May 20, 2012

Sciarrino- D'un Faune







Salvatore Sciarrino's "D'un Faune" (1980) for piano and flute.

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reBlogged from: Uploads by john11inch

on May 20, 2012 at 09:00 AM

Mayuzumi: "Ritual Overture"







Toshiro Mayuzumi: "Ritual Overture" (1964) Stockholm Symphonic Wind Orchestra

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reBlogged from:
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on May 20, 2012 at 05:00 AM

Tania León ~ Parajota Delaté







Parajota Delaté
Tania León
(1988)

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reBlogged from:
Uploads by stanchinsky

on May 20, 2012 at 04:00 AM

Tom Plaunt Plays Charles Ives (1984 McGill University Records)


Charles Ives, the archetypal American Maverick, died 58 years ago today at the age of 80 years.

 

Side One:

a1-I:Emerson (15:05)
a2-II:Hawthorne (13:09)

Side Two:

b1-III:The Alcotts (5:14)
b2-IV:Thoreau (10:32)

Tom Plaunt,Piano

(1)  or  (1)

reBlogged from:
A Closet of Curiosities

on May 20, 2012 at 03:00 AM

Dick Horowitz says goodbye

Richard Horowitz, who has had an astonishing sixty-six-year-run as the principal timpanist of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, plays his final performance tomorrow, when the orchestra appears at Carnegie Hall. A lovely article by Fred Plotkin, on the WQXR website, highlights...

reBlogged from:
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

on May 20, 2012 at 02:00 AM

May 19, 2012

Fischer-Dieskau and the War Requiem (updated)

Not many people in the musical world intimidated Benjamin Britten; Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was one of them. Below, I've excerpted two letters that Britten wrote to the baritone — the first almost comically meek in tone, the second considerably warmer. They...

reBlogged from:
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

on May 19, 2012 at 07:00 PM

LA Children's Chorus Holds Auditions from May 31 - June 4 for Kids Ages 8-12

Renowned Chorus Seeks Talented Boys and Girls Ages 8 to 12 Who Love to Sing



Los Angeles Children’s Chorus (LACC), one of the nation’s leading children’s choirs, is holding auditions for boys and girls ages eight (by September 1, 2012) to twelve on May 31 and June 1, 2 and 4, 2012, in Pasadena. Previous singing experience is not necessary, but audition appointments are required.



LACC’s program focuses on training children who may not necessarily have had previous singing experience, but who are dedicated to achieving excellence in vocal technique, choral singing and classical music. Successful candidates will demonstrate the ability to match pitch, follow instructions, and thrive in a structured, but supportive learning environment. Children audition in groups of five to ensure their comfort, and no preparation is necessary.



Under the artistic direction of Anne Tomlinson, Los Angeles Children’s Chorus, currently in its 26th season, provides a comprehensive music education and performance program for children of diverse cultural and economic backgrounds in Los Angeles County. LACC is comprised of six choirs with choristers ranging in age from 8 to 18 who hail from 60 communities throughout Southern California. (Younger singers are encouraged to enroll in LACC’s class for six- and seven-year-olds, First Experiences in Singing, offered in Pasadena.)



Rehearsals for entry-level choirs are once a week at Pasadena Presbyterian Church. In addition, all children take musicianship classes (a six level curriculum) and receive individual vocal training. They receive mid- and end-of-year evaluations as well. Repertoire is selected to fit each choir’s skill level and focuses on classical works, but also encompasses folk music from around the world, spirituals, gospel songs and jazz, as well as new music



High-profile performance opportunities are an important and integral part of the program and include two culminating choral concerts each year, plus performances at major civic events. LACC’s premier choirs perform with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, LA Opera, Los Angeles Master Chorale, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, among other prestigious music presenters. The choir was also featured in the Academy Award-nominated documentary film, “SING!” which chronicles a year in the life of the choir and is shown periodically on PBS stations nationwide, as well as follow-up documentaries “SING OPERA!” and “SING CHINA!” In addition, LACC tours locally, nationally and internationally.



Auditions will be held at Pasadena Presbyterian Church, located at 585 East Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena, California 91101. For more information or to make an audition appointment, please call (626) 793-4231 or visit
www.lachildrenschorus.org.





reBlogged from: Interchanging Idioms

on May 19, 2012 at 06:00 PM

From a Diary: I:xxvi

There is some confusion between the radical music's minimal impulse — the elimination of distractions — and austerity.  When the PR Department at Nonesuch records effectively recuperated and coopted the label "minimalism" (dropping La Monte Young out of the Young, Riley, Reich & Glass quartet and replacing Young with a more or less conventionally tonal composer from their own stable, John Adams) the notion of eliminating distractions in order to create a frame within which ever more layers of rich acoustical detail could be heard, a form of austerity —when not acoustical poverty — was promoted.  It is tempting to identify this with the current form of economic austerity — at the cost of diversity and growth — that is widely promoted these days, particularly (but not only) by the political right.



reBlogged from:
Renewable Music

on May 19, 2012 at 06:00 PM

The Golandsky Institute’s 2012 Summer Symposium and International Piano Festival Takes Place from July 8th – 14th in Princeton, N.J.



The Golandsky Institute has announced the performers for its 2012 International Piano Festival, to be held at Princeton University for its ninth consecutive summer, July 8th – 14th. The Festival will feature six recitals by internationally acclaimed artists from the classical and jazz piano music worlds. This year’s season will also feature an Evening of Songs with soloists from Opera New Jersey. The first four of the six concerts will be held in the Berlind Theatre of the acclaimed McCarter Theatre Center, the last two in Richardson Auditorium, Princeton University.



On Sunday, July 8th at 8:00 p.m., 15 year old artist Llewellyn Sanchez-Werner makes his Princeton debut at the Golandsky Institute on opening night. The youngest student ever to attend Juilliard’s College with a portfolio of critical accolades from Baghdad to the White House, this young emerging star will dazzle, charm and touch your heart. The performance will be held at the Berlind Theatre, McCarter Theatre Center, 91 University Place, Princeton.



Monday, July 9th at 8:00 p.m at the Berlind Theatre, McCarter Theatre Center, soloists from the Opera New Jersey production of HMS Pinafore – Sarah Beckham, soprano; Jennifer Feinstein, mezzo-soprano; Sean Anderson, baritone; and Mathew Edwardsen, tenor will collaborate with popular Golandsky Institute pianist, Thomas Bagwell in a special art song recital. Songs of Debussy, Poulenc and composer Jack Perla will be featured in a program of vocal duets, quartets and solo repertoire.

On Tuesday, July 10th, An Evening of Chamber Music: The Jasper Quartet with Ilya Itin, at the piano at 8:00 p.m. at the Berlind Theatre, McCarter Theatre Center. 2012 winners of the Cleveland Quartet Award and now poised to be the next top string quartet in the US, the Jasper is a “powerful” (NYTimes), quartet holding the position of ensemble-in-residence at Oberlin as well as Classic Chamber Concerts of Naples Florida, in partnership with Ilya Itin. Their multi-year artistic collaboration culminates in Princeton with this superb program of beloved piano quintets, quartets, and the string quartet of living composer, Ler Auerbach.



Thursday, July 12th, 8:00 p.m. at the Berlind Theatre, McCarter Theatre Center, Spain’s young star pianist Josu de Salaun de Soto returns to Princeton directly from critically acclaimed tours of Europe. This much heralded artist will delight listeners with a recital program of piano masterworks by Schumann, Brahms and Debussy. In addition, the 150th anniversary of Debussy’s birth will be celebrated with a related lecture preceding the concert by New York composer and musicologist , Nils Vigeland.



Friday, July 13th, 8:00 p.m. at Richardson Auditorium, Princeton University, Russian born virtuoso, Leed’s Gold Medalist, Ilya Itin returns to Princeton from a year of hugely successful concerts in Japan, China and the USA. This year’s thrilling program will include some of the most challenging repertoire ever written for the piano: the complete Chopin Preludes, Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit, and La Valse. Itin will be making history at Richardson Auditorium by giving the World Premiere of the work written expressly for him by Pulitzer prize-winning composer Yehudi Wyner.



For the grand finale, international jazz superstar Bill Charlap, performs a solo concert at Richardson Auditorium, Princeton University on Saturday, July 14th at 8:0p.m. Considered one of the best jazz pianists in the world, Charlap will perform a 90 minute set of jazz classics in his superb style revealing every perspective of melody, harmony and rhythm.

Tickets for all concerts are on sale at the McCarter Theatre box office, www.mccarter.org, 609-258-2787.



