Fringe

FRINGE ATLANTA:
CLASSICAL MUSIC FOR A POP GENERATION
Fringe founders Fia Durrett and José Reyes speak with Steve Goss on Atlanta NPR affiliate, 90.1 WABE

By STEVE GOSS 90.1 WABE

LISTEN to Fia Durrett and Steve Goss

LISTEN to José Reyes and Steve Goss

GPB INTERVIEW ON THE GEORGIA GAZETTE:
Fringe founders Fia and Dana Durrett and José Reyes speak with Edgar Treiguts on Georgia Public Broadcastings' The Georgia Gazette.

By EDGAR TREIGUTS GPB

SHUCK THE FORMALITY;
FRINGE MAY BE THE FUTURE

By PIERRE RUHE The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Published on: 5/19/08

It’s hard to decide what Fringe Atlanta does best. Is it the committed, sometimes superb, chamber-music performances — or the presentation of those concerts?

The Fringe paradigm might be this: classical music, if well played, remains vibrant and engrossing, but the formality and ceremony of most classical concerts turns off audiences in our modern a go-go world.

So across its four-concert inaugural season, which ended Saturday night, Fringe retained what works and shucked what doesn’t. It has proved a savvy strategy: loosen audience inhibitions and heighten anticipation for the actual music-making. It’s irreverent only for people who revere rituals over music.

Notably, in the program Mozart’s G minor Viola Quintet and Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 received equal billing with the evening’s other artists.

Nashville photographer Jeremy Cowart’s stylized, plasticized portraits of rural Africans hung on the lobby walls. Jennifer Mitchell, a local composer who moonlights under the club moniker DJ Little Jen, spun ambient sounds during the breaks. Her opening set sounded libidinous and skrunky — is that a word? — riding on a thumping sex-and-sweat bassline.

“Jeu” and “The Man Without a Shadow,” two wordless, short films by Georges Schwizgebel, an award-winning Swiss-Canadian animator, told fables of urban life and its ennui using bright Henri Matisse colors.

Then came slick, shabby-chic infomercial-style musician interviews. These aren’t deep conversations but designed to pique the first-time listener’s attention, touching on the performers’ lives and what to expect from the music. Israeli cellist Roy Harran, for example, revealed that his cello, which is too fragile to check with luggage and requires an airline seat, has its own frequent-flier miles.

Yet when Mozart and Shostakovich finally arrived, they weren’t an afterthought.

Violinist and music director Fia Mancini Durrett, like her colleagues a prominent local freelancer, recruited strong players. In the Mozart, with violists Tania Maxwell Clements and Virginia Respess singing the soulful middle voices, the group found the quintet’s melancholy joy and other powerful yet vaguely defined emotional states.

In the Shostakovich — played by Durrett, violinist Helen Kim, Clements and Harran — they held tight to the composer’s inner torments which shadow the quartet. But in the brief, wrenching, all-consuming firestorm that’s the work’s most unforgettable episide, the players couldn’t dig deep enough, couldn’t find an edge lethal enough to communicate a lifetime of regrets and a (Soviet) culture that devoured its own.

In recent decades, when concert rites ossified and the repertoire rarely included music composed after the early 20th century, the performers, by default, held a dominant position. Among other complications, this led to passive audiences who sat quietly, applauded at prescribed times and knew their role as a paying support group for the folks up on stage. This is a bit of a generalization, but I think not so far off the mark.

Fringe’s casual scene means that it is incumbent on the musicians, moment by moment, to earn your rapt attention. Their plan might not work with the subtlest pieces of music, or with works that yield its secrets only with very focused attention. They’ve offered a few recent works across their debut season, but little of it left an impact. No, what Fringe does well — repackage the old classics for a new audience — it does very well.

FRINGE: SMOOTH AROUND THE EDGES
Event puts a new spin on the old classics

By MARK GRESHAM Creative Loafing

Published on: 02/27/08

The wide rift between classical music and American pop culture has long been a matter of debate. But no matter how old that rift may be, the history hardly matters to today's under-30 crowd.

