Brian Slattery Photos
Galberth, Schloss, and Chance.
It was Wednesday evening at Best Video on Whitney Avenue, and Gneiss Ensemble was just starting into its set. With a gesture from Anne Rhodes on voice, Tahj Galberth on clarinet, Cliff Schloss on guitar, and Brianna Chance on flute launched into a cascade of flickering notes. With another gesture, they climbed into an upward-moving phrase. They moved to pixellated again, and back to lyrical. Rhodes and fellow guide Adam Matlock on accordion provided the broad outlines, but Galberth, Schloss, and Chance were playing the second-by-second substance. Galberth took the lead for a time and the others fell in behind him. They did it by playing well, and more important, by listening hard to one another.
New Haven is a hotbed for improvised and experimental music, but Gneiss boasts perhaps the scene’s youngest members. Chance, who is 17, just graduated from Wilbur Cross and ECA and is headed to the University of Connecticut at Storrs in the fall. Galberth is 18 and also just graduated from ECA and Cross; he is taking a gap year to save money, play music, and go to a lot of performances before heading off to Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass. At 22, Schloss is the oldest member and a teacher at Neighborhood Music School.
The trio met two years ago when they were part of the ensemble for the theater piece (Be)longing, performed at Long Wharf Theatre as part of 2017’s International Festival of Arts and Ideas. Rhodes, who was also in the ensemble, saw that the young musicians were adept at the piece’s more improvised elements and asked if they would be interested in creating a group of their own.
“We were like, ‘yes … why would we say no?’” Chance said.
The three of them started getting to know New Haven’s experimental music scene. Schloss recalled visiting Firehouse 12 and having a realization about the music when seeing it in action after studying it in school. For all the theory and the academic rigor that could sometimes surround the music in the context of a music program, “it came from people trying to make something that was new,” Schloss said.
Seeing it done in practice, he said, “I started to understand the philosophy” — as Galberth put it, to “make music that’s good weird.”
With the history of recorded music from around the world at our fingers, Schloss said, “we’re living in the age of anything goes. The future is free jazz mixed with things that are rhythmic, things that make you feel.”
It took time to move the idea of the ensemble into reality. Gneiss’s first rehearsal was in April of this year. There, Rhodes and Matlock introduced Galberth, Chance, and Schloss to the concepts of avant-garde musician Anthony Braxton’s language music, which offers ways to guide musicians through a group improvisation on the spot by using hand signals to refer to a set of parameters for creating musical phrases — say, a long tone, or a series of musical intervals, or short, punchy notes. What notes, at what speed, and with what emotional content, however, were up to the performers.
Chance, Galberth, and Schloss took to it fast. “We already had some chemistry coming into this,” Chance said. They found that when they played together, “everything ends up falling together,” Galberth said. “It’s something that satisfies me a lot.”
“It’s like telepathy,” Chance said. “I feel like I can enter into your minds.”
“Y’all think of things that I would never think of,” Schloss said. Chance and Galberth felt the same about him. Together, they were pushing each other to get better as musicians — from improving their technique to finding new ways to play their instruments. This was accomplished, they all agreed, by listening, really hard. It was “the most important aspect,” Galberth said.
Rhodes, who has worked with Braxton for years and tried his language music with several groups, couldn’t agree more. “One of the hardest things is to get people to listen to each other. Transparency is one of the major goals. With older adults, that takes a lot of reminding. With this group, I said it once and they did it.”
With Chance, Galberth, and Schloss “on it,” Rhodes said, she would like to expand the group and work with even younger musicians (young musicians who may be interested can contact her through her website). She would also like to continue paying the musicians to perform and has raised funds to do it for the group’s first few performances. As young musicians are expected to believe that “exposure is a form of payment, and we know that it isn’t,” she wants the musicians she works with to know that “your time and talent is worth compensation, regardless of your experience level.”
Rhodes and Matlock.
On Wednesday evening, Rhodes and Matlock warmed up the attentive audience with a short improvised set of their own. With a series of loop and other pedals, along with her own prodigious vocal technique, Rhodes created a landscape of drones and flitting phrases for Matlock to respond to. They went back and forth, letting the music get dense and pointillistic in places, spacious and lush in others. They then began singing together, a series of phrases that first cascaded downward, reciting numbers and letters, then began jumping around. Rhodes unrolled an embroidered scroll for them to follow each other out.
Gneiss then got down to business. Flanked by Rhodes and Matlock, Chance, Galberth, and Schloss by the middle of their set were exploring the outer ranges of their instruments’ tone. Galberth found ways to voice two tones at once. Inspired, Chance partly disassembled her flute and first played one half as if it were a trumpet, creating a lower-pitched, warbling sound, then seeing what she could do with just the mouthpiece. They broke the music down into duets, into trios. Then, with just a couple more gestures from Rhodes, she and Matlock became the chorus for Chance, Galberth, and Schloss, as the three created a swirling texture of notes that allowed them to end their set in a burst of energy and imagination.
Chance and Galberth credited their musical training with preparing them for Gneiss’s guided improvisations, which required an unusual combination of discipline and freedom. Chance said her classical background gave her that discipline, while other free-improv groups taught her about freedom. “We’ve had the strictest and the most laid-back, and here we get the in-between,” she said.
“This type of music, you’re not thinking of anything else but listening and flowing with the music,” Galberth said. Playing together and learning from one another, added Chance, was putting them on the road to “becoming who we are as musicians.”