Admission for the concerts is $20, senior/student:$15






reBlogged from: Interchanging Idioms

on May 19, 2012 at 02:00 PM

MusicThinkTank.com Weekly Recap: Why Music is Less Valuable Than Expertise & More

image from www.hypebot.comWhere


The Music Industry



Thinks Out Loud


 



reBlogged from: Music Think Tank (primary) RSS

on May 19, 2012 at 12:00 PM

The Sonic Image



The
transsubstantiatio.tumblr.com site collects sounds as images: tracks of audio that are, quite simply, opened in an unexpected and unintended computer program. A source file encoded so as to be heard is instead transferred through that which is meant to be seen. Up top, for example, is the resulting visualization of a track by Nine Inch Nails, “Pinion.” The Tumblr appears to be a sibling site to the soundcloud.com/null66913 account, where the latest track appears to take the opposite course (this is all based on interpreting a page originally in Spanish and itself computer-rendered in a different language, in this case English, courtesy of Google’s Translate service). The track appears to be the sound of an image. What image, I can’t say for sure. Perhaps someone else can be of assistance. The result, nonetheless, is striated noise. In the mind’s eye, it’s the fuzz of a dead channel. I wonder what the channel would show if it were properly dialed in.



More (in Spanish) about the move from sound to image to sound at mediateletipos.net. More on null66913 at null66913.net and twitter.com/null66913.




reBlogged from: Disquiet

on May 19, 2012 at 10:00 AM

Millenial Recording

A few weeks have passed since the announcement, but I have not been posting very much lately (end of the year busyness at my day job, combined with trying to get some composing done), so I am only now sharing with you the news that the 21st Century Consort has received an NEA grant to support the recording of my Sacred Songs and Meditations. My program note on the piece follows. The plan is for a performance of the piece next summer, to be followed immediately by recording sessions. The album will also include Stephen Albert’s Cathedral Music and Christopher Patton’s  Out of Darkness, with all three pieces receiving their first recording. Heartfelt thanks to the director of the Consort, my dear colleague Christopher Kendall who has been a tremendous supporter of my work over the years.


Sacred Songs and Meditations


When Christopher Kendall asked me to create a piece for his two consorts (the Folger and the 20th/21st Century)  to play together, I knew immediately that I wanted to accept, even though I was already booked this past year with commitments both professional and personal (the birth of our twins!). I had been lucky enough to have both these splendid groups perform my music separately in the past, and the idea of a “millennial” piece that both groups would perform together was too good to pass up. But there was no way I could meet the deadline for the piece if I was to create something from scratch.


I dealt with my time constraints by eventually settling, with Christopher’s encouragement, on a set of arrangements of already existing pieces. Christopher had long wanted to perform my Four Sacred Songs — arrangements of old sacred melodies for soprano and performers on modern instruments — so what developed was a piece that would incorporate the Four Sacreds  (with parts added for early instruments), interwoven with a set of instrumental pieces that would feature the early instruments, occasionally supplemented by the modern instruments. The instrumental movements are arrangements of earlier pieces of mine, drawing on music used in a string quartet, a work for organ, and even an orchestral suite. (I put aside any guilt about concocting a ragbag of arrangements when I recalled that music with a flexible instrumentation performable in multiple realizations is very much in keeping with the musical practice of earlier times that the players of the Folger bring so beautifully to life.) This new set is thus a kind of summary of my preoccupation with making music based on old sacred melodies, an interest that goes back to the Three Sacred Songs of 1989, and continues through a number of compositions throughout the nineties for various ensembles. My work as a liturgical musician is the real source for this preoccupation, for it was in working as a church musician, principally in New York in the eighties, that I got to know most of these melodies. This new composition, like its predecessors, represents a uniting of my work as a liturgical musician with my work as a composer of concert music. This union is vividly symbolized both by the sacred space in which we hear the piece today and by the contribution of the Cathedral Choir, giving us a taste of the melody on which each movement is based before that movement is played.


Here are some notes on the individual movements:


1. Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence


The musical substance for this piece began as a simple choral arrangement which I later plundered for my String Quartet #2. I had thought I would have Latin titles and texts for all 8 movements of the Sacred Songs and Meditations, but a scholar friend informed me that the 19th century text for this piece is based on a Greek hymn dating back to the 5th century and there is no Latin to which we can return! The tune is a traditional French melody known as “Picardy” that dates from the 17th century.


2. Jesu Dulcis Memoria


This movement retains the original scoring for modern instruments as in the Four Sacred Songs. The text is attributed to St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the great Cistercian monk and preacher and is set to a chant melody.


3. Pange Lingua


My setting of this Eucharistic hymn draws on both the modern and ancient instruments and is based on a movement from my orchestral suite of Five Meditations on old sacred tunes. The music, perhaps the darkest portion, harmonically speaking, in the whole cycle, reflects the deep mystery of subject dealt with in St. Thomas Aquinas’s text.


4. Corde Natus Ex Parentis


“Of the Father’s Love Begotten” is the usual English title for the hymn on which this piece is based; the title comes from a 19th century translation of the original fourth century text. The chant melody is from the 13th century. I have set the tune using a somewhat free version of the medieval technique known as a mensuration canon: except for a few freely imitative phrases, all the parts have the same melody, but played at different speeds.  For example, the low cello, viol and harp notes mark out the tune at a pace six times slower than the voice.


5. Caelestis Formam Gloriae


My best efforts failed to come up with the Latin original for this 15th century office hymn and the choir will sing a verse in the English translation by John Neale from the 19th century. The title literally means “form of heavenly glory” and the hymn speaks of the mystery of the Transfiguration of Christ. The tune is the Agincourt Song, the same 15th century melody used by Walton in his music for Henry V. This arrangement, exclusively for the old instruments, is based on another movement from my Five Meditations.


6. Christus Factus Est


The chant “Christus Factus Est” appears in the Liber Usualis  as part of the Holy Week liturgy; the melody is unusually wide-ranging and highly melismatic.  The text is part of St. Paul’s famous “Philippians Hymn”, and speaks of the mystery of Christ’s suffering and exaltation.  The first setting I did of this melody was for voice and piano, with the long ringing piano notes evoking the resonances of a great sacred space – it is a kind of homecoming now to hear this new arrangement in a space of the kind that inspired the original conception.


7. Christus Vincit


Based on an organ piece I wrote for the rededication of the organ at St. Meinrad’s Archabbey in Indiana, this movement employs several sources: the refrain (in slightly modified form) and verses of Christus Vincit (Christ Conquers) and a hymn called Vexilla Christus Inclyta (Raise Christ’s Banner).  The former is a very old melody, said to have been sung at the coronation of Charlemagne; the latter is a modern conflation of older text and melody probably devised by a monk of Solesmes.


8. O Fillii et Filliae


The origins of the tune for “O Fillii” are obscure, and may be secular in nature. (One friend suggested to me that the tune is a medieval drinking song that “got baptized”.)  The words date from the 14th century and somewhat discontinuously narrate the Easter story, closing with a call to give praise and thanks to God.


(photo: interior of the National Cathedral)





reBlogged from: Secret Geometry - James Primosch's blog

on May 19, 2012 at 05:00 AM

Duain Wolfe Receives Award for Choral Arts

AWARD FOR DEVELOPMENT OF THE PROFESSIONAL CHORAL ART



Duain Wolfe, Chorus Director for the Colorado Symphony, has been awarded The 2012 Michael Korn Founders Award for Development of the Professional Choral Art.



“I am overwhelmed and truly honored by this award,” said Mr. Wolfe. “In a nation where ten percent of the population is actively involved in choral singing, it is humbling to be accorded such a tribute. The professional choral arts embrace a wide range of organizations and I am especially proud that two of Colorado's finest choruses that are models of high professional standards, the Colorado Symphony Chorus and the Colorado Children's Chorale, are sharing this tribute with me.”



VP for Artistic Administration at the Colorado Symphony, Anthony Pierce, added “Duain is a remarkable resource for the Colorado Symphony, and I can’t emphasize enough how fortunate we are to have him make the commitment that he does to this community and the state of Colorado.” “As an artist, he brings only impeccable work to the table and our choral concerts continue to one of the pillars of our Masterworks presentations.”





reBlogged from: Interchanging Idioms

on May 19, 2012 at 02:00 AM

Beethoven Nine: Inside and Out with the Pacific Symphony



Beethoven’s crowning achievement, the epic Symphony No. 9, “Choral,” featuring the soul-stirring “Ode to Joy,” brings Pacific Symphony’s classical season to a memorable close in a variety of ways. First! The concert, led by Music Director Carl St.Clair, features a monumental fusion of orchestra and voices that includes Pacific Chorale and four world-class opera singers; plus, two timely works by Frank Ticheli: “Rest” (world premiere version for strings) and “Radiant Voices” provide a stunning prelude. Taking place Thursday-Saturday, May 31-June 2, at 8 p.m., in the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, Costa Mesa, this concert is also part of the Symphony’s Music Unwound series and includes a display of Beethoven-inspired artwork by local artists who responded to the call: “OC Can You Create?” A preview talk by composer Ticheli begins at 7 p.m.



Second! The Symphony, in association with Segerstrom Center for the Arts, presents the very first “Pacific Symphony PlazaCast,” a live simulcast of the Symphony’s Beethoven Ninth performance shown on the Center’s plaza during the Saturday, June 2, concert starting at 9 p.m., with festivities, beginning at 8:30 p.m. The evening is a celebration of Maestro St.Clair’s 60th birthday, the Center’s 25th anniversary and John Alexander’s 40th anniversary, hosted by Classical KUSC’s Rich Capparela. This unique event is free and open to the public with no ticket required. The community is invited to come early, bring chairs and blankets, and picnic on the plaza, while enjoying a preview and live interviews with key guest artists—and a few surprises.