"Where's the disconnect?" asks Fia Mancini Durrett, 28-year-old violinist and music director of Atlanta's new Fringe music series. "I couldn't really tell you, because I've grown up with this [disconnect], so I only know it this way."

Created last year by two couples with different backgrounds (José and Nikolle Reyes, Fia and Dana Durrett), Fringe is determined to close the gap and instill the love of classical music into an iPod generation.

Fringe garners its aesthetic ideas largely from a circle of eminent music critics that includes Alex Ross (the New Yorker) and Greg Sandow (formerly of Entertainment Weekly). These pundits eschew the traditional barriers of classical music, even the term itself, easily mixing talk about classical and pop genres in the same breath.

While studying music at the Juilliard School in New York, Fia Durrett took one of Sandow's classes exploring the problems of reaching young, new audiences. Then, about five years ago, she and her husband Dana moved south to Atlanta and experienced a culture shock.

"It's so different from New York," Durrett says. "In New York, I found it much easier to have community because you're just a short train ride away from stuff and you walk everywhere. Here, you drive everywhere. It seems [to take] more of an effort to create that community."

The struggle to create artistic community is certainly not lost on Atlanta's classical musicians. Though it's easy to detect an undercurrent of carpetbagger chauvinism in Durrett's comparison, it's a perspective Atlanta's cultural elite have often expressed.

Yet Durrett's Big Apple-tinted glasses have, in part, motivated the creation of Fringe. "Our goal is mixing and diversifying this whole concert series in reaction to where we see culture going," Fringe President José Reyes says.

The problem isn't classical music itself, but a "delivery factor," he says. "There's a lack of understanding of who the audience is and what [they're] willing to take in. Most people are curious [and] willing to give something a chance – young people in particular."

Fringe's approach is to establish an inviting atmosphere – lanterns in trees, an outdoor courtyard bar, a DJ spinning remixed classical music, a gallery of local art, a loftlike performance space. In short, Fringe provides a comfortable environment to hang out. The mixed-media program presents videos to introduce performers, short films and live music performed without comment.

"We came to believe that we need to make it a hipper, more funky experience," Durrett says. "More like a rock concert than a classical concert."

But the nagging question remains whether or not Fringe truly offers, as its engaging website promotes, "a fresh experience of the arts like Atlanta has never seen." Never? Well, based on the group's own descriptions – no, not really.

Since the 1980s, "avant-classical" and "avant-garde" groups such as Thamyris, Composers' Resources, Railroad Earth (the audio-visual artists, not the jam band), Bent Frequency, Sonic Generator and others have all broken the old concert norms. All of these have garnered an audience by being on the frontier of classical music and experimentation, while breaking the bounds of performance norms.

Fringe does the opposite: While seeking to break the norms of traditional concert presentation, it is decidedly mainstream (read: old-fashioned) when it comes to the kind of classical music it programs. In no way does that diminish the value of Fringe. In fact, it's precisely what sets it apart.

"This is a repertoire that I've fallen in love with that my generation doesn't know anything about," Durrett says.

Indeed, much like Miranda in Shakespeare's The Tempest, Fringe's target audience might excitedly exclaim, "O brave new world, that has such music in't!"

To which Prospero's simple reply would remain: "'Tis new to thee."

By JASON KILLINGSWORTH Paste Magazine

Issue 39, February2008

The Founders of Fringe (Including Paste creative director José Reyes) have created a series of concerts that brilliantly blend short film, art installations and DJ sets with chamber-music performances by some of the most talented musicians in the country, reminding young audiences that classical is kick-assical.

FRINGE CONTINUES TO HOLD THE CENTER

By PIERRE RUHE The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Published on: 12/03/07

Fringe Atlanta made quite a stir for its inaugural concert in September. For its second-ever show, Fringe again proved itself one of the most radical classical music groups in the country, not because they play freaky modern music or dress like Andre 3000, but because they’ve jettisoned the ritual and decorum of the concert hall without snubbing its mainstream, bourgeois aesthetic. Why hasn’t this been done before with such success?

