Musical America: Yuga Cohler Nets Orchestra Prize at Toscanini Competition

Musical America
Taylor Grand

Boston-resident conductor Yuga Cohler, 28, has won the Paolo Vero Orchestra Prize at the Arturo Toscanini Conducting Competition, held at the Auditorium Paganini in Parma, Italy.

Read the full article here.

GQ: An Orchestra Is Mashing Up Kanye West’s Hits with Beethoven’s to Create “Yeethoven”

GQ
By Nicole Silverberg

It's pretty epic

Los Angeles's Debut Orchestra of the Young Musicians Foundation is taking a bold approach to their Great Music Series, performing some of Beethoven's classic works alongside Kanye West's Yeezus to create the perfectly titled "Yeethoven." I'm sure it tickles Kanye's fancy to be put alongside someone as musically revered as Beethoven, but it actually works. While it seems a little strange, partially because the best part of Kanye's music is frequently, you know, Kanye rapping, when you listen to the preview, it makes sense.

Yeezus and hits by Beethoven, including "Egmont Overture" and "String Quartet No. 14 (op. 131)," are played alongside each other and reveal some striking similarities. The conductor Yuga Cohler explains that both Beethoven and Yeezy make music with a "brashness creating wild contrast, thrashing juxtapositions within a single bar of music," which isn't exactly what I think of when I'm listening to "I Am a God," but now that Cohler said it, I'm like, Oh, yeah!

Cohler said he chose Kanye and Beethoven because they both have a "willingness to ruthlessly abandon tradition, and their influence on that larger culture can't be overstated." Seeing as Yeezy is getting his own orchestral arrangements, I'm gonna have to agree. Just one question: Does this mean I have to start wearing gowns and pearls to his concerts?

Rolling Stones: 'Yeethoven' Concert to Juxtapose Music of Kanye West, Beethoven

Rolling Stones
By Brittany Spanos

The music of Kanye West and Beethoven will be compared and spliced up by a 70-piece orchestra during a Los Angeles concert.

On April 16th, Beethoven will meet Kanye West when a 70-piece orchestra mashes up and reimagines the work of the two artists. The program is part of the Great Music Series hosted by the Young Musicians Foundation.

Co-curated by conductor Yuga Cohler and arranger Stephen Feigenbaum, "Yeethoven" aims to show the commonalities between the seemingly dissimilar artists. "Obviously, they work within very different traditions," a voiceover reflects in the promotional clip for the concert. "Their willingness to ruthlessly upend tradition and their influence on the larger culture can't be overstated."

The concert will feature six works by Beethoven and six works from West's Yeezus that will be "juxtaposed" and "spliced together" by the orchestra live. It will be put on for free at the Aratani Theatre — Japanese American Cultural & Community Center in Los Angeles.

In 2012, a year before West released Yeezus, he compared himself to the classical composer during a concert in Atlantic City. "I am flawed as a human being. I am flawed as a person. As a man, I am flawed, but my music is perfect," he began. "This is the best you're gonna get ladies and gentlemen in this lifetime, I'm sorry. You could go back to Beethoven and shit, but as far as this lifetime, though, this is all you got."

Los Angeles Times: Kanye meets Beethoven: How young musicians are mixing classical with pop

Photo: Kanye: Flickr/David Shankbone. Beethoven: Shutterstock

The Los Angeles Times
By Mark Swed

It wasn't quite Little Coachella in Little Tokyo. But as if out of nowhere, more than 1,000 hip-hop fans, some wearing Kanye West T-shirts, descended on the Aratani Theatre. A few had arrived as early as noon on Saturday and waited in the hot sun for a 7:30 p.m. concert.

Once the crowd had taken over San Pedro Street, the police came by to see what was going on. It was no big deal, they were assured, simply a queue for free tickets to the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra's Beethoven concert.

Make that Yeethoven, short for "Yeezus" (West's 2013 album) and Beethoven.

Meanwhile, not far away in Glendale, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra sandwiched between the tame "Classical Symphony" of Prokofiev and "Clock" Symphony of Haydn a new cello concerto by Mason Bates, who has one foot in electronica and moonlights as a DJ.

Is something going on? Yes and no.

Every generation genre-bends, each in its own way. They always have and, no doubt, always will. Eyebrows go up and they go back down. But by now it has gotten pretty hard to shock.

What does seem new is the lack of controversy. One almost longs for the days when Parisians rioted the premiere of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," the Viennese practically threw Mahler out of town for smudging the sacred symphonic art form with street music, and the 1950s avant-garde horrified the establishment with pursuits that redefined the definition of music.

I heard the Sunday night repeat of LACO's program at UCLA, and for both this and the YMF event Saturday, the musical and social welcoming mat easily co-opted rebellion. Still, it is hard to complain about attaining, through music, a unifying feel-good mood in our otherwise divisive feel-bad times. "Yeezy season approachin'," West tells us. Could that be the revolution we need?

