Caleb Burhans: A Man of Many Talents, Eager to Use Them All

NYT

October 5, 2008
A Man of Many Talents, Eager to Use Them All
By ALLAN KOZINN

EARLY this summer Caleb Burhans cleared his performance calendar for the first time since 2001, when he graduated from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester and moved to New York City. He wasn’t taking a vacation, exactly. Lincoln Center and Alarm Will Sound, a new-music orchestra in which he plays violin, had commissioned him to write a work to be performed in March as part of the reopening festivities at Alice Tully Hall, and Mr. Burhans resolved to do nothing but compose.

Well, sort of. He set aside his weekly bread-and-butter job, singing as a countertenor in the Trinity Choir on Sunday mornings, and turned down pickup orchestra gigs.

But at the Bang on a Can Marathon in June, he played his “No,” for violin and electronics, and performed with Alarm Will Sound and another new-music group, Signal. He also performed with Signal at the Ojai Music Festival in California. And in a three-day stretch in August, in New York, he sang with two chamber choirs (also conducting one of them), played and sang in a pop theater piece and gave a concert with itsnotyouitsme, his ambient rock duo.

And when his Sept. 1 deadline arrived, the industrious Mr. Burhans not only had completed his work for Lincoln Center, “oh ye of little faith ... (do you know where your children are?),” but had started two more pieces as well.

At 28, Mr. Burhans has pursued a career path so logical that it seems almost foolproof. Just sing, compose and master several instruments (besides the violin he plays viola, guitar, bass, keyboards and percussion) and the New York freelance world is your oyster. But this is a new development. Until recently, the conventional wisdom went, musicians with diverse talents should specialize: decide whether they are better suited to composing or performing, singing or playing an instrument, working in classical music or a variety of pop.

And while most young musicians still make the traditional choices and scramble to find work in freelance ensembles until they have established themselves as recitalists or chamber players, others are seeking to diversify. Mr. Burhans’s generation is the third to come of age during the rock era, and where conservatories once taught only classical music, most now offer courses and even degrees in jazz and rock, recording technology and the music industry itself. And musicians who grew up hearing everything from Mozart and Ligeti to Wilco and Radiohead are less inclined than their elders to compartmentalize their passions.

“I was always told, when I was a kid, that you have to decide at some point what it is you want to do,” Mr. Burhans said one afternoon early in his composing break. “And I thought, that’s cool. I’m going to school and study violin, viola and composition, and I’m playing in jazz and rock bands, and when I move to New York, that will decide it for me. People will see what I’m best at, and that’s what I’m going to do.

“But when I got here, I actually did the opposite. I kept doing them all, and I love it. The variety keeps me on my toes, creatively.”

A film about Mr. Burhans would be a cross between “Zelig” and “Amadeus.” In New York’s trendy new-music world, he is everywhere, working with just about everybody as both performer and composer. His name stands out on a roster, and if you’ve heard him as a violinist, guitarist, bassist or mandolinist in a new-music group, it can be puzzling to find him listed among the choristers at Trinity Church or as a member of the disco band Escort or the techno ensemble Bleknlok.

But there’s no mistaking him. He’s the one with the short, sometimes spiky hair, retro eyeglasses, black nail polish and earring.

As new as Mr. Burhans’s career approach is, he is hardly an anomaly. Seven other musicians in Alarm Will Sound also compose. Several have rock bands as well. And the number of musicians with fingers in both classical and pop seems to be growing.

Lev Zhurbin, a young violist and composer who works under the name Ljova, has largely given up his chamber ensemble jobs now that his composing career has taken off. He performs most often with his genre-crossing ensembles, the Kontraband and Romashka, both of which draw on classical pop and world music.

Christina Courtin, a Juilliard-trained violinist, plays in orchestras but is also a pop singer-songwriter with her own band and an album coming from Nonesuch. And Brooklyn Rider, a string quartet that sometimes accompanies Ms. Courtin — and that, like Ms. Courtin, plays in the Knights, a chamber orchestra — performs a repertory that tilts toward new music, sometimes with multicultural strands.

“Playing different kinds of music is something young musicians increasingly have to do,” said Justin Kantor, a 29-year-old cellist and the proprietor of Le Poisson Rouge, a new Greenwich Village club that offers both pop and classical performances. “And besides, it’s fun.”

Role models are few for musical switch-hitters. Leonard Bernstein, who balanced conducting, composing, piano playing and multimedia lecturing, is one. So are Steve Reich and Philip Glass, who early in their careers revived the 19th-century notion of the touring composer-performer, leading their own ensembles in programs devoted to their works when there was no other way to get them played.

