A Bold Baritone

Some musicians become identified, even typecast, in their areas of expertise. A concert program called “The New Music Baritone” led to Thomas Buckner, the renowned New York-based baritone who has become central to the care and feeding of new music for voice the last few decades.

His recital next Thursday, with frequent collaborator Joseph Kubera and David Wessell on electronics, will be a highlight of CalArts’ “Musical Explorations 2001” series.

On his current West Coast sweep from San Francisco to San Diego, Buckner is presenting a program by Charles Ives. Like many new music makers, Buckner considers Ives a great inspiration and recalls being a young college student in Santa Clara in the 1960s when he first encountered an Ives song called “Evening.”

“I’d never heard any music other than popular music and very traditional classical music in my life,” he said this week. “I went through the piece. Playing through it and singing it, I thought, ‘This is an amazing thing.’ As I worked on it, it was so beautiful, it became my first favorite song.”

At California Institute of the Arts, the focus will be on pieces written for Buckner. One of the newest is by the conceptual composer Robert Ashley, with whom Buckner has worked for many years. He has been a key singer-speaker in the Ashley operas “Improvement,” “EL/aficianado,” “DUST” and a hard-to-categorize piece performed at CalArts three years ago called “When Famous Last Words Fail You.”

Also on the program will be Ushio Torikai’s “Voiced: One,” as well as a more traditional sounding composition by CalArts alumnus William Holley.

“It doesn’t sound like imitation classical music,” Buckner said. “It sounds like him. My feeling is that I’m interested in composers who sound like themselves.”

Buckner also will perform “Spirit Catcher” by Wadada Leo Smith, a CalArts faculty member, and Wessell’s “Situations 1” for live electronics, piano and voice, which appears on Buckner’s 1997 album, “Inner Journey.”

Improvisation plays a role in Buckner’s music, particularly his program at CalArts. “There’s nothing like hearing music being made right before your ears,” Buckner said.

A new development in Buckner’s world is the record label Mutable Music. Buckner is no stranger to the indie label world, having run 1750 Arch Records, so named for the address of its Berkeley home in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. But he has been focusing on his singing career since then, recording various projects for Lovely Music and other new music labels. He is only now returning to the artist-run label business.

That function is an extension of Ives’ do-it-yourself philosophy. Ives composed innovative music on his own time.

“Ives himself didn’t hear a single performance of his work during his composing career--which lasted until the first World War when he was in his 40s--that he didn’t pay for himself,” Buckner said. “Certainly, in new music today, one has to find one way or another of making things happen themselves, because there’s not a whole lot of funding organizations out there trying to make new music happen.”

BE THERE

“The New Music Baritone,” featuring Thomas Buckner, pianist Joseph Kubera and David Wessell on electronics, performs Thursday at 8 p.m. at Roy O. Disney Hall, California Institute of the Arts, 24700 McBean Parkway, Valencia. Free admission. Call (661) 253-7832.