St.Clair also leads an afternoon performance and conversation for Classical Connections, “Beethoven’s Ninth Revealed,” on Sunday, June 3, at 3 p.m.









reBlogged from: Interchanging Idioms

on May 19, 2012 at 12:00 AM

May 18, 2012

Colorado Symphony Joins with Denver Gay Men's Chorus on Broadway Rocks 2

THE COLORADO SYMPHONY PRESENTS AN ENCORE TO THE RECENTLY SOLD-OUT BROADWAY ROCKS WITH A WHOLE NEW SHOW, BROADWAY ROCKS 2



The
Colorado Symphony has partnered with the Denver Gay Men’s Chorus under the direction of Ben Riggs for the highly anticipated follow-up to the wildly successful Broadway Rocks from the 2009/10 season. Also featured on the program are three top-notch vocalists, direct from Broadway; American Idol finalist, LaKisha Jones, Rob Evan of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra and Tony Award nominated actress, Christiane Noll. These vocalists join the Symphony and the Denver Gay Men’s Chorus in modern favorites from Jersey Boys, Lion King, Wicked, Rent and Phantom of the Opera along with some of rock-n-roll’s greatest songs from Queen, Journey and The Beatles.



Broadway Rocks 2 comes to Boettcher Concert Hall on Saturday, May 26 at 7:30 pm.



Program:

Act I

Rocks Overture (arr. Fleischer)

We Will Rock You/We Are the Champions (Queen)

This Is The Moment (Jekyll and Hyde/Wildhorn)

Defying Gravity (Wicked/Schwartz)

Jersey Boys Medley

Total Eclipse (Dance of the Vampires/Steinman)

Circle of Life (Lion King/John)

Proud Mary (Fogerty)

Seasons of Love (Rent/Larsen)

Don’t Stop Believing (Rock of Ages/Journey)



Act II

Come Sail Away

Nobody’s Side

Hey Jude (Beatles)

Mama Mia Medley (Andersson/Ulvaeus)

Conga (Estafan)

And I Am Tellin’ You (Dreamgirls/Krieger)

Phantom of the Opera (Phantom/Lloyd Webber)

Music of the Night (Phantom/Lloyd Webber)



Performance: Saturday, May 26 at 7:30 pm



Tickets: Tickets are on sale now at www.coloradosymphony.org, the Colorado Symphony Box Office: (303) 623-7876 or (877) 292-7979 or in-person in the lobby of Boettcher Concert Hall in the Denver Performing Arts Complex. Hours are Monday to Friday from 10 am to 6 pm and Saturday from 12 pm to 6 pm.





reBlogged from: Interchanging Idioms

on May 18, 2012 at 11:00 PM

Sympho to Present "Coast to Coast," Performances in New York and California in Consecutive Weeks in June

Featuring Bionic Symphony at Manhattan’s Angel Orensanz Foundation on June 6, 2012 at 8 PM, and TOWER, at 4 PM on June 16 and 17 at the Oliver Ranch Foundation’s Tower in Geyserville, CA.



Sympho is a 6-year-old classical ensemble and concert presenter that according to the New York Times “refits the concert experience for a new century.” This June, Sympho will present “Coast to Coast,” a festival of two brand-new programs, one on either side of the country. The two programs will take place nearly 3000 miles apart—one in a former 19th-century synagogue in New York and one inside a 21st-century sculpture and performance space in California—and will encompass a range of repertoire from Rameau to newly commissioned works by Christopher Bono, Bora Yoon, and Artistic Director Paul Haas, including music by Mozart, Haydn, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Bizet, and Erkki-Sven Tüür.



Haas has honed an approach to programming that uses techniques such as juxtaposing music of different periods in close proximity and changing the spatial relationship between performers and audience, with a goal that goes beyond merely holding the audience’s attention through variety. Says Haas, “My goal is for audiences to come to a listening experience in a new way, to have something happen that is just different enough from everyday life to open you up to new thoughts.”



For Bionic Symphony, Haas has constructed an evening-length concert comprising four sections, each section being a “bionic symphony” made up of movements from works of the 18th-century Classical and 20th-century Neo-classical periods. These four “bionic” symphonies themselves form a larger-scale four-movement work, knit together with sections of Erkki-Sven Tüür’s haunting Passion. Says Haas about this way of constructing a concert, “Music exists on a historical continuum. Musical styles have changed, but human beings have always asked the same questions, and great art is in part a response to those questions.” He continues, “By listening to pieces of music from different periods of history in close proximity through a modern lens, we can experience this continuum, giving us greater perspective and insight into human nature.”



TOWER, by contrast, consists entirely of new work, though the score incorporates and is heavily influenced by world and ancient musics. The program, which will be performed in collaboration with Bay Area alt-classical pioneers Classical Revolution, was commissioned by the Oliver Ranch Foundation, whose past commissionees include Meredith Monk and the Kronos Quartet. The composers, working closely with each other and multi-disciplinary theater artist Ruth Pongstaphone, have crafted an evening of music written especially for the unique interior of artist Ann Hamilton’s 80-foot tall concrete structure, on whose double-helix staircases both audience and performers will sit and stand. While Haas prefers to avoid saying “this is what this music means” in a concrete and dogmatic way, the dozen-or-so individual segments of the TOWER program—which will be performed as a continuous 70-minute work—were inspired by the idea of portraying an entire human life in music. The works will utilize the space in various ways, responding to both the literal physical configurations of the space and the symbolism of the structure.



While Sympho has its home base in New York, Haas grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and maintains strong roots there. TOWER, which will be presented in collaboration with San Francisco’s Classical Revolution, will be the second concert Sympho has performed in Northern California (following 2008’s REWIND with the New Century Chamber Orchestra at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts).





reBlogged from: Interchanging Idioms

on May 18, 2012 at 11:00 PM

Classical Action’s 2012 Michael Palm Series Concludes on May 17, with Christine Brewer and Craig Rutenberg in Intimate House Concert



Classical Action: Performing Arts Against AIDS closes its 2012 Michael Palm Series of house concerts on Thursday, May 17, with a memorable evening of song from soprano Christine Brewer and pianist Craig Rutenberg. Held in the Tribeca loft apartment of supporters Simon Yates and Kevin Roon, who have hosted all concerts in the series since 2010, the upcoming recital is part of the New York City-based salon series named for the charity’s late benefactor. The performance begins at 7:30pm, following an hour of wine and hors d’oeuvres; tickets for this series-closing concert may be purchased online at www.classicalaction.org or by calling Classical Action at (212) 997-7717. For the first time in the history of the Michael Palm Series, the music may also be enjoyed beyond this cozy salon setting: the recital will be recorded for a broadcast presentation at a later date on SiriusXM’s Symphony Hall, channel 76.



Grammy Award-winning American soprano Christine Brewer, named one of the top 20 sopranos of all time by BBC Music magazine, was recently lauded as being “in outstanding voice…, floating her high passages effortlessly with clarity and a sound like molten gold.” The review continued: “With that devastating vocal beauty came a powerful stage presence; Brewer exuded a sense of peace to match the music” (St Louis Post-Dispatch). According to the New York Times’s Anthony Tommasini, she is “in her prime and sounding glorious,” while as London’s Sunday Times observes, “she brings a soaring opulence” to her interpretations. Fresh off a May 13 recital with Rutenberg at Alice Tully Hall, Brewer joins Classical Action for the first time on May 17.



While renowned for her stunning portrayals of Wagner, Strauss, Verdi, and Britten heroines, the soprano is equally at home on the recital stage, often appearing in concert and recital at some of the world’s greatest concert halls. To date, her 2011-12 highlights include singing Wagner and Beethoven for the Atlanta Symphony’s season-opening concert, undertaking the Wesendonck Lieder with the New World Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas, and joining the San Francisco Symphony and Esa-Pekka Salonen for excerpts from the Ring cycle.



Pianist Craig Rutenberg, “whose playing range s from sterling directness to expansive beauty” (San Francisco Chronicle), has collaborated with many of the world’s greatest vocalists and is recognized as one of the most distinguished accompanists on the stage today. The upcoming performance marks his third collaboration with Classical Action, and his second appearance in the Michael Palm Series, following a 1996 recital with the late American tenor Jerry Hadley. Besides regularly partnering Brewer, Rutenberg has appeared in recital with Denyce Graves, Sumi Jo, Harolyn Blackwell, Susanne Mentzer, Frederica von Stade, Angelika Kirchschlager, and Dawn Upshaw, and, more frequently, Ben Heppner, Jerry Hadley, Olaf Baer, Simon Keenlyside, Stanford Olsen, and Thomas Hampson, with whom he performed at the White House under the Clinton administration. Rutenberg is also the Director of Music Administration at the Metropolitan Opera and a noted interpreter of operatic repertoire.






reBlogged from: Interchanging Idioms

on May 18, 2012 at 11:00 PM

American Pianists Association’s 2013 Classical Finalists Perform on Classical WQXR 105.9 FM and Online at WQXR.org, Wednesday May 19



The five finalists for a prize valued at more than $100,000 from the American Pianists Association will be showcased in performance on New York’s classical station, WQXR (105.9 FM and online at wqxr.org) on Wednesday, May 19 at 9pm. There will be a simultaneous broadcast on WFYI in Indianapolis, home of the American Pianists Association. The program, hosted by Robert Sherman, is part of The McGraw Hill Companies Young Artists Showcase. It was recorded last month when the names of the finalists for the 2013 ProLiance Energy Classical Fellowship Awards of the American Pianists Association were revealed at Steinway Hall.



