No Exit Rediscovers the Cleveland School

Cleveland has always known how to keep its secrets under smoggy, overcast skies. While New York thundered through the Jazz Age and Paris shimmered at the turn of the twentieth century, an extraordinary group of artists was thriving along the Cuyahoga — painters, poets, and provocateurs bound together by immigrant ambition and industrial grit, forming clubs, staging masked balls scandalous enough to rattle a bishop and a mayor, converting abandoned schoolhouses into salons where Hart Crane and William Sommer argued about whether music could be heard in color. The Cleveland School was never modest in its ambitions. It was deficient only in reach and press coverage.

NoExit — now in its seventeenth season, with over four hundred commissions behind it — has made a practice of exactly this kind of cultural excavation: unearthing what the broader narrative has passed over, then detonating it into the present.

Their March concert series, Cleveland Renaissance: Art of the Cleveland School, carries that mission to its most personal and most ambitious expression yet. Eight composers and poets have each been handed a single painting and asked to do what artists have always done with the work of other artists: steal from it, argue with it, wrestle it into a new form. Timothy Beyer, NoExit’s founder, calls this ekphrasis — art inspiring art. Here, visual art is transformed into poetry and music.

The pairings are provocative. Gleb Kanasevich, a clarinetist and composer whose sensibility runs to the austere and industrial, confronts Clara Deike’s cubist-impressionist Shells (1937). Greg D’Alessio, working with video and ensemble, traces the arc of an entire artistic life, moving between Clarence Holbrook Carter’s rural realism of 1941 and his haunted egg-and-moon images of 1973. Composer Adonai Henderson listens to Hughie Lee-Smith’s moody, surrealist The Confrontation and hears a conversation so tense and unresolved that it can only be rendered through instruments that harmonically drift in and out of resolution. James Praznik takes Clarence Van Duzer’s 1945 Anti-Fascist Triptych — all crumbling architecture and contorted bodies — and treats it not as a historical document but as a present-day emergency. The Cleveland Museum of Art provides an ideal venue for these confrontations: its massive screen projects images thirty feet high, looming over the performers below.

Threading through the evening like a winter storm is William Sommer — the Detroit-born lithographer who became Cleveland’s patron saint of modernism, who moved to Brandywine and turned a schoolhouse into a crossroads, who was called a degenerate by critics and a genius by posterity, and who inspired Hart Crane to write one of the most exuberant ekphrastic poems in the American canon. Two composers, Timothy Beyer and Ray McNiece, along with the ghost of Crane himself, orbit Sommer’s work from different angles of devotion.

This is the kind of concert that takes Cleveland’s past seriously — not as backdrop, not as a regional joke, but as a community with its own unfinished business; “a rustbelt siren song,” as Beyer described it in his opening remarks.

Poetry threaded through the evening kept listeners oriented, though at one point even a performer seemed briefly adrift when an image failed to appear on the screen. Ray McNiece’s verse is beloved in Cleveland for its folksiness, and his nostalgic reflections gave the evening warmth — especially when he recalled his grandmother’s warning: Don’t put your winter coats away. You never know when the temperature will drop again.

NoExit has always introduced new voices to Cleveland’s new-music scene. Adonai Henderson (b. 1993), among the youngest composers on the program. His work Left Unsaid presented a 2 voices shaped by his work as a teacher at Menlo Park Academy. His response to Hughie Lee-Smith’s The Confrontation imagines a conversation between two adolescent girls, their voices embodied by an alto flute and B-flat clarinet, supported by a string trio in a neo-classical idiom. Henderson writes in his program note that he “will never know what those two are saying or even who is speaking at what time” — and yet he renders a dialogue so plausible it recalls the playful, half-heard conversations of middle school.

The intimacy of Charles Sallée’s Bedtime (1940) found a sharp complement in Raja Belle Freeman’s poem “Hi Stranger.” Freeman’s writing works through accumulation of private detail: I’ve picked myself clean / Scrubbed, scraped, oiled, brushed / Made waste of undesirable bits / Recited elegies for my dead skin and toenail clippings. These are scenes most of us recognize — even the elegies for old toenails.

Greg D’Alessio has been part of NoExit from the beginning. The works he chose were Clarence Holbrook Carter’s After Jane Reed and Dora Hunt (1941), depicting two women picking coal from train tracks, and Eschantos No. 6 (1973), with its alien orbs floating above a canyon. D’Alessio’s music and video trace the arc of Carter’s career across those three decades. His work has always balanced humor and profundity through a clever mix of electronic and acoustic sound, here amplified by video — as when Cara Tweed’s dark lower-register violin line accompanies a rising moon.

The playing was fabulous throughout. It was enlightening to observe how longtime ensemble members — Nick Diodore, Sean Gabriel, Cara Tweed, and Shuai Wang — have grown over the past decade. Among the newer voices are harpist Stephen Haluska and percussionist Katalin La Favre. Ensemble playing presents particular challenges for harpists and percussionists, but these two were in perfect sync, cueing one another with their bodies like dancers. In Beyer’s The Japanese Bridge, with its Feldman-like textures at the softest dynamics, their exposed unison entrances — piano, harp, and percussion together — were executed to something approaching perfection. In my notebook I simply wrote: When percussion, piano, and harp play chords in unison. Perfect.

That refinement reached its peak in Praznik’s Anti-Fascist Triptych, which featured amplified brake drum producing a remarkable range — guiro-like rasps, snare-drum rolls, bell tones. When Praznik sang directly into the brake drum, my jaw dropped. She has an exceptional instinct for percussion and vocal texture, and for maximizing the sonic possibilities of a minimal setup. Her playing was, simply, magical.

What NoExit has assembled is something rarer than a themed concert program: an act of civic archaeology conducted in real time, before a live audience, with all the mess and urgency that entails. The Cleveland School artists whose work anchors this evening were themselves, as William H. Robinson notes in the program, a “dynamic network of institutions, events, and shared ambitions” — people who understood that art does not happen in isolation but in argument, in community, in the friction between one sensibility and another. That Kokoon Klub motto, attributed to founder Carl Moellmann, has lost none of its voltage: Alone an artist becomes a routine man.

NoExit is, in this sense, the Kokoon Klub’s spiritual descendant — without the masked balls, so far as we know, though the evening’s music occasionally approaches that level of drama. The ensemble has spent seventeen seasons proving that new music need not be an exercise in austerity or exclusion, that the concert hall can come to the community rather than demanding the community ascend to it. Here, that philosophy finds its sharpest articulation yet, because the community being addressed is not an abstraction but a specific one: Cleveland, with its gray cloud cover, epic winters, and capacity for producing artists who are then politely ignored by the national narrative — until someone, eventually, has the will to look again.

These musicians and composers will return to their institutions. The art will survive in digital form and live on in private collections. The scores will travel and, in a few years, be resurrected.

But for these three nights in March — at Praxis Fiber Workshop, at the Cleveland Museum of Art, at SPACES — something happened that can only be described in the language the program itself keeps reaching for: a confrontation, left mostly unsaid, between the living and the dead, between image and sound and the words we never knew we were carrying.

“The apples,” as Crane wrote to Sommer, “are poised full and ready for explosion.”

Read more about reviewer Paul Cox here.