Peter Broderick & Ensemble 0

Welcome to the 19th edition of Klarafestival! The theme Crossroads - Come Together keenly evokes the convergence of the audience, the artists and their inspiring concerts. A meeting place where the leading lights of international classical music enter into dialogue with challenging creations and young talent. 

The inspiration for this edition comes from festival artist Claron McFadden. As she told us in an interview, “I stand at a crossroads where styles and generations cross, meet, and collide”. This notion forms the core of the programme. We hope you will enjoy Klarafestival as a sanctuary of hope, polyphony and beauty in all its forms. As a place where the familiar takes on new meaning and where new experiences take you by surprise. 

Jan Raes, chairman

Joost Fonteyne, intendant

Chantal Pattyn, manager Klara

For all its wonder and beauty, the musical output of Arthur Russell also embodies irony, tragedy, and paradox. Consider all that he left behind. Russell famously recorded more than 1,000 hours of tape and left an otherwise-tremendous archive, now part of the New York Public Library. But before his death in 1994, Russell released just three albums under his own name. One of those was Tower of Meaning, a score commissioned for and then abandoned by a Robert Wilson production of Medea. Philip Glass helped preserve the music, at least, subsequently releasing a somewhat-thin recording on his own label in an edition of 320 LPs.

A few years into his obsession with Russell’s work, the singer, producer, and composer Peter Broderick paid $500 for one of those scant copies, the most he’s ever spent on a single album. (It was remastered and reissued in 2006, followed by several subsequent editions.) Still, he didn’t connect with that collector’s item the way he did with so much of Russell’s oeuvre. It felt a tad cold and distant, Russell’s usual tangle of intimacy and mystery perhaps lost in his frustrations with the process or maybe in the recording itself. In either case, Broderick now understands entirely just how sumptuous and sweeping Russell’s Tower of Meaning has been for 40 years. He is a linchpin of Give It to the Sky: Arthur Russell’s Tower of Meaning Expanded, an 80-minute reanimation that threads several lost songs into a meticulous and gorgeous rendering by French contemporary music institution Ensemble 0. There can now be no mistaking the wonder and beauty of Tower of Meaning.

Ensemble 0 founder Stéphane Garin realised he needed to pursue this project immediately after performing just a bit of the piece—in fact, it was on the train ride home from a concert that he offered his idea. In 2019, the group played a 25-minute chunk as a preamble to Femenine, the pulsing minimalist masterwork of Julius Eastman. (A longtime Russell collaborator, Eastman conducted the initial recording of Tower of Meaning.) Garin was struck by its splendor and subtle difficulty, the way that Russell shirked dissonance in favor of metric complexity. There was little else like it.

Garin’s epiphany launched a four-year quest of research, transcription, consultation, rehearsing, recording, and imaginative editing. At one point, they even interviewed Gavin Bryars, whose own score had replaced Russell’s in Wilson’s staging. ‘I never wanted to hurt your show. I was struggling with my inability to go faster,’ Russell once wrote to Wilson in a letter he never sent. ‘I always thought that you would be pleased in the end, but now I’m sorry you are angry.’ Ensemble 0 wanted to give one of Russell’s most misunderstood compositions another chance to be heard.

Early in the process, Ensemble 0 made two crucial decisions: First, they would not seek out Russell’s original esoteric scores, which had already been used to stage Tower of Meaning elsewhere. They liked that the recording felt unfinished, allowing them to consider what was missing and how the ever-restless Russell might have modified it over time. Ensemble 0 saxophonist Julien Pontvianne toiled over this task, scrutinizing recordings that Russell had slowed with a tape machine in order to find the melodies and undergirding arrangements.

And second, they would look beyond Tower of Meaning itself to consider how it worked alongside other bits of Russell’s massive musical corpus, particularly his songwriting. They knew not only of Broderick’s stints interpreting Russell’s songs on stages and albums for the better part of a decade but also his work collaborating with Russell’s estate to restore previously unreleased tracks for the staggering album Iowa Dream. Broderick did not hesitate when Ensemble 0 asked him to enlist, but he did offer a surprise: rather than lace Tower of Meaning with expected Russell standards, why not incorporate some of his cherished songs that had never found a home? Russell’s estate agreed.

Give it to the Sky is supple and dioramic. Pontvianne’s transcriptions add both muscle and nuance to the original recording, with a new low-end depth to balance the trebly tremble. Ensemble 0’s layers are as intricate as they are expertly rendered, the obfuscation of that rare Glass release replaced by a clarity that lets you peer inside this mesmeric music. New ideas appear, suggesting Tower of Meaning as the scaffolding to something greater.

Ensemble 0 weave in and out of Broderick’s additions. Corky, a poignant cowboy ballad that Russell never finished, appears, disappears, and reappears three times, the droning exhalations of Tower of Meaning making it feel sweeter and sadder. Arriving just after the triumphant halfway mark, the title track is a sublime meditation on mere existence, about staring at some simple rural scene and marveling at the miracle of being anywhere at all. It is an apt encapsulation of how this entire project feels—a glorious way to hear something that might have seemed familiar as if for the very first time.

Russell was never much for definitive versions, of course. He was constantly rethinking the possibilities of a piece, of wondering what else it could do. Give it to the Sky is a powerful affirmation of those principles, using Tower of Meaning’s framework to build outward and upward, to shape something that functions within Russell’s wondrous, paradoxical world. And Give it to the Sky is also not intended to be some definitive last word. Broderick and Ensemble 0 speak already of the ways it may shift on stage, of where else it might lead.

But more broadly, Give it to the Sky is a brilliant invitation to reconsider the mother work, to open it to new listeners who may find another forward path with it. This isn’t how Russell would have continued with Tower of Meaning. At last, in this imaginative new rendering, you can hear the majesty of what he did write in full splendor, played and recorded with utmost care. Give it to the Sky is an homage to Russell’s past that returns his underserved and overlooked jewel to the present and future, where it belongs.

Ensemble 0

The French Ensemble 0 was founded in 2004 as an ensemble for contemporary music, including that of its own members. The ensemble is led by composer Sylvain Chauveau and percussionist-composer Stéphane Garin and consists of a large group of musicians who are deployed for specific projects depending on the requirements. Ensemble 0 will perform compositions by Moondog, Julius Eastman and György Ligeti, among others, in addition to work by contemporary composers such as Tristan Perich, Michael Pisaro and Rachel Grimes. The ensemble has released several albums with work by contemporary composers as well as by its own members, including an album consisting of five versions of John Cage's 4’33”.

Peter Broderick – voice, violin, acoustic guitar, cassette player

Peter Broderick is an American composer and multi-instrumentalist who performs worldwide with various ensembles, such as the renowned Danish band Efterklang, with whom he has been collaborating for 5 years. He has created compositions ranging from contemporary classical to folk, for various types of projects, including film and contemporary dance. His numerous recordings have been released on prestigious labels such as Erased Tapes and Bella Union. He currently lives in the west of Ireland.