The Program:

Andrew Staupe, 27, will open the broadcast with Pierre Jalbert’s Toccata; followed by Sara Daneshpour, 25, in Domenico Scarlatti’s Sonata in B minor, K. 27 and Rachmaninov’s Etude-tableau in A minor, Op. 39/6. Claire Huangci, 22 – the youngest finalist – will play three etudes by Alexander Scriabin: Op. 42/3, Op. 8/10, and Op. 8/12. Sean Chen, 23, will perform Ligeti’s Etude No. 13 (“The Devil’s Staircase”). For the finale, Eric Zuber, 26, will be heard in Rachmaninov’s Preludes in G-sharp minor, Op. 32/12 and B-flat major, Op. 23/12.





About the Five Finalists:

Sean Chen is second prize winner of the 2011 Seoul International Music Competition and a prizewinner in the 2009 Cleveland International Piano Competition. Born in Margate, FL and raised in Oak Park, CA, he has performed in Bucharest, Seoul, Taiwan, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, Miami, and New York. Chen received his undergraduate degree at the Juilliard School, where he won the 2010 Gina Bachauer Piano Competition, and he is currently pursuing his Master’s degree there. His teachers have included Jerome Lowenthal, Matti Raekallio, and teacher-mentor Edward Francis.



Sara Daneshpour is second prize winner of the 2007 William Kapell International Piano Competition, first prize and Gold Medal winner of the 2007 International Russian Music Piano Competition, and first prize winner of the 2003 Beethoven Society of America Competition. She joined the roster of Astral Artists as winner of the 2010 National Auditions. Daneshpour has performed in her hometown of Washington, D.C. as well as in New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Russia, Germany, Finland, Estonia, Denmark, and Sweden. She is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, studying under Leon Fleisher, and is now pursuing her Master’s degree at Juilliard with Yoheved Kaplinsky.



Claire Huangci won first prize in the 2010 National Chopin Piano Competition in Miami, and is a laureate in the 2010 Queen Elisabeth International Piano Competition. She made her debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 2003 and has since performed with orchestras in Stuttgart, Frankfurt, St. Petersburg, Moscow, and with the China Philharmonic, among others. Born in Rochester, NY, Huangci entered Philadelphia’s Settlement Music School at age seven and did her undergraduate work at the Curtis Institute of Music. She is currently studying in Germany at the Hochschule für Musik in Hanover with Professor Arie Vardi.



Andrew Staupe made his Carnegie Hall debut at Weill Recital Hall earlier this month as recipient of the 2011 Pro Musicis International Award, and he is the Gold Medalist of the 2010 Young Texas Artists Music Competition. The St. Paul, MN native has performed several times with the Minnesota Orchestra and has toured throughout the U.S. and Europe, appearing at the Concertgebouw in the Netherlands as well as in Russia, Holland, Latvia, Romania, France, Germany, and Bulgaria. Staupe received Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Minnesota, and is currently completing his DMA in Piano Performance at Rice University in Houston with Jon Kimura Parker.



Eric Zuber has won major prizes in seven international piano competitions: the Cleveland, Arthur Rubinstein, Seoul, Sydney, Dublin, Minnesota, and Hilton Head competitions. The Baltimore, MD native made his orchestral debut at the age of twelve with the Baltimore Symphony, and has performed with the Cleveland Orchestra, Israel Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra, Korean Symphony, and Ireland’s RTE National Symphony, among others. Zuber holds degrees from the Peabody Institute, Curtis Institute of Music, and the Juilliard School, and is currently pursuing his DMA at Peabody. His teachers have included Boris Slutsky, Leon Fleisher, Claude Frank, and Robert McDonald.






reBlogged from: Interchanging Idioms

on May 18, 2012 at 11:00 PM

How is TwtrSymphony Getting so much Attention

TwtrSymphony is rapidly gaining a fan base by leveraging social media. Here's how:



We can be found on 
Twitter (of course), also on FacebookTumblr and the web. Our klout score is at 45 and growing. Several major orchestras are following and socializing with us. Other industry professionals are checking us out and even some record companies have expressed interest in our project. We don't have sponsors yet, but we haven't released our first track either. Everyone is waiting to see what the results of our experiment will be.



How have we gained the attention of all these people in the classical world? Social Media. But it's not only our own tweets, facebook and tumblr posts that are causing all the stir. The real momentum behind the project is our enthusiastic musicians. This blog, for example, posts an article about TwtrSymphony and the musicians mobilize. A TwtrSymphony article has three to four times as many hits in a single day as pretty much any other article I post. Interchanging Idioms posts news about a lot of different classical music stars, but it is TwtrSymphony articles that get the most attention. Our Facebook or Tumblr page don't have thousands of followers yet, but we have more people checking our pages on a daily basis than we have musicians, so it isn't just our musicians who are making all the hits. The news is getting out to a host of other people. With less than 100 fans on Facebook, we typically have a reach of 3-5k people. Just imagine when we have 5,000 or 10,000 fans, how far our reach might be?



A look at these statistics made me wonder --are orchestra musicians normally this enthusiastic, or did we just get lucky? A number of professional and semi-professional orchestras on Twitter and Facebook have a far bigger following. Although it is not uncommon to have musicians comment on their own orchestra's facebook page, I rarely see musicians tweeting about their upcoming performances. Most major orchestras perform two to three different shows a month. Each orchestra has 70-100 musicians for these performances. If only 10% were talking about upcoming shows, that would still be a LOT of chatter. The best part about this kind of chatter is it's honest enthusiasm for the artform.



Still thinking that maybe TwtrSymphony musicians are unique in regards to social media I ran a small survey --The Power of Musicians. In two days I had almost double the number of responses I expected. Beyond that, the responses were glaringly lopsided: musicians clearly want to promote their performances. The "advertising" of the survey was done on social media alone, so already I'm talking to a select group of musicians, but of those that replied +80% are semi-professional musicians or better, 98% of them have a facebook account, over 90% would use their personal pages to promote not only groups they are performing with, but even promote these groups when they aren't performing. Many more musicians replied to this survey than just TwtrSymphony musicians, so I think it's safe to say these statistics aren't the anomaly, but rather the norm.



The key is inclusion. The musicians are not employees of TwtrSymphony; they are TwtrSymphony. Any success we achieve is a direct result of the hard work and enthusiasm of the musicians. With no real product to sell, we are creating a buzz in the industry. When our music does become available, this 'buzz' will only serve to further promote who and what we are: Musicians promoting their Music.





In the final analysis it seems that ownership is key to enthusiasm. When musicians feel invested in an organization's success they are enthusiastic about getting the word out.





reBlogged from: Interchanging Idioms

on May 18, 2012 at 11:00 PM

Around The Classical Internet: May 18, 2012












Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and pianist Gerald Moore in an undated recital rehearsal.

Erich Auerbach/Getty Images

Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and pianist Gerald Moore in an undated recital rehearsal.