Their philosophy — spelled out in a program-booklet essay titled “Listen to This” by critic Alex Ross, reprinted from The New Yorker magazine — is that classical music is as vital and compelling as any of the popular stuff that the kids enjoy. But the often stilted formality of the classical experience, the logic goes, can repel potential fans, since almost everyone grew up with the entertainment ideals of television and pop music.

So Fringe has a plan.

A small exhibition by a local artist (Jennifer Jenkins) is in the lobby. A deejay (DJ Little Jen) spins art-club ambient electronica. The lights come down and a short film serves as the opening act (Gary Lundgren’s “Wow and Flutter,” about a boy, a girl, and a mix tape).

Stylized, computer-enhanced videos introduce the musicians. Finally they take the stage and play old classics and audience-friendly newer pieces. The whole concert is available for audio download the next day. It’s a smooth, non-threatening package that works: all the components funnel our attention to the actual performance, rather than distract from it.

Saturday’s music included beautifully executed dance collections by J.S. Bach, Bela Bartok and Astor Piazzola and genre pieces by Sebastian Currier and Toru Takemitsu.

“Night Time,” by Currier, a New York composer, premiered in 2000. Violinist Fia Mancini Durrett (a Fringe founder) and New York harpist Bridget Kibbey here made brilliant work of its five snapshots. “Dusk,” the opening movement, involves creepy-crawly sounds alternating with crepuscular lyricism. “Sleepless,” with a pizzacato’d violin part and restless harp, is the sound of caffeine racing through the bloodstream. “Starlight” twinkles silver and blue.

My favorite image was the sight of Kibbey and flutist Julietta Curenton cutting loose on Piazzola’s “Histoire du Tango,” lit by various floor lamps, with Little Jen’s turntables sitting quietly behind them. It spoke of open borders, accepting good music where you find it, living in the present instead of trying to freeze some romanticized notion of the past.

At its September debut, Fringe drew more than 200 people, and filled the church sanctuary. Saturday the numbers were just a little off. If their message is really meant for the broad, could-be-a-classical-fan contingent that lurks in metro Atlanta, Fringe must prove its viability by drawing them to concerts. The next is March 1st.

CLASSICAL MUSIC MEETS MEDIA SAVVY

By PIERRE RUHE The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Published on: 09/24/07

Viva la revolucion! Fringe Atlanta, the latest fine-arts group based in the affluent northern suburbs, made a stunning debut Saturday night. Despite the modest ambition suggested by the name, they positioned themselves near the center of the city's classical music scene. They set the new standard.

Question is, in artistry and funding, can they sustain it?

Fringe's aim is to present tried-and-true classical music in what might be called MTV-generation attitudes to entertainment. Advised to "Feel free to get your groove on," the audience of about 200 people attempted this feat while listening to music by Zoltán Kodály and Franz Schubert. The results were successful beyond all expectation.

Short video interviews, done like an infomercial, with stylized lighting effects, on-screen graphics and conversational chatter let the performers make the case for themselves and the music. Co-founder Fia Durrett, a 28-year-old freelance violinist, emphasized her pop-culture bona fides: at home, she doesn't listen to classical music but prefers rock bands like U2 and Coldplay.

It was a savvy bit of publicity aimed at the captive audience. Durrett and cellist Roy Harran then took the stage for Kodály's 1914 "Duo for Violin and Cello." Their playing was wonderfully alive and polished, at once detailed and with a wide-angle, cinematic sweep.

Another infomercial introduced Schubert's time-suspending "Quintet in C," from 1828. In the lucidity of their conception, their spirituality and hunger to communicate, these five musicians — violinists Michael Heald and Durrett, violist Joli Wu and cellists Charae Krueger and Harran — put many of the moonlighting Atlanta Symphony Orchestra chamber squads to shame.