“My goal (when I was 14) was to move to NYC and play/sing for Philip,” Mr. Burhans wrote in an e-mail message. “That didn’t really work out (I work with Steve Reich instead, which is cool by me ...) but I’ve always held up Philip and Steve as models of the do-it-yourself way of approaching music.”

But in an interview a few weeks later, he noted a significant difference between himself and those composers.

“It’s different for me because I thrive on doing other people’s music as well as my own. And if I didn’t have those outlets, I don’t know what my music would be like. I’m so influenced by other things around me. It’s nice to know I’m singing in a church service in the morning, and I’m playing with a rock band at night.”

The catholicity of Mr. Burhans’s listening habits is something he has in common with an increasing number of musicians of his generation. Classical musicians who grew up in the 1960s and ’70s may have listened to rock and played jazz in their off hours, but those influences didn’t inform their performing lives. One reason was that “crossover” projects, which sought to link pop and classical music, were regarded as both unhip and inept by listeners on both sides. The doorways between the repertories were few.

But by the time Mr. Burhans came of age, he noticed even at a considerable distance from New York that the downtown Manhattan indie rock scene had links to avant-garde artists and composers. And from his point of view, as both a listener and a player, the boundaries between avant-garde rock and avant-garde classical seemed invitingly porous.

The varied musical life that Mr. Burhans leads is evident to anyone visiting his studio, a sunny, instrument-filled room in his Washington Heights apartment. A book of Mr. Glass’s piano works sits on an electric piano along one wall. And on music stands to either side of a selection of guitars, violins (Baroque, modern and electric), a mandolin and two violas (also Baroque and modern), Mr. Burhans has a book of Bach sonatas, Mr. Reich’s “Violin Phase” and works by Biber, Paganini, Ysaÿe, Xenakis and John Adams, as well as a couple of his own pieces.

On the floor toward the center of the room, Mr. Burhans has a Casio sampler and a collection of electronic pedals, which he uses to make loops: recordings of musical passages that repeat continually. In some of his music, shifting loop sequences form a backdrop against which melodies unfold.

Sitting at his computer, Mr. Burhans played a handful of his loops, some of which he uses as they are, in spacey, meditative (or at times, rambunctious) electronic works; others are radically transformed. A plaintive, minor-key violin and bass loop was the basis of a haunting choral setting, “Nunc Dimittis” (2004), written for a church in Rochester and also performed at Trinity; the new piece for Alarm Will Sound and Alice Tully Hall is partly based on a loop as well.

Playing several instruments and being drawn to most musical styles is in Mr. Burhans’s DNA. His father, Ron Burhans, was a guitarist and bassist who toured as a sideman with Ray Charles, the Everly Brothers and Kenny Rogers. After he gave up touring, he worked as a one-man party band, with a repertory of about 3,000 songs and a setup that included MIDI guitars, bass pedals, a drum machine and a vocal harmonizer. (He died when Caleb was 17.)

“I’ve tried to figure out how Caleb ended up the way he did,” his mother, Venus Burhans, said. “I would say part of it was modeling from his father, who as a musician did not try to peg himself as just rock ’n’ roll. He was ready with all the country songs, the classics or whatever was out there, basically so that he could work and put food on the table. We could see that the more versatile you were, the more marketable you were. So Caleb was always around music. His dad had all his equipment set up in the middle of the living room, and whenever he was away from it, Caleb would run up to the microphone and sing into it.”

Mr. Burhans also got a sense of a musician’s itinerant lifestyle early on. He was born in Monterey, Calif., in 1980, and lived briefly in Chiloquin, Ore., before moving to Houston and then to Janesville, Wis. He began his musical studies in Houston, when his second-grade music teacher persuaded him to join the Spring Branch Boys Choir; soon after, he was drafted into a production of “The Pirates of Penzance” as Buttercup and discovered that he liked the attention.

He was also — haltingly at first — becoming interested in instruments. He turned down his father’s offer of guitar lessons and gave up the flute after a week before becoming fascinated with the violin. His parents resisted his pleas for a violin at first, but when the family moved to Wisconsin and Mr. Burhans was still clamoring for a fiddle, they gave in.

“I didn’t listen to any classical music until I started playing the violin,” Mr. Burhans said. “I discovered Mozart and the Beatles in the same year, when I was 9. I came one day and said, ‘Could you guys get me a Mozart tape?’ And my parents weren’t sure why, but they got me one. I was listening to Mozart, Beethoven and Bach, and then Philip Glass. Before Stravinsky or Bartok. It made sense, because I grew up with 1980s rock, which is very compressed, and then there was Mozart, with those Alberti basses that are almost like the arpeggio sound in Glass, so when I first heard Philip’s music, it made total sense. It wasn’t until I was 15 or 16 that I began listening to Ligeti, Xenakis, Ravi Shakar and Aphex Twin. And I was, like, ‘Wow, this is all great.’ ”

Having discovered his diverse group of musical favorites, Mr. Burhans continued to sing in choirs and joined two professional local orchestras when he was 13. He also played and sang in punk and jazz bands. He studied piano for a while, getting as far as the Beethoven concertos before deciding to give it up to spend more time composing. When he made that decision, he also asked his parents to remove the television and Nintendo game from his bedroom so that he wouldn’t be distracted by them.