What made "Yeethoven" especially engaging was its unmistakably sincere musical roots. The Debut Orchestra, a training ensemble for instrumentalists and conductors founded in 1955, happens to boast among its alumni André Previn and Michael Tilson Thomas, famed for their groundbreaking mixing of symphonic and pop worlds. The 26-year-old Juilliard-trained YMF music director Yuga Cohler is in their mold, a self-proclaimed hip-hop fan since childhood who does not see that and Beethoven as worlds in opposition.

A young composer of like mind, Stephen Feigenbaum, served as "Yeethoven" arranger and co-curator. Six Beethoven scores were paired with songs from "Yeezus," each grouping given a theme — Form, Contrast, Harmony, Rhythm, Gesture and Will — representing qualities Cohler and Feigenbaum find shared across centuries and cultures by Beethoven and West.

Introducing the pairings, Feigenbaum noted the chaotic, over-the-top nature of Beethoven's "Egmont" Overture and West's "New Slaves" or the heroic yet ambiguous character of the snappy second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony and "Hold My Liquor." These are, of course, all general enough qualities that you could make the same case for any number of composers.

In fact, dissimilarities could be more striking than similarities, beginning with an informal pop crowd that little resembled the formal musicians on stage. Neither do Beethoven and West sound alike. And while West does profess some of Beethoven's democratic ideals and confidence, there are also major differences, such as the pop star's attitude toward women so radically opposed to Beethoven's idealized "Immortal Beloved." And, of course, orchestra and pop concert settings have little in common.

Yet "Egmont" and "New Slaves" are, each in its own way, transgressive arguments for freedom. Putting West in orchestral dress and removing the vocals meant avoiding anything offensive. Were his language to be used in a traditional classical concert (or this newspaper, for that matter), there really would be trouble.

All but two of the pairs were mash-ups. Beethoven seldom upgraded West, rather West infected Beethoven with contemporary funk and spunk. The final mash-up mattered most. An orchestral arrangement of the last movement of the Opus 131 string quartet undercut Beethoven at his most spiritually transformative with the raunchy side of West in "On Sight." Cohler and Feigenbaum's theme was Will, but it could just as easily have been Impurity. Beethoven kept earthy, and West's music rose spiritually higher than you might have otherwise expected.

For the enthusiastic crowd (200 or more were turned away), every recognizable West hook got a shout out and Beethoven got respect. Cohler conducted with surety and security. The orchestra, though looking a little dazed in these surroundings, played with a joyful sense of making a history.

The crowd at Royce Hall on Sunday night was more standard issue for LACO, with but a few more young people than normal in attendance. (I wonder what would happen with audiences at UCLA if the school eliminated its $12 parking fee for concerts.) Much of the interest here focused on Matthew Halls, the British conductor who became music director of the Oregon Bach Festival two years ago and whose strong showing makes him a credible candidate in LACO's music director search.

An all-around early music guy whose recording of Bach harpsichord suites is a knockout, Halls also happens to be big on 19th century opera, symphonic blockbusters and contemporary music. He went for boldness in both Prokofiev and Haydn, getting some of the loudest playing I've heard from the orchestra.

But he put most of his attention on Bates' new Cello Concerto, which had its premiere earlier this year with the Seattle Symphony (conducted by Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla). It was written for Joshua Roman, who has his own street cred. The popular young cellist will, for instance, be playing at Amoeba Music on Wednesday, and he showed up at Royce in a showy print suit reminiscent of '60s Carnaby Street.

Bates is everywhere. The new composer-in-residence of the Kennedy Center (a first), he will have his next premiere streamed next week on the San Francisco Symphony Facebook page (believed to be a first for a major orchestra). He has lively orchestral imagination excellent for evoking specific sonic environments (such as primordial life or a future colony in Iceland) by adding beats and electronica effects to snappy melodies.

The Cello Concerto is more traditional. It includes instances of lightweight jazziness and commercial pop. It exploits Roman's flowery virtuosity and offers the cellist diverting light touches — such as bouncing the bow on the strings and plucking them with a guitar pick. But with Roman's propensity for cuteness, this concerto becomes less the transgressive expansion of our musical vocabulary than a contrivance suitable for taming the "monster about to come alive again" that West unleashes in "Yeezus" and Cohler cavorts with in "Yeethoven."

Huffington Post: Yeethoven Is The Kanye And Beethoven Mashup You’ve Been Waiting For

Photo: Priscilla Frank

The Huffington Post
By Priscilla Frank

The Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra, led by conductor Yuga Cohler and composer Stephen Feigenbaum, is bringing hip-hop and classical music together.

When Kanye West released his sixth solo album, titled “Yeezus,” in 2013, he —with a single turn of phrase — fused his identity with that of the central figure of Christianity. The connection between Ye and JC was more than just an egotistical outburst from a narcissistic rock star, but a message about power, sacrifice, influence and vision, albeit a bombastic one.