  • This week has ended on a very sad note with the passing of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who died earlier today in Bavaria at age 86.
  • Anne Midgette has a remembrance of her friend and co-writer Herbert Breslin, who managed Luciano Pavarotti's career for more than 35 years and who died yesterday in Nice. He was "a man who routinely screamed expletives into the telephone before slamming it down, cut various financial corners, and made gleeful use of his star client's fame to manipulate journalists and other artists ... But there was a lot more to Herbert's story than that."
  • And yesterday, the French pianist France Clidat died at age 79. She won the Liszt Prize in Budapest in 1956. (link in French)
  • Der Spiegel has the story behind Dietmar Machold, the "Stradivarius man" going on trial this summer in Vienna for embezzlement, bankruptcy fraud and grand commercial fraud, with criminal complaints also coming from the U.S., Australia, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. Prosecutors' efforts "have pieced together a picture of a businessman who was probably cash-strapped for years and sold violins he had taken in commission for millions — often failing to pass on the proceeds to the instruments' owners or to banks, allegedly using the money to pay off other debts instead."
  • Remember that planned partnership between Kid Rock and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra? Well, it happened: "There was a lot of entertainment, energy and even a few moments of enlightenment."
  • The Sacramento Philharmonic has raised enough cash to sustain itself through at least one more season.
  • Speaking of cash, the Wall Street Journal has a look at the New York City Opera's current financial standing: "City Opera scheduled only four performances of Orpheus, which seriously limits its income-producing potential. Indeed, this season, only 8% of the company's $15.3 million budget was met through ticket sales. ... By contrast, the Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, N.Y., has less than half City Opera's budget, does 40-plus performances of four operas in a 900-seat theater, and last year earned about 34% of its budget in ticket income (42% in earned income when you add in rentals, T-shirts, and the like)."
  • After the first year of partnering with Carnegie Hall in the "Achievement Program" teaching standards program, the Toronto Conservatory has doubled its enrollment. (Famous alums: Glenn Gould, Jon Vickers, Diana Krall.)
  • Have you heard about the hot young Venezuelan conductor who's come out of El Sistema? No, it's not Dudamel (for once) — it's 32-year-old Rafael Payare, who has just won the very prestigious Malko Competition for Young Conductors in Copenhagen.
  • I don't speak Mandarin, but this fight between the (Russian) Oleg Vedernikov, the principal cellist of the Beijing Symphony Orchestra, and a random female passenger on a Shenyang-Beijing train is kind of bananas. Vedernikov has apologized, but in the meantime he's been suspended from the symphony and is awaiting further disciplinary action from his employer.
  • Here's a completely subjective list of the 10 most musical American presidents. (Me, I would have picked Thomas Jefferson over Warren Harding.) Interesting tidbits gleaned: Jefferson practiced three hours a day! Chester Arthur played the banjo!
  • And the snarky and yet widely beloved (actually, probably in part widely beloved due to the snark) blog "Proper Discord" blog is back at long last. The not-so anonymous author has revealed himself to be Andy Doe, the former classical buyer for iTunes and until recently the COO of Naxos.
  • Van-tiques Road Show Results. Last week we mentioned that more than 150 items belonging to piano icon Van Cliburn were up for grabs May 17 at Christie's auction house. The event was a success, bringing in $4.3 million. The top lot of the sale was a pair of George II Giltwood Mirrors, attributed to Matthias Lock, dating from around 1570. The final price was $464,500.




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"fullattribution">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.



reBlogged from: NPR Blogs: Deceptive Cadence

on May 18, 2012 at 11:00 PM

Fischer-Dieskau and the War Requiem


Britten to Fischer-Dieskau, 1961: "Please forgive me writing to such a busy man as yourself — you can be sure that if I did not feel very strongly I should not be troubling you! ... I am writing what I think will be one of my most important works. It is a full-scale Requiem Mass for chorus and orchestra ... Peter Pears has agreed to sing the tenor part, and with great temerity I am asking you whether you would sing the baritone. You may not, I fear, be free (the dates of the two performances are May 30th and June 1st, with rehearsals the few previous days), and above all you may not feel inclined to do this, but I am earnestly hoping you may be free and willing... handwritten Please forgive me troubling you."


Britten to Fischer-Dieskau, 1962: "I am made happy when I think of our working together, & our meeting with you and your dear wife, in Coventry. It was one of the great artistic experiences of my life ... I cannot say how touched I was by the great trouble you took over the War Requiem, & by your complete understanding of what I was trying to say in this work."


Fischer-Dieskau in his memoirs: "The first performance created an atmosphere of such intensity that by the end I was completely undone; I did not know where to hide my face. Dead friends and past suffering arose in my mind."


reBlogged from:
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

on May 18, 2012 at 09:00 PM

John Tejada Interview: Asking a Techno Ambassador the Big Questions


Photos courtesy John Tejada.

From his home in LA to the global scene, John Tejada is a planet-navigating techno ambassador and one of our favorite electronic musicians. He’s one of a handful of artists successful today who has managed to cross eras, whose experience isn’t just of this moment but who has touched the evolution of that scene. We turn to guest writer Alex Brandmeyer, who interviews Mr. Tejada about his own work as well as where the music scene is headed. What I like about Alex’s interview is that he asks some really fundamental questions about the evolution of the international audience for this music and tools – and Mr. Tejada is just the sort of person whose answers are worth reading. -PK


John Tejada’s music has been raising the bar for more than fifteen years. Alongside an intense schedule of performances all across the world, he’s managed a steady stream of high-quality releases on dozens of labels, including his own baby (now fully-grown), Palette Recordings. Add to this some high-profile DJ mixes for outlets like Fabric, along with strong support for his music from top international DJs, and what you’ve got is one of the highest-calibre electronic artists around. Despite this success, he remains a very friendly, down-to-earth guy who’s instantly approachable, and whose love and enthusiasm for electronic music and performance immediately comes across. I caught up with him following one of his recent live shows at Studio 80 in Amsterdam.


One thing that interests me most about dance music, and about house and techno music in particular, is the fact that its appeal traverses national and geographic boundaries. What do you think the common thread is? Psychology? Biology? Culture? And what is it about four-on-the-floor electronic beats and sounds between 120-130 BPM that allows dance music to tap into these things?


I feel these days it has become such a global movement, with everyone around the world linked together through social media and other sources on the net. My experience in the early 90s, however, was much different. These avenues didn’t exist yet, and you had to grab magazines to find out about what was going on abroad and order new releases with your local shop. These days it is so instant. Most of my friends and I still can’t wrap our heads around it. Back then, it was such a treat to find the thing you were looking for or hear an artist you loved live, because you couldn’t just do an MP3 search and have it instantly or watch clips on YouTube from last night’s concert half way around the world. I see all these new developments as mostly a positive.


The sound seems to spread to all cultures at this point. Everyone likes to dance all over the world and many want that moment of hearing a new sound for the first time and wondering what it is. For these reasons, I don’t think it is all that unique that the music is loved the world over now. Many genres of music exist worldwide because people love music and keep all these scenes going.


Of course there are differences, too. As someone coming from California with strong connections to Europe, how do you feel about moving between these places, between the different audiences and cities? Does it matter in the sense that it pulls music and music communities in different directions over time? Or does the music itself make this type of question less important?


I still have a tie to Vienna with my father still being there, and being able to travel to Europe on a regular basis, so I feel connected to both places. I feel when it comes to audiences being different, it’s usually a case of a venue or the people you meet that can have a big impact on your opinion of that place. You may have a good or bad experience in a certain city and your whole experience might rely just on that one club night, when down the street at another club could have been potentially a completely different good or bad experience. It took me repeat visits to cities to realize this and to try not to make up my mind about a place just because of one night. I think the music will keep evolving, as it always does.


Every year, there are new pieces of gear, new bits of software, new labels, new clubs, and new ways of spreading music. Apart from the internet and social media culture you mentioned before, what have been the most important evolutions in your own music making over the years? Have there been specific ideas or techniques which really opened up new creative possibilities for you? 


I feel while technology comes along and makes many things easier and options pretty much limitless, it also turns the same solutions into problems. Music has become more of a “paint by numbers” type of process for many people, which has made lots of new music less interesting for myself. The difference between imposing limitations on one’s creative process and actually having limitations is a different thing. When we were all starting out, the creative process was different than it is now. We now basically have limitless options, which can keep you second-guessing your work. At the same time, sure, it’s great to have new tools working more the way they were intended, and the resurgence of analog has made quite an impact in my workflow and sound. Generally, computer programs have developed mostly in positive ways, making music creation a lot more straightforward.


Again on the subject of evolution… an interesting question is always where this is all headed. People predicted a lot of different outcomes of the digital revolution, but underground clubs, labels, and to some extent, vinyl, all still seem to be doing pretty well, hand-in-hand with the ‘new era’ of Beatport, laptop DJs ,and commercial dubstep. What are your feelings about where the underground dance music scene is headed? Do you have any hopes or fears for the music? Does history repeat itself?


Things do seem to go in circles. I think we’re at the beginning of the next phase in the way music is being distributed. I have a strong belief that physical media will in some form make a comeback, wether it will be records or something else. I just can’t imagine a future where one’s music and book collection are only digital. It sort of misses the point of having a collection. Part of the fun of collecting is finding these physical objects that are tangible. While watching the new Comic-Con documentary, I had this thought that no one values PDFs of classic comic books, or JPEGs of hard-to-find baseball cards. The real physical item has great importance. This is why we love to collect records. I think people will start to miss that the more it disappears. 



The past year I’ve been lucky enough to catch a couple of your live shows, and have enjoyed seeing you perform some of the tracks which I’ve come to love over the years. I’ve also really enjoyed listening to some of your DJ mixes. What for you is the difference between playing out as a DJ and playing using your live setup? Do you have a preference for one or the other? What are the challenges in each type of performance?


DJing can be stressful in the way that I’m looking to make a playlist with the goal of being an entertainer. Sometimes I don’t want to bother with that, and just concentrate on my own art and being creative that way. Playing live limits me to my own ideas which is a little easier for me, but can also be stressful, because if the set isn’t going down well I’ve got nowhere to go, really. I may have the ability to change my set list and arrangements live, but for the most part, it’s just me. At the moment, I’ve been enjoying the live sets quite a bit more. I’d love to bring more gear, but I’m usually shoved in a DJ booth, so for now, it’s a small synth and computer mixer set up.


I think distinguishing between a DJ as entertainer and a live performer as artist taps into something interesting about the way in which electronic music is performed and consumed these days. How important is your connection to the audience when you perform? Do you notice a difference in this connection when you perform live as compared to when you DJ?


