Living, breathing, label-free music: Etchings Festival is ‘the natural habitat for something that doesn't fit any specific mold’

Etchings Festival is all about showcasing original contemporary music in a way that transcends boundaries. It’s not exactly a classical festival, though its Ecce Ensemble is made of classical musicians. It’s not exactly a world festival, but the music it presents blends cultures.

After a few years away from Northampton, it’s finally returned.

The festival has three different concerts this year: a “Meet the Composers” event at Bombyx on Thursday, Aug. 7, at 7 p.m.; Hazmat Modine and The Ecce Ensemble at Look Park on Friday, Aug. 8, at 7 p.m.; and Felipe Salles and The Ecce Ensemble at Bombyx on Saturday, Aug. 9, at 7 p.m. The latter two nights will feature performances of new works played by the Ecce Ensemble.

Etchings Festival got its start in 2009, albeit not at Bombyx – or, for that matter, in the United States at all.

Festival Co-director John Aylward has a longstanding interest in European music because his mother is from Germany. Early in his teaching career, Aylward decided it was “a good time to take another step and start looking at how to dialogue with music in Europe,” he said. So he, with the help of the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, found a spot for a new festival – a 14th-century chapel, in fact – in the village of Auvillar, France. Etchings Festival ran for 10 summers until the venue went through “some really difficult moments,” he said, after which Aylward decided to rethink his goals for the festival.

In 2019, he moved to Northampton, where he lives with his wife, Kate Soper, a guest composer at the festival and an associate professor of music at Smith College. He liked the Pioneer Valley and felt it was where he wanted to settle down and raise a family, so it made sense to bring Etchings here, too.

The festival has also been in New York City in some of its most recent summers. Post-pandemic, Aylward and his team were scoping out different venues to move Etchings to. The Ecce Ensemble’s pianist, Geoffrey Burleson, teaches at Hunter College in New York, and Aylward said that the group had “a wonderful time” playing there. Still, it wasn’t a permanent fit.

“We auditioned New York; we auditioned Northampton,” he said. “Northampton kinda won.”

This year will be the festival’s third in Northampton.

“Now we are really going for it, and it feels great,” Aylward said. “The energy is really wonderful.”

The festival gets its name from part of its mission: to provide professional opportunities for young composers, a key part of which is creating high-quality recordings of their work played by members of the Ecce Ensemble. Using the name “Etchings Festival” is “a nice way to recognize the idea that we are etching a print of one of their works, like the grooves in a record,” Aylward said.

Besides that, he said, the name also brings to mind block etchings. “I really like the idea of relating what we’re doing to another kind of beautiful ancient art form, because music is so old and I want us to be able to recognize the lineage that we’re working in,” Aylward said. “Contemporary music – well, in a way, there’s nothing contemporary about it. It’s been going on for thousands of years.”

In popular media, Aylward pointed out, such as in movies like “Tár” and “Whiplash,” the process of fostering musical genius is shown to involve harassment, torture, stress. At Etchings, though, “We’re trying to present the cultivation of classical music in a much more positive light.”

Friday’s headliner, Hazmat Modine, is far from an expected act at a classical festival, even a contemporary one. The eight-piece New York-based musical group, which performs all original music, “plays the kind of Blues one might have found in a barrelhouse in New Orleans had the city been inhabited by gypsies who performed with Otis Redding and the city had been built on the Black Sea,” according to its website. Their press kit says they bring “a uniquely intercontinental sonic collage encompassing a tremendous range of instrumental, vocal, and conceptual originality – all with a lot of soul and groove.”

“I would not consider myself in any way a classical musician, but I think that breaking boundaries is a beautiful thing, and I think that the philosophy of being open musically is super important at this point in time,” said Hazmat Modine frontman Wade Schuman. “Y’know, music’s in bad shape – all music is in bad shape because of AI, because of the digital apocalypse, and classical music has been segregated from other forms, so a festival like this, I think, is important to show people that compositional thinking can be connected to many different things.”

Schuman’s setlist for the show will be a mix of up-tempo and slower tunes.

“[Audiences] want everything to be up and exciting, but I like to also have quiet songs. I like sometimes to have songs that have three or four people. … One thing that makes me sad is when you see a band, and, after two or three songs, it all sounds the same. I’m kind of against that in principle. It’s like if you have a meal and it’s all one thing, you go nuts,” he said, adding that he likes to provide both “hors d’oeuvres” and “unexpected beverages.”

Composer, conductor, and saxophonist Felipe Salles, who teaches jazz studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will be debuting music from his album “Camera Obscura” during his set on Saturday. The show will feature a 14-piece band, including a jazz quartet, a string quartet, and a woodwind sextet.

“It’s a project that combines a classical music aesthetic with a jazz aesthetic with my Brazilian background. Some people will call that a crossover project, but I don’t like to label things. I think music is music, good or bad,” Salles said.

“I’ve written concertos and pieces for only classical musicians with no improvisation, and I’ve written stuff that is just for jazz musicians, so this is sort of like an opportunity to find that place,” he added, “and to me, a festival like this is the natural habitat for something that doesn’t fit any specific mold.”

Aylward said that Salles and Hazmat Modine were chosen because they pair well with the works the Ecce Ensemble plays. Both of them, he said, “highlight and complement the kinds of expressions that these emerging composers are already interested in, whether it be new folk expressions or interesting jazz expressions.”

He pointed out that acclaimed artists like Miles Davis and Bob Dylan both got flak from critics when they expanded their sound. That pushback is expected, sure, but Aylward doesn’t mind.

“I think there’s a lot of people saying, ‘Oh, this is genre-bending.’ Well, sure, I’m happy to have genre-bending music,” he said, “but I’m also just happy to have music.”

Tickets to each event are $20 in advance via bombyx.live or $25 at the door. For more information about the festival or the Ecce Ensemble, visit eccearts.com.

Carolyn Brown can be reached at [email protected].