Summers, he attended music camps, including Interlochen in Michigan, where he also spent a year preparing for conservatory auditions. Among the musicians he came to know there was his future wife, Martha Cluver, then a violinist and violist, now a soprano who often works with Mr. Reich, John Zorn and other composers.

“We’ve known each other since we were 11,” said Ms. Cluver, who grew up in Fort Atkinson, Wis., 30 minutes from Janesville. “We had the same violin teacher. Even before I ‘liked’ him, I thought he was this genius.”

Ms. Cluver and Mr. Burhans both completed their music degrees at the Eastman School, where they became involved with Ossia, a new-music orchestra from which a group of graduating students — including Mr. Burhans and Alan Pierson, the conductor — formed Alarm Will Sound in 2001.

“I encountered Caleb when he was a freshman,” Mr. Pierson said, “but I had heard about him before I met him. A friend of mine who had been at Interlochen mentioned that there was a phenomenal violinist coming to Eastman. When we were planning an all-Ligeti program in 1998, we were looking for a violinist. One of my friends, walking across the campus, ran into this kid looking at the score for the Ligeti Piano Concerto and thought, that has to be Caleb. We auditioned him, and he quickly became an important part of the new-music scene.”

Mr. Burhans took a job as a substitute in the Rochester Philharmonic, which was sometimes rocky. Once, when Mr. Burhans turned up at a rehearsal with his hair dyed purple, the orchestra’s managing director asked him to do something about it before the concert. Mr. Burhans turned up in a witch’s wig, cut short. The next week he tried to dye his hair a conventional red, but because of the purple die, it came out crimson, so he shaved his head.

“I found out that one of the trumpet players was going around saying that I was making a mockery of classical music because my hair was purple,” Mr. Burhans said. “And I had a really intense conversation with the managing director, where I said: ‘You know, I’m just trying to help classical music, because if we don’t get more people like me coming to these concerts, this orchestra is going to die. The only people who are coming are old people, and you’re shooting yourself in the foot.’ And he said: ‘Yeah, you’re right. Sorry.’

“But I made a sign that said, ‘I Make a Mockery of Classical Music’ and started wearing it around.”

Mr. Burhans had decided by then that one of the brass rings of a traditional classical music career — a seat in a major symphony orchestra — was not for him. That was a big decision: jobs at the top orchestras are scarce, but the base pay at several now tops $100,000. (At smaller orchestras around the country, the schedules are sparser and salaries can be around $25,000. Some musicians cobble together a living by splitting their services among several orchestras in adjoining states, which means driving hundreds of miles between jobs.) Playing in freelance ensembles and chamber groups, to say nothing of composing, though more attractive to musicians of Mr. Burhans’s interests, is more financially precarious.

When Mr. Burhans and Ms. Cluver graduated from Eastman, they considered moving to Boston but opted for New York. The decision was made carefully, with the advice of friends who were pursuing careers. New York remains the most vibrant center of classical music performance in the United States, and it offers the most freelance opportunities.

Even so, it’s hard for a conservatory graduate to hit the ground running, and Mr. Burhans and Ms. Cluver lived on credit cards at first before landing choral jobs at Trinity Church in downtown Manhattan. The jobs remain the basis of Mr. Burhans and Ms. Cluver’s household economy, although they now both pursue a crowded schedule of freelance jobs as well.

But lately Mr. Burhans has been wondering whether the cacophonous variety of his career is a double-edged sword.

“I know Caleb is confused about this sometimes,” Ms. Cluver said. “He thinks about focusing more on composing or on his band itsnotyouitsme. But then all these other opportunities come up, and he gets really excited about them. He’s just so talented, it’s hard for him to pick and choose. With me, I’m just focusing on singing, and he’s told me, ‘I’m jealous of you, because you know what you’re doing.’ But I don’t. He’s the one who knows what he’s doing. And most of the time, he’s happy staying busy.”

His success has not dulled his wry, sometimes self-deprecating humor. “When I was in school,” he said, “my grandmother asked me what I wanted to do. And I said, ‘I’m going to move to New York and freelance.’ She said: ‘What do you mean? Don’t you want to be in an orchestra?’ So I said, ‘No, I want to live from paycheck to paycheck and not have health insurance.’ She was terrified: ‘Oh, my God!’ And here I am, living paycheck to paycheck and not having health insurance. I’m fulfilling my dream.”