When DJing, I have a stronger connection to the audience, because I’m choosing songs based on what I perceive to be their reactions. When playing live, I am really involved making sure I am doing all the right things and controlling the right parameters; I hardly have time to take a look around. That can also be a good thing, as I’m less influenced by people’s reactions. I’m limited to my own compositions, so my main goal is to perform those pieces that as best as I can.


Do you notice differences in the types of crowds that will come to see a live PA as opposed to those who come out for a DJ set? 


The crowds can be different, more in the US I think. In the States you’ll have more “concert” shows, and that’s where people are more open to what a live performer will do. If I’m just shoved into a DJ booth in Europe and asked to make it work somehow, and the crowd is just a party crowd, then there is no difference there. I find in those spaces a DJ set is more appropriate.


You’ve been involved with electronic music for quite a while now. Do you have any particular achievements or peak moments that really pop out from the rest?


I’ve had some really unique opportunities including doing some shows here in LA at the Disney Hall which were really special. Checking out most of the planet has been quite great as well.


Could you tell me a bit more about the shows you did at the Disney Hall? How different is performing in a proper concert hall from performing in a club?


I got to play there twice. Once opening for The Orb at an all night event, where I played a hardware set and covered a table full of synths. The other time was when I got to play my piece “The End Of It All” with a 100 piece male chorus. The piece was reinterpreted by myself as well as adding all the vocal harmonies.


What was it like performing with a choir?


It was quite an experience to be able to do that, especially in that space. 


Did the acoustics kick ass?


The acoustics are really tailored for acoustic performances. It was designed for the LA Philharmonic. While they have a really high-end PA, it is not really geared towards electronic shows. However, the space below the hall, The Red Cat Theater, hosts a big variety of very cool synth shows and avant garde programs. I’ve seen tons of shows at both recently. Definitely LA’s best venue.


Can you amuse us with any anecdotes about bizzare/amusing/plain weird things that have happened to you so far during your career as an electronic musician? No need to name any names.


There’s just so much and of course nothing comes to mind immediately. It’s usually disasters that end up being a little bit funny later on, but at the time they are not amusing, unless someone just says something completely ridiculous at dinner like the Italian promoter who was repeatedly asking Arian (Leviste) and I “don’t you think my wife is beautiful?” I remember in Tokyo, a good friend from Germany was playing and asked if I could start immediately. I said “sure,” and he went off to a corner of the stage and huddled on the ground in fetal position and just stayed there, apparently a bit food poisoned. He was soon OK.


For the coming years, what are the things that keep you motivated to make new music? Do you have any projects or ideas that you’re really excited about? Are you still looking for the perfect beat?


I’m always striving for something, tweaking my technique, my mixdowns, quality of sounds, stripping things away, the list goes on and on. I’ve just completed work on a new full length. Hopefully details on that will be announced soon.


http://www.paletterecordings.com/




reBlogged from: Create Digital Music

on May 18, 2012 at 08:00 PM

Remembering 'A Born God' Among Singers: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau












A portrait of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau taken circa 1965.

Erich Auerbach/Getty Images

A portrait of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau taken circa 1965.






Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau — often cited as one of the greatest and most influential singers of the 20th century — died near Starnberg, Germany this morning at age 86. His wife, soprano Julia Varady, announced his death from undisclosed causes.

Fischer-Dieskau's lyricism and sensitivity to the words he was singing made him unmatched among song interpreters. His repertoire was said to include more than 3,000 songs by composers including Schubert, Brahms, Schumann, Mahler and Wolf, and he made hundreds of recordings over the course of his 50-year career. When he made his American debut in 1955 (singing Schubert's Winterreise), the New York Times cheered, "The performance left no doubt that last night's listeners were in the presence of a singing artist." In Richard Wigmore's 2007 biography Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau: The Baritone of Our Age, soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf hailed her frequent colleague as "a born god who has it all."

Reached this morning by phone, critic and author Tim Page said, "What makes Fischer-Dieskau such a significant artist, especially when it comes to lieder, is just the way he throws himself completely into the music. You have the sense that he's examined it from every possible angle and he's chosen this way to go with it. The shading and the sensitivity with which he works with words, not only their meaning but the way he caresses their phonemes, is quite remarkable."

Fischer-Dieskau was also widely respected on the opera stage, with roles that ranged from the Count in Mozart's Nozze di Figaro to the title roles of Verdi's Rigoletto and Paul Hindemith's Cardillac. After his retirement from the stage in 1992, he continued to be a vigorous presence in master classes.

The baritone was born May 28, 1925 in Berlin. By his own figuring, he tried to start singing somewhere around age 2. His mother supported his fascination by taking him to concerts even when he was barely school-aged. By the time he was a teenager, he was already becoming a force to be reckoned with.

He first sang Winterreise in public at age 17, in 1943. He was singing at the town hall of Zehlendorf, a suburb of Berlin. The performance was interrupted by an RAF bombing. In an interview he gave to The Guardian upon turning 80, the singer recalled, "The whole audience of 200 people and myself had to go into the cellar for two-and-a-half hours. Then when the raid was over we came back up and resumed."

One of his most frequent collaborators, the pianist Gerald Moore, wrote in his memoirs: "He had only sung one phrase before I knew I was in the presence of a master." (At the time, Moore was 52 years old, while Fischer-Dieskau was just half the pianist's age.) As time went on, the admiration only increased for this musician's musician: Fischer-Dieskau partnered with such pianistic legends as Sviatoslav Richter, Vladimir Horowitz, Daniel Barenboim and Alfred Brendel.

The baritone's very first recording, of Brahms' Four Serious Songs, was made in 1949. Within two years, he was giving his first concert in London and made his first recording with Gerald Moore — the first of no less than three recorded traversals of Schubert's Die Schoene Muellerin with Moore, along with other recordings of the same cycle with Alfred Brendel and other pianists.

The Second World War defined a large part of the singer's youth. Conscripted into the German army, he was captured in Italy by the Americans in 1945 and spent almost two years as a POW; while there, he gave recitals of Schubert songs. Once the Nazis were defeated, Fischer-Dieskau returned to Berlin and began singing professionally.

In a gesture suffused with symbolism, it was Fischer-Dieskau whom English composer and conductor Benjamin Britten requested to sing in the premiere of Britten's War Requiem in 1962 at the shattered and then rebuilt Coventry Cathedral. Britten's choice of wording speaks volumes about Fischer-Dieskau's immense reputation among fellow artists: "With great temerity," Britten wrote in his letter, "I am asking you whether you would sing the baritone."





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"fullattribution">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.



reBlogged from: NPR Blogs: Deceptive Cadence

on May 18, 2012 at 07:00 PM

It's A Marvel-ous Wagner Production



reBlogged from: NPR Blogs: Deceptive Cadence

on May 18, 2012 at 07:00 PM

Beckett listens to Fischer-Dieskau

"A. Avigdor Arikha put on Hans Hotter singing Der Leiermann, S. preferred Fischer-Dieskau, 'at the end there's a real cry, he cries out.' We put on Fischer-Dieskau to compare. At the end, the cry, a shudder. S. looked at me,...

reBlogged from:
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

on May 18, 2012 at 06:00 PM

Bach: Cappriccio in E-Major BWV 993 (Richard Egarr, harpsichord)







Painting: detail from Chardin's "La rale."

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reBlogged from:
Uploads by p0lyph0nyXX

on May 18, 2012 at 06:00 PM

Manuel Zurria: loops4ever

Manuel Zurria


loops4ever


music for flute and electronics


Mazangran



  • Casaciescelsi – Giancinto Scelsi

  • Portrait – Pauline Oliveros

  • Almost New York – Alvin Lucier

  • Madonna and Child – Alvin Curran

  • The Carnival – John Duncan

  • The Garden of Love – Jacob TV

  • I Will Not Be Sad In This World – Eve Beglarian

  • Lipstick – Jacob TV

  • …Until… – Clarence Barlow

  • A Movement in Chrome Primitive – William Basinski

  • Last Judgement – Frederic Rzewski

  • Dorian Reeds – Terry Riley


There is nothing typical about this 2 disc set. I would submit that when most flutists are putting together a recording project of music for flute and electronics, they would tend to shy away from the majority of the works that Manuel Zurria has so expertly collected and performed. Not only that, Zurria ups the ante by leading off with his own Scelsi-hommage. Casadiscelsi is really a combination of Scelsi’s bass flute work Maknongan and flute work Pwyll with sounds that Zurria himself recorded from Sclesi’s house in Rome. It sets the stage for this whole first disc which is one of luminesce and slow-moving atmospheres. The virtuosity of performance is not one of a million notes per second but one of tone, mood, and environment. Zurria nails it every single time and loops4ever is consistently captivating. In Portrait by Oliveros, Zurria is almost invisible, with the voice taking center stage, yet he could not be removed. Few flutists are brave enough to feature a work like Lucier’s Almost New York for flute and three oscillators, giving up 25 minutes of precious CD space so they can play long tones, but Zurria anchors the first disc around this particular work to great affect. After the Scelsi and the Oliveros, the Lucier is exactly what we want to hear, played in precisely the way we want to hear it.


