Field Notes: Cleek Schrey & David Behrman at ISSUE Project Room April 21 - A Preview
“Seeking out older master musicians to play with and study with is always something that I’ve done” says Cleek Schrey, a NYC-based fiddler, improviser, and composer who grew up in Virginia, surrounded by master fiddlers.
For the past few years, Cleek Schrey has been playing and studying with the computer music icon David Behrman to resurrect some of Behrman’s early work from the 60’s along with a collection of newer pieces. (Team New Sounds recently saw them perform together at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville.) Not all of the technology Behrman was using fifty years ago has stood the test of time like he has, so this collaboration re-invents the pieces for 21st century equipment.
I first got to know Cleek, not as a fiddler or composer, but as the teaching assistant for my Theory & Analysis course at Wesleyan University. Cleek was in the university’s composition masters program studying with electroacoustic masters, Paula Matthusen and Ron Kuivila; he is now working toward his PhD at Princeton, in seminar with So Percussion. Over the two years we spent together at Wesleyan, I grew to admire Cleek’s work as an adventurous fiddler, steeped in traditional fiddle music and also reimagining what contemporary fiddle music can sound like. We hadn’t spoken in almost two years, but with Behrman and Schrey collaborating again for a concert at ISSUE Project Room this Saturday, I wanted to reach out and catch up on Cleek’s experience working in this duo.
“David and I met at Wesleyan” Cleek told me. “He came during my first semester to teach the composition seminar, but we didn’t actually connect that semester. Some time after, I went to his house to play some music, and he liked what I was doing with his pieces... There is a lot of openness with his work. He creates these environments with his work and performers get to make choices.” David Behrman was one of the absolute original composers working with interactive electronics. This open and experimental approach of his led him to form the Sonic Arts Union with Alvin Lucier, Robert Ashley, and Gordon Mumma.
After David and Cleek played together in the winter of 2014, they had no plans to play together again, but Behrman, somewhat mysteriously, said “you never know what might happen.” In the spring of 2016, Cleek was travelling to London to work with the Gare St. Lazare theater company on a new adaptation of some of Samuel Beckett’s work when Behrman invited him to collaborate once again, this time for a performance. That May, Schrey and Behrman joined with cellist Anton Lukoszevieze for a two day residency at London’s Cafe Oto. Cleek told me “I didn’t know the pieces we were playing really well and would ask for guidance. I asked David ‘generally, what’s the pitch world for the piece?’ and his response was ‘whatever you hear.’ After those concerts, then Meredith Monk invited us to do her series at Roulette, which then led to a couple more performances. Every time we do it, there are more pieces he has resurrected. He is discovered by some throughout the decades, and lots of long-time fans finally get to hear these pieces.”
Behrman has a history of working with violinists; Takehisa Kosugi collaborated on a lot of work with Berhman - some of which is being reinterpreted by Cleek in his adaptation. “[Kosugi and I] are very different players” said Cleek. “Some of the interest for David is to highlight that difference. The way the pieces work - they aren’t conceived for a particular instrument, but he has players in mind. One of the things David likes about my playing and why it fits well with some of his experimental aesthetics. He likes that my playing isn’t very violinistic.” Behrman recently released some unpublished work he recorded with Kosugi back in the ‘70s on the new LP “Music With Memory”.
Cleek has also worked with some of Behrman’s contemporaries, recently playing with Alvin Lucier in a daxophone ensemble, New Perplexity. “That’s the generation I look to most for artistic inspiration; I find them to be kindred spirits. More than my peers, those are the people I want to be making stuff with while I can.”
Working with Behrman has had a deep impact on how Cleek approaches his playing. “One of the things we will do in this concert, I am going to play interpretations of fiddle music within an electronic environment. I don’t usually make explicit reference to the repertoire, but this was David’s idea and it worked out really well… Fiddling really comes in to inform my sensibility as a player and interpreter; the way I use the bow and some of the way I approach tone and sound is heavily similar.” Possibly even more more than this collaboration’s influence on Cleek’s playing is its impact on him as a composer. “Working with him has really influenced my concept of composition because of how much agency he gives to the performer. I haven’t really encountered much work that does that and retains a strong identity of a piece. Watching how he navigates that boundary… with wonderful ambiguity… is what I want to aspire to.”
Cleek also plays/works with Anna & Elizabeth, Nic Gareiss, and many other groups around New York, but for a wholly unique electroacoustic night of music, head to ISSUE Project Room this Saturday.