Now, three years later, Ye has received another rather complimentary comparison. On April 16, at the Artani Theater in Los Angeles, the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra will perform “The Great Music Series: Yeethoven,” comparing Mr. West to Ludwig van Beethoven, and thus exploring the overlap between classical and hip-hop, 18th-century poofy collared shirts and 2013-era leather pants.

Yuga Cohler is directing the performance, along with project co-creator and composer Stephen Feigenbaum. The two, natives to the classical music world and longtime fans of Kanye’s work, have played music together since high school.

The Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra is made up of 70 Los Angeles-based musicians between 15 and 25 years old. Cohler was appointed director last year. “I knew one of the things I wanted to do was make classical music engage with music of today, music that is very widely heard and massively popular,” Cohler explained to The Huffington Post.

From the beginning, Cohler and Feigenbaum were interested in “Yeezus,” the dark, grating, vinegary album that at once feels like a protest, a divine revelation, a nightmare and an industrial rave. “There are a lot of things in the album more reminiscent of classical than pop or hip-hop,” Feigenbaum said. “We tried to examine that and make that case that the commonalities across genres are more interesting than genre barriers.”

With “Yeezus” as a starting point, Cohler and Feigenbaum set out to find an unlikely musician whose sound reverberated with Ye’s. And if said musician happened to have an extremely punnable name, so be it. “We quickly came to Beethoven as someone similarly controversial in his time, someone brash and aggressive,” Cohler said. “Beethoven was rough around the edges. He’s one of the earliest examples of modernity, and often the audience really didn’t like it.”

They then began matching up Yeezus songs with analogous pieces from Beethoven’s oeuvre. For example, Kanye’s “New Slaves,” an epic harangue encompassing everything from systemic racism to fashion addiction, showed similarities to “Egmont Overture” in its dark, tumultuous energy. “In both songs, the endings are bizarrely uplifting, it almost feels bitter,” Cohler explained.

At first, the concert will juxtapose songs by Kanye and Beethoven to illuminate the comparisons aligning them. As the concert continues, the artists’ work will become ever more integrated, until the line between them becomes jagged and molten. “I think the boundaries we set up [in music] are necessarily artificial and don’t need to be adhered to,” Cohler said. Feigenbaum added: “We’re interested in getting out of the box that classical music puts us in.”

Although Cohler and Feigenbaum stress that their project is less concerned with the personas of the artists at play, and more concerned with their work, it’s hard to ignore the fact that, like Kanye, Beethoven was also something of an egoist. When a review of his “String Quartet No. 13” declared the work “incomprehensible, like Chinese,” he responded indignantly and without a hint of self-doubt, calling his audience “Cattle! Asses!” One of his most iconic quotes, “There are many princes and there will continue to be thousands more, but there is only one Beethoven,” sounds similarly familiar.

The show concludes with a comparison of the last movement of Beethoven’s “String Quartet No. 14” and Kanye’s “On Sight,” which opens his album. “If you don’t know the pieces you would have no idea where one piece starts and the other ends,” Cohler described. “It’s so emblematic of the artistic embryo that characterizes both Beethoven and Kanye — that propulsion, impulse and drive.”

Not everyone is psyched about the performance. Pitchfork Senior Editor Jayson Greene called the project “spectacularly ill-conceived.” Greene, who writes about both classical and hip-hop music, sees little connection between the two artists beyond a catchy conjoined nickname, and described the effort as a lazy attempt to bridge high and low culture that underestimates both artists and their audience.

“Lumping things on two sides of a room and drawing a line is less difficult than figuring out where each individual element belongs in a space,” Greene wrote. “And if you are going to start mixing and matching — say, by establishing a parallel between a rapper and a composer that leaps over genre boundaries, countries, and hundreds of years — for god’s sake, think hard about what you’re doing.”

Whether or not you like the resulting Yeethoven mashup, after speaking with briefly with both Cohler and Feigenbaum, it’s difficult to deny that they’ve put quite a lot thought into the pairing. This concert has been in preparation for about a year. And while Greene posits Igor Stravinsky as a stronger parallel to West, his argument is based as much upon the artists’ characters and visions as the actual content, which Cohler and Feigenbaum privilege.

As someone who knows far less about classical music, I cannot confidently comment on the solidity of the parallel between Ye and Be, at least not until the show takes place on April 16. However, I fully support the mission of a free, instructive concert performed by an orchestra of young people, illuminating bridges between unlikely artists that can be embraced or rejected by the audience as they see fit.

Rather than insulting their audience, Cohler and Feigenbaum invite people to participate in an imperfect experiment, one that can illuminate the tenuous nature of boundaries and categories confining all art forms. “The more young musicians that realize they can learn Bach and also improvise and play in a band and [learn that] those don’t have to be totally separate,” well, these are all good things, right?

Besides, the potential for “Yeethoven” to result in outrage, disagreement, slippage, disharmony and even misguided overconfidence sans apologies seems quite appropriate for the subject matter, no?

“The Great Music Series: Yeethoven“ takes place Saturday, April 16, at 7:30 p.m. The event is free, but tickets are required, available first-come first-serve starting at 6:00 p.m.