Curran’s Madonna and Child is a relief from the stasis which culminated in the Lucier but still the work floats in a somewhat restless and rocking manner. Zurria’s bass flute tone is sumptuous and once layered upon itself, the lullaby nature of the piece is exponentially amplified. I couldn’t believe my ears with the last work on the disc, The Carnival by John Duncan. A single sustained piccolo pitch (and not the most comfortable one, I should add) is held, Lucier-style, for 17 minutes. There are gradual spectral and timbral changes through the electronics but for the most part, it is a monolith of piercing brightness. Imagine a piccolo arrangement of Lucier’s Silver Streetcar. I don’t mean any of this is a bad way, although some folks will be quick to skip this track. The Carnival is an amazing listen, the perfect tonic/alarm clock to the slumber found in the Curran.


Disc two contains works that are more expected of a “flute and electronics” recording. Zurria has packed in more peppy and traditionally-technical works with the same quality of performance found in disc one. Jacob TV’s works are rhythmic and cool, quirky and spiky with the electronic component coming almost exclusively from voice editing while the flute zips out perky punctuations. I Will Not Be Sad in this World by Eve Begrarian is the perfect palate cleanser, silky smooth and tender with subdued sustained vocal manipulations.


Clarence Barlow’s work for piccolo and drone finds the middle ground between Lucier’s work and Berio’s oboe Sequenza. Barlow’s repetitive melodic fragment changes subtly enough to keep me engaged while the drone does what drones do. It was also refreshing to hear a drone in the middle of the flute’s line as opposed to underneath. Once again, Zurria highlights his programming prowess by contrasting the bright sounds of the Barlow with the murky and luxurious sounds of Basinski’s A Movement in Chrome Primitive for bass flute, temple bells, and delays. Rzewski’s Last Judgement uses the bass flute as well but in a more strained and tense register, focusing more on propulsive energy than letting the listener wallow in sound. Either way, Zurria sounds great. Dorian Reeds, originally for soprano sax, gets the final word on the second disc. The overall take on this track uses more reverb than I expected, leaving the different delayed lines a grayish wash instead of dense contrapuntal lines.


The notes for the disc consist mainly of the short interviews that Zurria did with each composer and they make for a compelling read. I find the music and the performances speak for themselves, though. This is a terrific disc full of great repertoire and expertly performed.


reBlogged from: CD Reviews

on May 18, 2012 at 06:00 PM

Remembering "A Born God" Among Singers: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau












A portrait of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau taken circa 1965.

Erich Auerbach/Getty Images

A portrait of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau taken circa 1965.






Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau — often cited as one of the greatest and most influential singers of the 20th century — died near Starnberg, Germany this morning at age 86. His wife, soprano Julia Varady, announced his death from undisclosed causes.

Fischer-Dieskau's lyricism and sensitivity to the words he was singing made him unmatched among song interpreters. His repertoire was said to include more than 3,000 songs by composers including Schubert, Brahms, Schumann, Mahler and Wolf, and he made hundreds of recordings over the course of his 50-year career. When he made his American debut in 1955 (singing Schubert's Winterreise), the New York Times cheered, "The performance left no doubt that last night's listeners were in the presence of a singing artist." In Richard Wigmore's 2007 biography Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau: The Baritone of Our Age, soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf hailed her frequent colleague as "a born god who has it all."

Reached this morning by phone, critic and author Tim Page said, "What makes Fischer-Dieskau such a significant artist, especially when it comes to lieder, is just the way he throws himself completely into the music. You have the sense that he's examined it from every possible angle and he's chosen this way to go with it. The shading and the sensitivity with which he works with words, not only their meaning but the way he caresses their phonemes, is quite remarkable."

Fischer-Dieskau was also widely respected on the opera stage, with roles that ranged from the Count in Mozart's Nozze di Figaro to the title roles of Verdi's Rigoletto and Paul Hindemith's Cardillac. After his retirement from the stage in 1992, he continued to be a vigorous presence in master classes.

The baritone was born May 28, 1925 in Berlin. By his own figuring, he tried to start singing somewhere around age 2. His mother supported his fascination by taking him to concerts even when he was barely school-aged. By the time he was a teenager, he was already becoming a force to be reckoned with.

He first sang Winterreise in public at age 17, in 1943. He was singing at the town hall of Zehlendorf, a suburb of Berlin. The performance was interrupted by an RAF bombing. In an interview he gave to The Guardian upon turning 80, the singer recalled, "The whole audience of 200 people and myself had to go into the cellar for two-and-a-half hours. Then when the raid was over we came back up and resumed."

One of his most frequent collaborators, the pianist Gerald Moore, wrote in his memoirs: "He had only sung one phrase before I knew I was in the presence of a master." (At the time, Moore was 52 years old, while Fischer-Dieskau was just half the pianist's age.) As time went on, the admiration only increased for this musician's musician: Fischer-Dieskau partnered with such pianistic legends as Sviatoslav Richter, Vladimir Horowitz, Daniel Barenboim and Alfred Brendel.

The baritone's very first recording, of Brahms' Four Serious Songs, was made in 1949. Within two years, he was giving his first concert in London and made his first recording with Gerald Moore — the first of no less than three recorded traversals of Schubert's Die Schoene Muellerin with Moore, along with other recordings of the same cycle with Alfred Brendel and other pianists.

The Second World War defined a large part of the singer's youth. Conscripted into the German army, he was captured in Italy by the Americans in 1945 and spent almost two years as a POW; while there, he gave recitals of Schubert songs. Once the Nazis were defeated, Fischer-Dieskau returned to Berlin and began singing professionally.

In a gesture suffused with symbolism, it was Fischer-Dieskau whom English composer and conductor Benjamin Britten requested to sing in the premiere of Britten's War Requiem in 1962 at the shattered and then rebuilt Coventry Cathedral. Britten's choice of wording speaks volumes about Fischer-Dieskau's immense reputation among fellow artists: "With great temerity," Britten wrote in his letter, "I am asking you whether you would sing the baritone."





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reBlogged from: NPR Blogs: Deceptive Cadence

on May 18, 2012 at 06:00 PM

Re Orso - Réptétion Générale du 16 mai 2012 à l'Opéra comique







Re Orso
Favola per musica

Commande Opéra-Comique,Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, Ircam-Centre Pompidou, Ensemble intercontemporain, Françoise et Jean-Philippe Billarant
Création

Marco STROPPA, musique

Livret d'après Arrigo Boito
Catherine Ailloud-Nicolas et Giordano Ferrari, adaptation du livret
Richard Brunel, mise en scène
Bruno de Lavenère, décors et costumes
Laurent Castaingt, lumières
Thierry Thieû Niang, collaborateur aux mouvements
Gilles Rico, assistant mise en scène

Rodrigo Ferreira, Re Orso
Monica Bacelli, Ver
Marisol Montalvo, Oliba, une courtisane
Alexander Kravets, le Trouvère, un courtisan
Geoffrey Carey, Papiol
Piera Formenti, Daniel Carraz, Cyril Anrep, courtisans

Ensemble intercontemporain
Susanna Mälkki, direction

Carlo Laurenzi, réalisation informatique musicale Ircam
Arshia Cont, conseiller scientifique Ircam

Production Opéra-Comique
Coproduction Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, Ircam-Centre pompidou, Ensemble intercontemporain

Représentations le 19, 21 et 22 mai 2012 à l'Opéra comique-Paris


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on May 18, 2012 at 06:00 PM

For Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau



A monumental, vastly influential figure is gone. I can't help feeling shock at the news — a world without Fischer-Dieskau seems foreign and unnerving. As it happens, I had been listening to his recordings constantly in recent days, as I worked on a column on Christian Gerhaher and Florian Boesch, two of his most distinguished younger successors. I will say more in The New Yorker a week from Monday.


reBlogged from: Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

on May 18, 2012 at 03:00 PM

Matthew Herbert’s One Pig, On Tour, and the Making of a Sty Harp


Composing the sounds of an animal’s life cycle and ultimate consumption into a musical portrait, Matthew Herbert’s “One Pig” is in turns grotesque and sentimental, rock and opera. I expected squeamishness and vegetarian conversions when I saw it on tour, but instead, the crowd eagerly devoured the creature at the end. (Make of that what you will.)


One Pig is in Manchester, UK tonight before continuing to Brighton and Portugal.


As my own incurable appetite is for musical instruments, for me a highlight of the show is Scotland-based, American artist Yann Seznec’s Sty Harp. (See also our coverage of his iPad music game development work.) Gut strings in historical instruments already make use of animal parts, so a stringed instruments seems appropriate. But by dissecting obsolete, forgotten technology – a bit of a theme in these parts lately – Yann is able to make an effective, expressive instrument.


Sadly, there’s not much video of the instrument in action, but seeing it is a highlight of the live show. Yann’s performance has its own theatricality, rocking out on these extended strings around the “pig pen” like a boxer swinging against the ropes of a ring. First, Yann shares some notes on the show itself:


The album is an elegy to a life lived for the benefit of humans and raises complex questions about our relationship to these often-maligned and misunderstood creatures.