Yet for all the novelty of the approach, there's nothing particularly edgy, radical or modernistic about Fringe. They aim to please with traditional artistic values. Their creative synthesis involves combining what's normal inside a concert hall (performances of the old classics) with what's normal in the rest of society (the TV-driven media culture). In this world, a pretty face and appealing persona is as important in selling the product as musical chops, and that's bound to have rippling ramifications, for better and worse.

CLASSICAL MUSIC GETS EDGY AS HYBRID ENSEMBLE MIXES IT ALL UP

By PIERRE RUHE The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Published on: 09/21/07

The human brain is wired for new.

As we grapple with the unfamiliar, dopamines flood the learning and memory centers in our head, releasing a rush of pleasure. It's a delicate balance: If the newness isn't too disorienting, the dopamine becomes mildly addictive — especially for younger people, who seek thrills via new experiences.

Advertisers have long understood this intuitively: "New and Improved!" often reflects consumers' desires more than the product's innovation.

But classical musi, mired in tradition and the glories of its past, typically sells itself short in its potential audience's wish for novelty.

Enter Fringe Atlanta.

Conceived by a nexus of classical musicians, visual artists, filmmakers and an electronica-spinning DJ, the hybrid-arts ensemble gives its inaugural concert Saturday.

On a recent afternoon, two Fringe founders, violinist Fia Durrett and graphic designer José Reyes, are in a Decatur coffee shop, excitedly connecting their new fine arts format with cultural trends that are mostly ignored in Atlanta. As they sip the brew, the shop's big sign reassures patrons of their edginess. It reads: "Coffee for Independent Thinkers."

"People in their 20s and 30s have grown up in a nonlinear world," says Reyes, 35. "There's not this progression from A to B to C — like the Internet, you sample a lot of things, you constantly shuffle the deck.

"The categories matter less, and the connections matter more."

Thus Fringe's debut is a jampacked event. Audiences will take in an exhibit of paintings by local artist Lori-Gene; ambient electronica spun by Jennifer Mitchell, aka "Little Jen," a popular local club DJ; excerpts from Chen Kaige's 2002 Chinese coming-of-age film "Together"; short video-documentaries on the performers; and, as the centerpiece, a performance of Zoltan Kodály's knotty Duo for Violin and Cello and Franz Schubert's sublime Quintet in C.

"And we'll serve alcohol," adds Durrett, acknowledging that promoters in the art gallery and pop music scene try to make the experience as enjoyable as possible, which isn't always the case in the buttoned-up, mind-your-manners concert hall.

Although she feels Atlanta's artists tend to stick within categories — not enough healthy exchange between creators in different media — she asserts that "mixing it all up is the direction that all the arts are going in."

As a student at New York's Juilliard School, Durrett, 28, saw that some of the city's most vital groups fused classical music and visual art. Her ideas for Fringe were also shaped by a class called "Breaking Barriers: Classical Music in an Age of Pop" taught by composer and critic Greg Sandow.

"My students listen to pop all the time," says Sandow, reached in New York, "but they still have a feeling that classical music is somehow better, a belief that it's deeper and more complex. The cognitive dissonance comes in how they feel about the audience, when almost no one their own age is out there listening."

Yet where Atlanta's Sonic Generator and Bent Frequency ensembles find a synergy between avant-garde music and equally out-there visual installations, Fringe's current plans are to play the old classics in an updated, visually stimulating setting.

Thus the Fringe experiment is especially intriguing, says Sandow.

"They believe in the power of Schubert's music, but they'll find out if Schubert will attract younger people like themselves. That's the question for classical music's future."

