High School Musicians Take on the (Almost) Unplayable

Tensions are said to have run a bit high during the recording of composer and saxophonist Anthony Braxton’s pathbreaking, style-blending album “Creative Orchestra Music 1976.”

At the time, it was one of the Arista label’s most expensive productions, requiring multiple sessions and almost two dozen musicians. One seasoned player temporarily fled the studio after deciding one of Braxton’s intricate parts was unplayable.

You don’t expect to hear high-schoolers performing music deemed unplayable by professionals. But on June 10 at the Jazz Gallery near Madison Square Park in New York, three young ensembles from the Kaufman Music Center’s Face the Music program — featuring players between the ages of 12 and 18 — will convene for a remarkable concert devoted to Braxton’s work.

The program’s big band will present Composition No. 55, a showpiece from “Creative Orchestra Music 1976” that tips a hat to the work of Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus, while also reveling in Braxton’s idiosyncratic vamps and quickly careening melodies.

Face the Music’s improvisation collective, featuring some of the youngest students, will perform Composition No. 192, a ritualistic piece from Braxton’s “Ghost Trance Music” series. And an advanced octet will play Composition No. 69b, blended with Composition No. 108b, in accordance with Braxton’s dictum that “all compositions in my music system can be executed at the same time/moment.” (Eat your heart out, John Cage.)

For Face the Music, it’s the latest iteration of a long-standing aim to delve into the music of living composers. It’s also something of a soft launch for Braxton75, a multiyear project that will see various classical and improvising groups performing his works before his 75th birthday in June 2020. (Sony’s Legacy Recordings imprint celebrated his 73rd this month with a new compilation, “The Essential Anthony Braxton: The Arista Years,” including that vintage recording of Composition No. 55.)

The Face the Music students and their conductor, Aakash Mittal, will be joined in performance by four artists with deep ties to Braxton: vocalists Kyoko Kitamura and Anne Rhodes, brass specialist Taylor Ho Bynum and bassist Carl Testa. (The grown-ups are also scheduled to play a set of their own.)

Kitamura and Testa were on hand for a recent Sunday full of rehearsals, offering pointers and encouragement. When the high-schoolers needed a break from the rigors of Composition No. 55, the adult musicians talked them through Braxton’s “language music” system for improvisation.

Based on a codelike series of line drawings rather than traditional notation, this approach allows any single instrumentalist — or the conductor of an ensemble — to select broad performance parameters, like staccato lines or wide-interval hops, then shape what emerges. A few students took turns leading the others in this free (yet bounded) system.

Finishing her stint in front of the group, 17-year-old electric bassist Maxwell Jensen-Moulton, a student at the Brooklyn Latin School, turned toward Kitamura and said, “I felt like I had so much power.”

As Mittal prepared his students to go back into the traditionally notated Composition No. 55, he encouraged them to transition into the piece after another go at Braxton’s improvisation language. Suddenly, they were navigating the grandly stacked motifs of Composition No. 55 with greater ease.

A meeting of an advanced experimentalist and even the most talented high-schoolers is unusual, but Braxton seems to have planned for it decades ago. In notes for Composition No. 102 (for “Orchestra and Puppet Theater”), from 1982, Braxton said he intended “to become involved in the world of children and family-centered music” because “all of these matters are related to world change.” One of the operas in his “Trillium” cycle includes a double Dutch jump rope troupe.

For Mittal, the conductor, Braxton’s interest in youthful creativity and future potential is an ideal fit with the openness pursued by Face the Music, which draws students from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

“Braxton’s whole thing is, he lets other people be creators,” Mittal said. “That’s what teenagers need. That’s also what the world needs.” When a student writes a piece for “wacky instrumentation,” he added, Face the Music will work to field a new ensemble that can play it. “Students aren’t forced into some pedagogical model.”

That openness also involves letting students have honest reactions to unfamiliar music — even if those reactions are, at first, unfavorable. The 16-year-old clarinetist and saxophonist Seuss Fu-Rubin’s first encounter with Braxton’s music was not love at first listen.

“Not gonna lie,” he wrote in an email, “I wasn’t a huge fan when I was first introduced.”

But over the three years that Fu-Rubin, a junior at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, has been studying Braxton’s works, he said, he has “come to appreciate his genius and how he layers and opens up an ensemble in many different ways.”

Jensen-Moulton, the bassist, described a similar journey. And she explained why experimenting with Braxton’s “language music” improvisations made other pieces better, too.

“While we blend together in our other repertoire,” she wrote in an email, “'language music’ is different every time, which improves our ability to perform as one coherent group, rather than as a dozen different instrumentalists.”

This understanding of unity — pursued, in a seeming paradox, through open-ended individual expression — is at the heart of Braxton’s work. Whether it will lead to “world change” is unclear. But it seems unwise to rule out anything.