Chris Thile Records Bach

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Chris Thile has never been shy about genre-hopping. In his early twenties, singing and playing with the band Nickel Creek, the mandolin virtuoso covered songs by slacker-rock heroes Pavement, picking along with a fiddler and a guitarist. And a year ago, he was onstage with his band at Bonnaroo, the Tennessee summer music festival, working the crowd with acoustic string-band covers of rock songs by The Cars, Radiohead and others.

Now, he’s trying to get the same fans just as excited about classical music. For his latest record, Bach: Sonatas and Partitas Vol. 1, Mr. Thile, 32, has taken an approach of unadorned simplicity: It is just him, alone in a room with his mandolin, playing three suites – sixteen tracks in all – of works written for solo violin by Johann Sebastian Bach, the master composer of late-Baroque church music.

Mr. Thile argues that the same crowds that headbang to Radiohead anthems should be just as able to get psyched for Bach or Mahler.

“The great musics of the world are great for very similar structural reasons: good melody, good harmony, and a balance of feminine and masculine energy. What makes one type of music classical and one bluegrass and one folk – these things aren’t what’s important,” he said at a recent interview in midtown Manhattan. “My thesis statement would be – Bach didn’t write Baroque music. He wrote great music.”

At times, Mr. Thile’s new record has the same technical “wow factor” as his work with his band, Punch Brothers. On the Presto from Bach’s Sonata No. 1 in G minor (BWV 1001) for example, Mr. Thile’s fingers trace Bach’s elegant melody lines and near-nonstop arpeggios at an off-to-the-races tempo, up and down the neck of his instrument – not unlike a bluegrass fiddle tune.

At other points, such as the Allemanda from the Partita No. 1 in B minor (BWV 1002), Mr. Thile plays in a purely Baroque vernacular, shedding any trace of bluegrass and making his mandolin sound stately and delicate, not unlike the lutes played by Bach’s Renaissance forebears.

Born in Oceanside, California in 1981, Mr. Thile grew up in Southern California listening to folk music on the local public-radio station and hearing live bluegrass bands at a pizza shop in nearby Carlsbad. He first picked up a mandolin – the eight-stringed instrument that most fans of traditional country music remember best in the hands of bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe – when he was five years old. His piano-tuner father and his mother were “folkies,” he said, and his maternal grandfather, Robert Shallenberg, was an avant-garde composer who taught music at the University of Illinois and Indiana University.

At age fourteen, Mr. Thile’s family moved to southwestern Kentucky – within a few hours’ drive from both the birthplace of bluegrass music and the cradle of pop country music, Nashville – after his father got a job at Murray State University. Mr. Thile would later attend Murray State for three semesters.

Nickel Creek, Mr. Thile’s first band, won a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album in 2003 for their Alison Krauss-produced album, This Side, which peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart and later went gold. Mr. Thile founded his current band, Punch Brothers, in 2006 to help him record one of his own compositions, and the core of the band later backed him on his solo album How to Grow a Woman from the Ground. The group gelled around a style that recalled “new grass” of the 1970s and 1980s, which incorporated jazz and rock into the traditional string-band style, and has recorded three albums and sold more than 200,000 albums, according to its label, Nonesuch Records.

Mr. Thile moved to New York eight years ago, and has over the years added vocals and instrumental parts to records by Top 40 country singers including Eric Church, Keith Urban, and his friend Dierks Bentley.

Last year, he was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship – commonly known as the “genius grant” – and in 2011 made a richly composed fusion record with a classical-bluegrass supergroup headed by cellist Yo-Yo Ma, all while keeping up a punishing tour schedule with Punch Brothers and other groups. He and Punch Brothers were recently tapped to sing and play on the soundtrack to Inside Llewyn Davis, a forthcoming film by Joel and Ethan Coen, which follows a week in the life of a fictional folk singer in early-1960s Greenwich Village.

“He’s one of those people where, there’s nothing that he becomes interested in that he doesn’t go all the way in,” said Mr. Ma, the multiple-Grammy-winning cellist who has recorded and toured with Mr. Thile. “When he’s playing Bach, it’s with the utmost understanding of the human condition. He responds to the nature of the instrument, and he becomes the content. He’s organically attuned to the music.”

There is some precedent for bluegrass pickers dabbling in classical music – banjoist Bela Fleck recorded an album of the works of Bach, Debussy, Chopin and others in 2001. Mr. Ma has collaborated with classical bassist Edgar Meyer and fiddler Mark O’Connor on several classical-folk fusion records.

But few bluegrass musicians have embraced classical music so thoroughly: Mr. Thile in 2009 premiered his first concerto for mandolin and orchestra, and Punch Brothers have taken to playing the third movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 3 in G Major (BWV 1048) at concerts, interspersed amid the band’s usual melodic, progressive bluegrass songs. “You should just watch people flip!” Mr. Thile says. “I’m not saying you’ve got to like, jump up and down and scream during a Bach performance,” he says, before noting that “the classical music hall was like that, two hundred years ago, you know. You have reports of people, you know, whooping and hollering and demanding encore performances of things. . . . They were riotous!”

