If you're looking for "I Spys," dating or LTRs, this is your scene.
View ProfilesPublished January 10, 2024 at 10:00 a.m.
Monkton composer, arranger and musician Kyle Saulnier is immediately recognizable: His head is shaved, and he sports a wildly untrimmed salt-and-pepper beard. He manages to look both his age — 43 — and far older.
"I had a gorgeous 'Jew fro,' but I started losing it in grad school. It migrated. Now it's on my face," joked Saulnier, who is from Cheshire, Conn., and moved to Vermont in 2016. Compact in frame, he emanated an intense, springy energy from his perch at a high-top table at the Phoenix gallery and music hall in Waterbury.
Saulnier is adept at inhabiting different worlds. Trained mainly in jazz, he composes and arranges as often for strings as for jazz bands. He plays baritone saxophone — for which the classical repertoire is limited — and double bass, which he bows for classical and plucks for jazz. He has written a violin duet and a concerto for his wife, violinist Brooke Quiggins Saulnier.
Saulnier wrote his latest composition, how we talk to each other., for string quartet, flute and clarinet. The work will premiere this Saturday and Sunday, January 13 and 14, in two concerts at the Phoenix by 10-year-old new-music ensemble TURNmusic, based in Waterbury and led by artistic director Anne Decker, who commissioned the piece.
The rhythm-forward work displays Saulnier's signature "sense of groove," Decker said. "I really appreciate the way he brings a jazz-groove-funk sensibility into his writing for us."
The piece will be performed by TURNmusic's core players: violinists Mary Rowell and Quiggins Saulnier, violist Elizabeth Reid, cellist John Dunlop, flutist Hilary Goldblatt, and clarinetist Dan Liptak. It's part of a program to be performed this weekend that Quiggins Saulnier curated to help audiences get to know the musicians more intimately.
Much of the program consists of solos chosen by the musicians because of a meaningful connection. Reid, for example, will perform her own composition, "The Blue Hour." The exceptions are two ensemble pieces: Saulnier's and Vermont-affiliated composer Nico Muhly's "I Know Where Everything Is."
Saulnier said he composed his work with these particular six musicians in mind, a method he prefers to writing anonymous musical parts. He has studied the strengths and idiosyncrasies of each musician since 2016, when Quiggins Saulnier joined TURNmusic. In 2017, the group played Saulnier's string quartet at the edge of a world not unlike our own.
Saulnier also plays with TURNmusic; in 2018, the group performed his a foundation of sand. arranged for nine instruments, with the composer on bass. (Of his titles, Saulnier said, he saves uppercase letters "for when I really mean it.")
The idea of composing to highlight individual musicians' talents comes from the jazz world, Saulnier said.
"A lot of the training in classical is execution of this other person's idea. Jazz values self-expression over all else," he said. "What you celebrate in jazz is that everyone has a thing that they do, and no one else does it that way. Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus — they wrote things for people who didn't just play tenor sax but played it in this particular way. I want to do the same thing in a classical music sense."
Saulnier's parents both trained as engineers; his father listened to classic rock and Motown in an otherwise nonmusical household. Music, Saulnier recalled, was "something I signed up for in school and was instantly good at."
He joined his high school jazz band as a saxophonist and played electric bass guitar in a rock band. He wrote his first composition, for big band, at age 15, but "nothing was worth playing until 18," he said, when a band at his summer music camp played his arrangement of Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly With His Song."
Saulnier has become a fierce advocate for school music education, which he thinks has declined significantly since his high school years. He gives clinics on composition at schools as a Vermont Arts Council teaching artist, and he mentors budding composers through Music-COMP — a mainly online program that allows students to get professional feedback on their compositions and, occasionally, have them performed by the Vermont Symphony Orchestra and other musicians. "I've never seen anything like it anywhere," Saulnier said.
After high school, Saulnier studied classical theory and composition at Furman University in South Carolina before realizing he wanted to be in jazz. He finished his degree in jazz composition at Berklee College of Music in Boston. "I don't regret the classical," he said. "It still influences how I write now."
At the Manhattan School of Music, where he got his master's in jazz composition, Saulnier studied with arranger Michael Abene, whom Saulnier calls "legendary." "Jazz has a much stronger arranging tradition than classical," he explained, because it is based on "tunes, melody, chords" rather than exact instrumentation.
Saulnier has arranged everything from Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring to Kurt Cobain's "In Bloom" — both for string quartet. He arranged acoustic folk singer-songwriter Francesca Blanchard's "Baby" and "Did It to Myself" for her 2021 performance with the VSO.
"Jazz composers don't often write for strings; [sometimes] they don't know it's different from writing for winds," Saulnier said. "That's what I base my arranging career on. I'm that cat."