ATLANTA'S NEWEST CONCERT SERIES HOPES TO GIVE THE CLASSIC-MUSIC EXPERIENCE A SIP OF RED BULL
Atlanta, GA (September 10^th, 2007)

When most people think of attending a concert of classical music, the following scenarios spring to mind: a) getting violently shushed by an elderly matron nearby for coughing during the middle of a piece, b) looking shamefully under-dressed in the most formal outfit you own, c) wondering if you’ll be tackled by an usher for getting up to visit the bathroom before intermission, d) trying to mentally untangle the program’s footnoted footnotes originally scrawled on parchment by some bespectacled professor in a distant Munich conservatory.

Classical music can be an intimidating business, especially for younger audiences who are more accustomed to getting jostled about in a rock club. But these are precisely the music fans that Fringe—a fledgling, progressive-minded Atlanta-based arts series—is hoping to attract to its debut concert on September 22.

The evening’s program will feature a live DJ spinning ambient/electronic mixes with classical compositions, the screening of a jury-selected short film and multimedia introductions to the concert’s virtuosic performers, including a behind-the-scenes glance at their daunting rehearsal schedule. But the highlight will be the chamber-music portion itself, featuring two notoriously ambitious works: a sprawling Schubert cello quintet and a violin-cello duet composed by legendary Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly that Fringe’s Juilliard-trained music director Fia Durrett affectionately calls a “total rock-out piece.”

No matter how many jaw-dropping credentials Fringe’s musicians have to their credit or how expertly they perform, will audiences be able to take a classical program seriously if the performers happen to be wearing jeans instead of tuxedos and black gowns?

“We don’t want people to take it seriously,” quips José Reyes, Fringe’s 35-year-old president and founder. “We just want them to stop and enjoy this amazing artform, to soak it up. If they want to stand up and cheer in the middle of a piece, we hope they will. Our generation doesn’t necessarily want to sit still and be quiet. That’s part of the reason classical music is shunned. It’s a problem with the concert hall, not the music’s lack of relevance.”

The idea for Fringe grew out of a late-night conversation Reyes and his wife Nikolle had in the spring of 2006 with Fia and Dana Durrett, a married couple from NYC with whom they’d been friends for some time. Fia, who has studied classical violin her entire life and enjoyed tremendous career success, expressed her dream of being part of a “chamber music ensemble.” Even though Reyes admitted to being somewhat ignorant about classical music, the conversation inspired him to give it a closer listen.

During a visit to London in October of 2006, Reyes and his wife attended a chamber-music concert at St. Martin in the Fields church at Trafalgar Square, at the urging of Dana and Fia.

“The concert was nothing less than transcendent,” says Reyes of the performance. “I heard gorgeous music performed by world-class musicians at a level that would make the most cynical, narcissistic 20-something sit up and take notice. When it was over, my wife and I looked at each other, our eyes wide as saucers, and I said, ‘this is what we need to do in Atlanta.’”

Realizing they had to find a venue in Atlanta that suited the hip, accessible vibe of their production, Reyes and his co-founders settled on a space belonging to Church of the Redeemer on Peachtree-Dunwoody Road. The building’s open-air, loft-style architecture and acoustically resonant concrete floors felt ideal for a chamber-music program. Also the building’s modest size, which seats about 250 people, would heighten the intimacy and excitement of the performance.

As Reyes and his Fringe co-founders attend to fundraising matters and eagerly await the series’ debut performance in late September, they’re already looking toward the future.

“We’d like to start commissioning original pieces from exciting new composers,” says Reyes. “Supporting the arts means not only supporting the musicians but also the writers who are still composing amazing ‘classical’ music today. We hope to add more educational elements to Fringe, such as hosting a master class where high-school musicians can spend an afternoon studying with Fringe performers the day of the concert. Also we’d like for a portion of the concert’s proceeds to fund scholarships that allow economically disadvantaged musicians to continue their study.”

Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker and author of The Rest Is Noise: Listening To The Twentieth Century, writes, “The phrase [“classical music”] is a masterpiece of negative publicity, a tour de force of anti-hype. I wish there were another name.” Ross and many others should be delighted to find out that classical music does indeed have another name and, at least in Atlanta, that name is Fringe.