This month, Mr. Thile is touring with Mr. Ma, Mr. Meyer, Nashville Bluegrass Band fiddler Stuart Duncan and singer Aoife O’Donovan in support of their 2011 album The Goat Rodeo Sessions, followed by an international solo tour, on which he will play cuts from the Bach record, starting in early October.

In November, Nonesuch will release the soundtrack to Inside Llewyn Davis, on which Mr. Thile with his Punch Brothers bandmates Chris Eldridge and Gabe Witcher, as well as Justin Timberlake and Mumford & Sons‘ Marcus Mumford.

“Chris is a leading edge of a generational shift,” said T Bone Burnett, a legendary music producer who has made records with a wide array of pop and Americana acts, including Counting Crows, Elton John, Elvis Costello and Willie Nelson. Mr. Burnett first heard of Punch Brothers from a mutual friend and asked them to be a part of a benefit-concert series that he organized in New York and Boston in 2010. From there, the band worked with Mr. Burnett, well-known for his work curating music for Hollywood films, on the The Hunger Games: Songs from District 12 and Beyond. It was Mr. Burnett who asked Mr. Thile’s band to play on the Coen Brothers’ film soundtrack, which he is producing.

Separately, Mr. Thile is searching for a home to buy in New York City with his girlfriend, the television actress Claire Coffee, and practicing on a 1924 Gibson F5 mandolin, designed by legendary instrument-maker Lloyd Loar, an heirloom instrument that he bought last year using some of the $500,000 grant he won as part of the MacArthur Foundation’s genius award (Mr. Thile declined to say how much he paid for the instrument, but original Loar mandolins can cost up to $250,000). He says that these days, money is flush enough that he doesn’t take studio work unless it is for friends.

“They’re all passion projects for me. . . . It hasn’t always been that way. When someone came at me with a high number it used to be very hard to say no,” Mr. Thile says. “Now I can’t even believe I’m in the position I’m in.”

Robbie Whelan – The Wall Street Journal

Art Installations Made of Sound

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Janet Cardiff sound installations

Note the sound of your computer’s fan amid distant sirens. Hear your spouse in the next room, playing the Bowie channel on Spotify while chatting on the phone with your mother-in-law. Farther off, a TV is tuned to the news and a stereo plays Bach, while a mouse skitters inside a wall.

And know that every one of those sounds can now be the subject of art, just as every vision we see and imagine, from fruit in a bowl to the color of light to melting clocks, has been grist for painting and sculpture and photos. Sound art has been on the rise for a decade or two, but it may have at last hit the mainstream: On Saturday, the Museum of Modern Art [opened] its first full sonic survey, “Soundings: A Contemporary Score,” while two major sound installations are to go up in New York in the fall.

“The art of sound questions how and what we hear, and what we make of it,” the curator Barbara London writes in her catalog essay to the Modern show – which means the movement has purchase on a lot that matters. Perched in an office high above MoMA’s garden, where her exhibition will insert stealthy recordings of bells, Ms. London explained that artists are more than ever drawn to sound art, maybe because it sits on the exciting double cusp, as she said, of both music and gallery art. Her new show (or should we call it a “hear”?) reflects the “apogee,” as she put it, that sound art has now reached.

Ms. London’s survey will include those recorded bells, by the American soundster Stephen Vitiello, as well as recordings made near Chernobyl by Jacob Kirkegaard, a Dane, and a grid of 1,500 small speakers, each playing a different tone, by the young New Yorker Tristan Perich. It will also feature the Glasgow-born Susan Philipsz, whom the larger art world has taken to heart.

At the Modern, Ms. Philipsz will be reprising a 2012 work from Germany’s Documenta, the twice-a-decade festival that is one of the world’s most prestigious artistic events. Her Study for Strings riffs on an orchestral piece composed in 1943 at the Theresienstadt concentration camp for musicians there. For her recording, Ms. Philipsz has redacted the parts for all the instruments except one cello and one viola, leaving plangent silences between those two players’ scattered notes – and, of course, evoking the erasure of musicians and artists by the Nazis.

“For the public, sound art it still a fairly new and also a very, very accessible medium,” said Tom Eccles, the curator of a new Philipsz commission this fall in New York. “On a very basic, basic level,” he added, “sound is one of our first experiences – in the uterus, in fact.”

Ms. Philipsz’s new piece, called Day Is Done, will be the first permanent work of contemporary art on Governors Island, a former military site just south of Manhattan whose public spaces are being revamped with a budget so far of $75 million. Ms. Philipsz is mounting four old-fashioned “trumpet” speakers – the kind you’d see in an old ballpark – across the facade of a sprawling old barracks, and for an hour every evening, they will broadcast the notes of the bugle call Taps. The tones of the ghostly melody will pass from speaker to speaker, fanning out across the island’s open spaces.