Dunlop, who is principal cellist of the VSO, described Saulnier as "a sought-after arranger" who "plays around with texture a lot more than a lot of arrangers I've played. He likes to have the cello do these pizzicato descending-glissando things — you pluck and then slide the finger down — that sound very jazz-based but also give a unique stamp to his work."
In November, Dunlop and other VSO musicians performed Saulnier's arrangement of his a foundation of sand. for chamber orchestra.
At the Manhattan School, Saulnier met Quiggins, who was earning her bachelor's and master's degrees there. After they both graduated, the couple remained in New York for 10 years. During that "gap decade," as Saulnier quipped, he composed for and conducted his own 20-piece jazz band, the Awakening Orchestra, and got gigs in film and television.
One involved scoring episodes of the short-lived National Geographic television series "Hunter Hunted," featuring animals attacking humans. "I would get rough cut of a dude wrestling on the ground with a stuffed tiger. I had to compose to that," he recalled.
Quiggins Saulnier — the couple married in 2009 — said of their New York City life, "We were both working and playing a lot and were successful, but we both just got tired of literally running from one gig to the next."
Eventually Saulnier returned to academia to earn his doctorate at New England Conservatory in Boston. Quiggins Saulnier had been subbing at the VSO and loved Vermont, which was also an easier commute for her husband.
Quiggins Saulnier is now the orchestra's assistant principal second violinist. Saulnier is an affiliate artist at Middlebury College, where he is teaching a January course on Miles Davis.
Quiggins Saulnier was among the first musicians for whom Saulnier wrote specifically. "For me, he tends to write things that are extremely rhythmic, and anything that has me low on the instrument — that's when he seems to get the most excited," she said.
Dunlop notes, "He tends to like to throw in an extremely difficult, fast lick [i.e., solo] for me, which I've given him grief about. But he'd never change them; he'd say, 'Too bad,' and I'd figure it out."
All the classical musicians for whom Saulnier composes must learn to play "in the pocket," or groove — something that lies outside their training. "My vocabulary is largely rhythmically based, and that can be counterintuitive for classical musicians," he said.
Dunlop explained: "Classical players tend to sit forward a little on the beat. There's a desire to keep things moving. Playing in the pocket is the opposite: sitting back on the beat, not pressing it but rather fitting in just right; being relaxed but not lazy. It's a pretty subtle thing, but when you hear it, you know it."
"Once, at a party, [Saulnier] called me the protector of the pocket, and I felt so glorified," Quiggins Saulnier said with a laugh.
Saulnier continues to compose, arrange and perform in a vein he has made his own. He won a 2024 Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant to write an extended work for jazz ensemble with strings, and he co-leads two jazz trios: Cleary/Gagnon/Saulnier, with jazz pianist Tom Cleary and drummer Andy Gagnon; and Edna, with guitarist Michael Chorney and drummer Jeremy Frederick. The latter group has a "freewheeling, experimental" record coming out in 2024.
Dunlop noted that other composers, such as Carlos Simon, have brought jazz and rock backgrounds to the classical new-music field. But he finds Saulnier's music "very recognizable and distinct from other composers I've played" with similar backgrounds. "He really brings in all those elements in a way that isn't obvious."
Waterbury composer and guitarist Matt LaRocca is the same age as Saulnier; the two friends have performed each other's works. LaRocca was executive director of Music-COMP until last year and is currently chair of creative projects at the VSO and artistic director of the Champlain Philharmonic Orchestra, which premiered Saulnier's the Sun upon a hill. in March.
"For me, Kyle's music is all on the backbone of jazz — a real blend of jazz with true, deep rock and classical chops," LaRocca said.
He added, "We [composers] are all looking for our voice, for our style, and Kyle has one. You can plop a piece by him down in front of me, and I'll say, 'Oh, that's Kyle.' He's not emulating anyone or trying to be anything else."
TURNmusic Plays Kyle Saulnier, Saturday, January 13, 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, January 14, 4 p.m., at the Phoenix in Waterbury. $15-30. thephoenixvt.com
The original print version of this article was headlined "In the Pocket | A TURNmusic premiere spotlights Kyle Saulnier's ability to straddle the jazz and classical worlds"
Tags: Performing Arts, Classical Music, Kyle Saulnier, how we talk to each other., TURNmusic, Nico Muhly
Comments are closed.
From 2014-2020, Seven Days allowed readers to comment on all stories posted on our website. While we've appreciated the suggestions and insights, right now Seven Days is prioritizing our core mission — producing high-quality, responsible local journalism — over moderating online debates between readers.
To criticize, correct or praise our reporting, please send us a letter to the editor or send us a tip. We’ll check it out and report the results.
Online comments may return when we have better tech tools for managing them. Thanks for reading.