Edwin Outwater and Shara Nova Plan a 'Haunted House' with SFCM's New Music Ensemble

What does a haunted house at a music conservatory look like?

SFCM audiences will find out on Oct 30, when the Conservatory's New Music Ensemble takes the stage for two performances, one at 7 PM and another at 9PM. 

SFCM Music Director Edwin Outwater is helming the NME this year, and aiming for a visual identity for the performances similar to his Soundbox series at the San Francisco Symphony. 

"There's an overall theme of spookiness, given that it's Halloween," Outwater says, "and I'm also really happy that we're involving the guitar department and solo piano performances. It will be immersive, a continuous journey from walking into the venue and out. I really want to revel in this sense of the unexpected—which is something that most new music concerts are obviously full of. But if you double down on that with the right atmosphere, it can really elevate the experience to register in a different way."

Edwin Outwater at one of his San Francisco Symphony Soundbox performances.

Guest vocalist Shara Nova will be on-hand to sing Sarah Kirkland Snider's song cycle Unremembered. A truly multifaced performer, Nova's compositional work under the moniker My Brightest Diamond has been termed "chamber pop," though it hardly describes the breadth of her collaborations with artists like David Byrne and Sufjan Stevens. 

"Shara is a great collaborator and just a fantastic musical spirit with a really unique approach to singing," Outwater says. "When I played her some of her work for [Voice Department Executive Chair] Richard Cox,  he was immediately taken by the way that she sang and how she approached the vocal arts." 

"I met Edwin through Sarah Kirkland Snyder, whom I've known for 17 years now, I think" Nova says. "She first asked me to sing a piece of hers called Penelope after we met at a Padma Newsome gig at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I was singing with Padma, and I think it was at that time that Sarah figured out that I could read, because up until that point, I think she only heard me sing rock music. So after that concert, we met backstage and then developed a very fast friendship. I found singing her music like a perfectly fitting glove. Her rhythms, her sense of melody, her poetic language, her storytelling is just so deeply moving to me: It's such a pleasure to sing her work in any song."

Nova grew up in the proverbial musical family, with a choir director father and a piano and organ-playing mother. "But at the time that I was going to college," she says, "no one ever even discussed female composers. It was such a far-reaching thought that there were female composers, and, being a woman, I couldn't conceive of being one. So I went to study opera because that was the seemingly logical thing for me to do. But I always had this parallel of classical music, gospel and rock and roll happening simultaneously."

"Even in school," Nova says, "I was not taught about any living or past women composers. But I got really lucky because Paul Bonneau was coming to my rock gigs and he suggested I take composition with him, and so I did. Our first lessons were him playing Tori Amos' 'Boys for Pele,' and me having to figure out what the time signatures were. I was also listening to a lot of industrial funk at that time, and I always loved Samuel Barber's music, along with also Dominik Argento, Debussy, Ravel, Purcell, and Britten."

But Nova says she had "absolutely no plan for her career at all." She moved to New York City in 1999 and studied opera with a private teacher while gigging with her own band and immersing herself in the Lower East Side's singer-songwriter community, but but recalls, "I did three auditions for opera programs—didn't get in—and thought it was a sign that I shouldn't pursue opera. So I went full-tilt into working as a singer-songwriter."

Even after that pivotal decision, "I made sure I learned good technique, understanding my voice as best I could," Nova continues. "I found a new vocal teacher after quitting my opera singer pursuits, and that teacher came from the Italian Bel Canto tradition—but she also taught music theater, so she was able to help me understand a 'mix' for rock that has been invaluable." 

The first My Brightest Diamond songs arose from Nova "processing grief from a life-changing death," she says. "Björk's Homogenous was, I'm sure, influencing my desire for strings, so wrote a message on Craigslist and found string players. That became the first album, Bring Me The Workhorse—rock music with strings."

Also on the evening's program are György Kurtág's A kis csáva (The Little Fix), as well as Christopher Cerrone's The Night Mare. Adding to the Halloween theme is David T. Little's Hellhound, the title of which references legendary bluesman Robert Johnson's 1937 song "Hellhound On My Trail." Johnson was one of—if not the—modern musicians from whom the now-archetypal lore of selling one's soul to the devil in exchange for musical talent sprang from, and Little's work has been described as "blues studded with black metal, a pounding, distorted riff hitting like a train."

Learn more about SFCM's New Music Ensemble here.