At a test run one cold day in the spring, the piece evoked the era when Taps would have been played daily on the island, while it also triggered thoughts of military funerals and loss of life. (On 11 September 2001, those on the island were able to see the collapse of the twin towers.)

Day Is Done also evokes New York’s maritime presence. Visiting from her home in Berlin for the test run, Ms. Philipsz said that after the recording had played on site for the first time, “we thought it was still on.” She added: “But it was the sound of a ship’s horn. We were so happy.”

Mr. Eccles pointed out that with a piece like Day Is Done, “you don’t have to recognize it as art, immediately” – meaning that any knee-jerk resistance to contemporary art is less likely to kick in. “A sound work allows you to do something quite complex that might be unacceptable in another medium,” he said.

That could be because of the role MP3s and podcasts now play in our lives and because of our new comfort with the immaterial world of pure data, which makes immaterial sound art seem less esoteric. Sound waves floating through air may not seem any more exotic than information flowing through cyberspace.

There’s yet another ambitious sound piece about to open in New York. On 10 September 2013, the Metropolitan Museum will present Forty Part Motet, an installation by the Canadian Janet Cardiff that may be one of the best works, in any medium, of the last decades and the first work in sound at the Metropolitan. A piece like Ms. Cardiff’s “opens people’s eyes to a different art form that they wouldn’t expect to see at the Met,” said Anne Strauss, the project’s curator. “It’s something we can provide more easily, than, say, performance art.”

We were meeting far uptown in Manhattan, in a twelfth-century chapel at the heart of the Met’s Cloisters branch, now celebrating its seventy-fifth year as a home for medieval art. The forty speakers of Cardiff’s piece will be installed in a ring in that chapel, each one transmitting the sound of a single musical part from the choral extravaganza Spem in Alium, composed around 1570 by Thomas Tallis. Ms. Cardiff’s piece manages to take one of the most imposing masterpieces of Western music and reduce it to modest human elements. As you sidle up to any one speaker, the single voice you hear seems frail and at sea, and that stands in touching contrast to the grand effect that comes when you stand in the work’s center and hear all forty parts combined. Wherever Forty Part Motet gets installed, a visitor or two often leaves in tears.

The market has noticed sound art’s achievements. “I kind of resigned myself that I would never make any money,” Ms. Philipsz said. In fact, she’s now doing fine. She sold all three copies of her first installation at Tanya Bonakdar, the New York gallery that took her on in 2007. According to the gallery director, Ethan Sklar, her piece in the show at the Modern, also in an edition of three, is priced at almost $150,000. Mr. Sklar spoke of the appeal of Ms. Philipsz’s art to “collectors and institutions who are looking for the strongest and most challenging work.”

It also doesn’t hurt, he pointed out, that there are fewer headaches in storing and shipping a Philipsz data disc than some massive sculptural piece, although her sound fills space just as impressively: “You can have an epic work that comes down to a box.”

But it is still early days in the marketing of sound art. Both the auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s say that they have not sold a single sonic work, whereas they’ve begun to get good prices for major videos. Sound art’s vaguely unworldly air may actually increase its appeal.

“It’s not really commodified at this moment, which makes it approachable,” Ms. London said. “All of these works have a poetry, and a fleetingness.”

The mainstream’s embrace of sound art may mask something peculiar: that even as the field reaches new heights, it’s also in crisis. Art-trained figures like Ms. Philipsz and Ms. Cardiff, who build work around the sounds that we care most about – and who resist the whole idea of a coherent genre called “sound art” – are up against a sonic old guard, sometimes including younger figures, that one artist has referred to as the “honk-tweet” school.

Aligned with experimental music rather than visual art, the honk-tweeters are interested in strange beeps and buzzings for their own sakes. They craft what the sound artist, theorist and blogger Seth Kim-Cohen refers to as purely cochlear, rather than fully mindful, sound art.

In June, Mr. Kim-Cohen chided the survey at the Modern for including such work, which he described as the sonic equivalent of Op Art, a movement in painting “that does not demand (or merit) serious critical response,” as he has written. “Surely,” he blogged, “if the (visual) art world is now willing to embrace sound, it should do so according to the same criteria of quality and engagement that it demands of other media.”

Caleb Kelly, a scholar who recently published a book called Sound, compiling a range of essays on the art form, said he believes that pieces like Ms. Cardiff’s Motet, or the riffs on Hollywood soundtracks by the Swiss art star Christian Marclay, will still matter in a century, whereas today’s honk-tweeters (“dial twiddlers,” Ms. Philipsz calls them) will likely disappear, if they keep doing retreads of John Cage’s postwar innovations.

Sound artists like to point out that while you can close your eyes to an image you hate, you can’t close your ears to a noise. That gives them power but also puts them at risk. If a honk or a tweet does no more than annoy, visitors will vote with their feet.

Blake Gopnik – The New York Times