You won't find chatterbird's musicians eating red curry chicken at The Smiling Elephant on Friday night. That's because they'll be playing Richard Reed Parry's Quartet for Heart and Breath, a work that's positively brimming with gastroenterological implications.
"The musicians will all wear stethoscopes during the performance," chatterbird's artistic director Celine Thackston tells the Scene. "We listen to our heart rates, which we use to set the pace and structure of the piece. But the stethoscopes create the sensation of being underwater, so you hear everything, including your stomach churning if you've eaten spicy food."
Arranged for winds, strings and stethoscopes, Quartet for Heart and Breath seems tailor-made — make that organically grown — for chatterbird. Founded in 2014, Nashville's newest alt-classical group hopes to build a quirky, like-minded music scene similar to the one in Thackston's former hometown of Portland, Ore., where electric guitar orchestras and unorthodox opera productions were the norm.
"Nashville deserves that kind of scene," Thackston says.
Nashville will certainly be getting its fair share of quirkiness (and strange beauty) with Parry's Quartet for Heart and Breath, part of the group's program at 7:30 p.m. Friday at the Wedgewood-Houston venue/coffee club Noteable Blends. Best known as a multi-instrumentalist mainstay of Grammy-winning indie superstars Arcade Fire, Parry has in recent years branched out, composing music for such alt-classical groups as Kronos Quartet and Warhol Dervish. For his quartet, Parry borrowed generously from minimalism.
The piece opens with flute and pizzicato strings playing a repeated two-note motif, which pulsates like a beating heart. As different instruments join in, various motifs begin to overlap, creating oscillating patterns that call to mind gentle ripples on the surface of water.
"Since the pacing of the music is set by our heart rates, no two performances are ever the same," says Thackston.
For all of its innovation, Quartet for Heart and Breath may not even be the most progressive piece on chatterbird's program. That honor may well go to Stephen Gorbos' 8-bit divertimento, which is arranged for bassoon and electronics. In much the same way Haydn incorporated 18th century folk music into his classical works, Gorbos integrates the synthesized sounds of video-game music to create an offbeat contemporary chamber piece. Chatterbird bassoonist Maya Stone will be the work's soloist.
Another electronic piece on the program, composer Liduino Pitombeira's Maracatu, features elaborate synthesized music, creating a ringing, oscillating, unimaginably haunting sonic landscape. These scintillating sounds will accompany some remarkably sensuous passages for solo alto saxophone (chatterbird saxophonist Paula Van Goes will solo).
Chatterbird's idiosyncratic style is defined by the electric guitar. So it comes as no surprise that the group's composer-in-residence is the noted Nashville-based electric guitarist Bryan Clark. For the ensemble's performance at Noteable Blends, Clark will perform a jazz-influenced piece titled "Othello," which is the middle movement of a much larger suite called 7 Secret Lives of Lucien Midnight.
"It's always a challenge to make the volume of an electronic instrument blend with the acoustic instruments in a chamber group," says Clark. "Amazingly, the musicians in chatterbird are so flexible in their playing that it's not been a problem, so I think people are going to really love 'Othello.' "
More likely than not, the audience will also find much to admire in chatterbird's performance of Early in the Morning. The genesis of this piece was a trip that composer Eve Berglarian took down the Mississippi River in 2009. She recorded the pre-dawn sounds of the river, and when played in tandem with chatterbird's percussion section, those chirping crickets and croaking frogs create a sparkling tapestry of polyrhythms.
Also on the program: Two of chatterbird's musicians, Jesse Strauss, percussion, and Alex Leach, electronics, will premiere a new collaborative piece titled Consumer Science; and Nashville singer-songwriter Seth Timbs will contribute three new works — Etude Brute/Give Up on Your Dreams/Shylock.
"I've been a fan of Seth Timbs since his days performing with [power-pop band] Fluid Ounces in Murfreesboro," says Thackston. "Since part of chatterbird's mission is to collaborate with non-classical musicians as much as possible, I thought of Seth immediately when I planned this concert."
Chatterbird's reputation as a cutting-edge music ensemble has obviously gotten around, since the group has been invited to participate in TEDxNashville this Saturday at TPAC's Jackson Hall. TED conferences bring together distinguished speakers to discuss the latest ideas about technology, entertainment and design. For Nashville's sixth annual TED conference, chatterbird will perform the music of Clark, Strauss and Leach.
"Performing at TEDxNashville is a big deal for us," says Thackston. "It means chatterbird has come a long way in a very short time."
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