest electric guitarist will be in the mix at Turner Hall.
Composer Sean Friar’s Breaking Point, to premiere Friday, won’t be lost in tumult. I’ve heard the MIDI simulation — it’s fast, loud, intense, antic, frantic, with a blazing electric guitar part out front of a string quintet, clarinet, percussion and piano. Jangly, high dissonances and whiplash changes of pace abound. Several of them, along with illustrative riffs akin to cartoon music, made me laugh. Over lunch at the Plaza Hotel Wednesday, Friar, 27, was glad to hear that.
Friar wrote the piece last spring, while he was finishing up his PhD course work at Princeton, writing his dissertation, working on other commissions, and preparing to move back to Los Angeles, his home town. Breaking Point comes out of both the pressure he felt at the time and the sense of humor that occasionally put it all back into perspective. After all, he was facing academic and musical projects, not famine.
For Friar, it’s OK for music to be fun in the way that serious music can be fun. Breaking Point is raucous, high-energy fun put together by a sophisticated musician with a good grasp of musical structure.
“I want the music to be clear and intelligible, at least in the waxing and waning of density and energy,” Friar said.
Even in the MIDI simulation, that was apparent to me. But I couldn’t quite pin down the unifying elements, even on second listening to the 13-minute piece.
“I like to set up some kind of idea and develop it,” he said. “My material tends to be really elemental, like the rhythm and one large interval at the beginning of Breaking Point. It’s so simple that you might not perceive it as the main motive. The less profile the main idea has, the more I can manipulate it. I can dress it up any way I want. The way things change in the piece is so complicated that the material doesn’t have to be complicated.
“Some composers are more material based — they might begin with a fully formed melody and then show it in different lights. I’m more of a journey-based composer.”
He said that in addition this rhythm/interval combination, Friar employed a separate array of ideas, gestures and melodies he can superimpose on his main idea or bring in underneath it. Breaking Point unfolds in episodes, like the scenes in a play. A minor character introduced in one scene might play an important role in the next — another unifying strategy.
Though Friar obviously knows what he’s doing, he tries not to over-think the music.
“I enjoy listening in a high-minded way, but sometimes you can’t override what’s going on in your chest,” he said.
Friar determines timing and pacing, to him the most crucial elements, in an intuitive way. How long should those intense, fleet running scales go on? Twenty seconds? Forty, before that dreamy cocktail-piano bit interrupts? He listens and adjusts until it feels right.
Computer technology makes it easy to listen and adjust. Friar composes at the computer, and regards it as an invaluable tool — but just a tool. He had to step away from it and pick up a guitar for much of Breaking Point.
“I don’t really play guitar, so I wanted to be sure that everything was at least possible,” he said. He figured that if he could get his hands around the notes, no matter how awkwardly, that guest virtuoso guitarist Derek Johnson could hit them gracefully. Johnson and Friar have been in touch for quite some time; Friar, a keyboard player, credits Johnson with editing the electric guitar part, which is tantamount to a concerto solo.
“Derek’s a composer too, so he could say ‘I think I see what you’re after here, and we could get it more simply and easily if we did this.” Friar said. “We used Skype. He’d aim the camera at his hand and say, ‘See, we could do this.'”
After working with Johnson, Friar dispensed with retuning two of the strings to dropping one string by an octave, to allow the guitarist to get a “slap bass” effect. This will make learning the part much easier for subsequent players.
In September, Friar started teaching part-time at UCLA, where he earned bachelor’s degrees in both music and psychology. His parents are both clinical psychologists, and he believes his study of the science helps him as a composer. He’s interested in perception and tries hard to jump out of his own head when listening to his own work. He wants to make sure that listeners will have the bandwidth to take it all in — he might slow things down to allow that.
“It’s frustrating to sit through a piece where the composer hasn’t considered these issues,” he said. “”Not considering the audience is like talking to yourself in a mirror.”
Friar started composing music in grade school.
“I was lucky enough to have teachers who encouraged me to improvise and to compose,” he said. “I went through phases where I wrote like Chopin, Shostakovich — Scriabin lasted a while.”
But a rock ‘n’ roll phase preceded all that.
“I loved 1950s rock,” Friar said. “At Halloween I dressed up like Jerry Lee Lewis. I did ‘Great Balls of Fire’ at the middle school talent show. I guess something about that energy is in my DNA.”
Concert Info: 7:30 p.m. Friday May 24, Turner Hall Ballroom, 1032 N. 4th St. Pre-concert talk with Sean Friar at 6:45 p.m. Tickets $35, $25, $15, 50% discount for students; order online.
The Multitude concert is in partnership with UWM ArtSite and UWM Year of the Arts Celebrating the 50thAnniversary of the Peck School of the Arts. Come experience the beautiful and vivid art installations that will be on display by UWM Students, alumni and faculty.