The album is made entirely out of sounds from the pig and its surroundings – the first squeals, the sound of it being alone for the first time, and the dripping of its blood after being butchered. The result is a delicate, beautiful, and occasionally terrifying musical composition with a profundity rarely heard in electronic music.


The live show debuted at the Royal Opera House, London, in September 2011 and has since toured the world, performing at Berghain Berlin, STRP Eindhoven, Club Silencio Paris, Liquid Room Tokyo, Ancienne Belgique Brussels, and more. Future dates include headlining at Future Everything in Manchester, the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, Palais de Tokyo in Paris.


The show explores and questions the life, death, and consumption of the pig. A chef cooking onstage brings the sound and smell of cooking pig, and the performance features a brand new custom instrument – the “Sty Harp”, built and performed by Edinburgh-based artist Yann Seznec. This representation of the pig’s home is used to trigger and control elements of music, forming an integral part of the 5 piece band. The rest of the band is comprised of Sam Beste on keyboards, Tom Skinner on SPDS, Hugh Jones on samplers, and Matthew on various keyboards and samples and things.


Yann explains how the instrument itself is constructed:




Above: As “One Pig” dissects the life and being of a pig, here, we see inside the mechanical innards of the Sty Harp. Photos courtesy Yann Seznec.

In terms of the Sty Harp, the instrument is built using hacked Gametraks, which were a failed proto-motion controller from around 2003. They were sold only in the UK, and worked by using two joysticks with strings attached that you clipped onto your hands. These could then sense the distance and vague location of your hands …a few terrible games were released on PS2, Xbox, and PC for the Gametrak before they were pulled from the market.


In any case, I took apart a whole load of these (I probably have owned more gametraks than anyone in the world, ever) and used their innards for the string/joystick controllers, which are totally great! I built a whole system with Jon (from Lucky Frame) to hook up twelve of these controllers into my computer at once. I’m using an Arduino with a mux shield to handle the 36 analog inputs (x/y/string for 12 controllers) at once, converting them into MIDI and sending them over to Ableton.


In Ableton the controllers are doing a number of different things, slightly different for each song. In the Max patch I made I can send out 5 individual MIDI notes from each string, one for general movement above a threshold, and one each for a push, pull, up, or down movement. These movements are also sending out CC values, as is the pulling of the string. So each string controller is sending a whole pile of MIDI data at all times, and I pick and choose for each song which gestures to use. So in some cases I’m just triggering individual sounds using the strings, but in others I am using some strings to trigger clips, others to control effects on those clips, and still other effects to do master play/stop/effects/etc.


The climax of the Sty Harp happens about 2/3rds of the way through the show, when the whole band joins me in the sty for the symbolic butchering of the pig. For that song each band member controls different strings, building a huge sound wall.


You can read more about my building of the sty harp here: http://theamazingrolo.net/styharp/


We’re playing in Manchester on Friday the 18th, Brighton on Monday the 21st, then in Lisbon on June 29th and Porto on June 30th.


http://www.matthewherbert.com/

Matthew Herbert – One Pig: exclusive album stream The Guardian




reBlogged from: Create Digital Music

on May 18, 2012 at 02:00 PM

Erdem Helvacioğlu, Eleven Short Stories

Let’s play a word association game. If I say, “prepared piano,” many of you might think “John Cage.” Yes, John Cage was a pioneer for prepared piano, and yes, Sonatas and Interludes becomes an almost inevitable comparison when discussing any prepared piano composition, but I only mention Cage because I don’t want you to think about him. (I realize, of course, that’s like saying, “Don’t think of a honey badger.”)


The problem with comparing Eleven Short Stories to Cage is that while the basic instrument is the same(ish), the end results are anything but. If you listen to this album with Cage as your expectation, you will be confused at best and incorrectly disappointed at worst. Cage’s prepared piano is exotic, percussive, and somewhat esoteric. It is high art in the best sense. Erdem Helvacioğlu’s prepared piano is electronic, quasi-minimalistic, and highly accessible. This is more a pop album, also in the best sense.


Erdem Helvacioglu

Erdem Helvacıoğlu


Eleven Short Stories is inspired by the works of film directors Kim Ki-Duk, David Lynch, Krzysztof Kieslowsi, Theodoros Angelopoulos, Jane Campion, Anthony Minghella, Ang Lee, Atom Egoyan, Darren Aronofsky, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Steven Soderbergh. As to which director is paired with each piece, that is deliberately left unstated. Each is given a title suggesting a scene, such as “Jittery Chase” and “Shrine in Ruins,” and since each track is more about its title than anything else, Helvacioğlu seems wise to avoid any specific associations.


As a whole, it is abundantly clear that Helvacıoğlu has a remarkable ear, and he makes it easy to forget that all these sounds are generated from a piano. Every sound, every nuance serves the music, and nothing ever feels forced or hollow; his background in electroacoustic music most likely contributed to these highly successful preparations. The means of recording are also an important part of this album. Helvacioğlu used five microphones, two extremely close to the strings with the other three serving to capture broader perspectives. He also isn’t afraid to use multi-track recording to get all the sounds he needs, which brings me back to this being a pop album.


The influence of popular music is evident in several tracks, even to the extent that there seems to be a backbeat and claps on occasion.1 More than that, though, is that this CD feels like a pop album. Most ‘classical’ CDs are about taking music that was originally meant to be heard live and attempting to archive it. They are recordings, if you will. In this case, the music seems to be written for the CD, and would be rather difficult to reproduce live—each piece has a unique preparation and the multi-track recording would require that some sounds be played over speakers in a live setting. The tracks are also relatively short (4:21 on average), adding to the pop feel. This isn’t a recording. It’s an album, and a very good album, at that.2


eleven short storiesHelvacioğlu does a wonderful job evoking each of these eleven scenes. Two standouts for me were Blood Drops by the Pool and Six Clocks in a Dim Room. The former is decidedly the most experimental on the CD, but also one of the most evocative. The scraping sounds would be perfectly at home in any thriller, and the gradual accretion of the “blood drops,” which crescendo into chaos in the middle of the track is just fantastic. Were I alone in a dark alley in a strange city, this is not the music I’d want to hear. Safe at home, I love it. Six Clocks on the other hand has an entirely different feel. There is a driving beat that fades in and out, which might be heard as either rhythm guitar or bass, and a simple melody produced by plucked strings hangs over this foundation as other ambient sounds fill out the track.


There is a fair amount of variety across the CD, both in sounds and styles, and I imagine that nearly everyone will have their own favorite tracks. Still, there remains a cohesiveness to this album that works extremely well, thanks in large part to the single underlying source of sound production. I was not familiar with Erdem Helvacioğlu before this CD, but I am now anxious to hear what else his discography has to offer. Eleven Short Stories is an excellent CD, and I would highly recommend it.


Just don’t think about Cage.




Erdem Helvacioğlu. Eleven Short Stories (Innova Recordings, #245) March 2012 – Buy it on Amazon


1Every time I hear claps in a song, I inevitably think of this. I just couldn’t think of any possible way to mention this in the review without, well, utterly confusing most people who clicked the link while simultaneously tarnishing my reputation as an academic. Enjoy.


2There are two CDs that spring immediately two my mind that share the same album “feel,” both of which are on heavy rotation at home: Leah Kardos’ Feather Hammer, and Jean-Philippe Goude’s Aux Solitudes. I would highly recommend both.




reBlogged from: I care if you listen(.com)

on May 18, 2012 at 12:00 PM

150 Years Of 'Taps'
















Audio for this story from Morning Edition will be available at approx. 9:00 a.m. ET





May 18, 2012



 



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A lone bugler stands at attention in the rain at Wilmington National Cemetery in North Carolina, in 2009.

Logan Mock-Bunting/Getty Images

A lone bugler stands at attention in the rain at Wilmington National Cemetery in North Carolina, in 2009.






rday, 200 buglers will assemble at Arlington National Cemetery to begin playing "Taps," a call written 150 years ago this year.

Retired Air Force Master Sgt. Jari Villanueva, a bugle player, says he started out as a Boy Scout bugler at about age 12. He went on to study trumpet at the Peabody Conservatory before being accepted into the United States Air Force Band — where one of his duties over the next 23 years was to sound that call at Arlington National Cemetery.

Villanueva says "Taps" has taken him on a wonderful journey. "During the Civil War," he says, "in late June and July of 1862, the Union Army is camped all along the James River, and especially at a place called Harrison's Landing. Within that big army is a brigade commanded by Gen. Daniel Butterfield. Butterfield doesn't like the regulation call for 'lights out' — that call, like most calls in the Army manual at that time, was derived from the French.

"So Butterfield calls his brigade bugler," continues Villanueva, "a 22-year-old private by the name of Oliver Wilcox Norton. Butterfield gives him music to a new call, and asks him to play it that night. The next morning, Norton is approached by different buglers from other brigades who asked, 'What was that you played last night?' He then furnishes copies of the music to the other buglers, and pretty soon everyone is now sounding this new call" — the 24 notes of "Taps."




 

It might seem amazing that parts of the Confederate army also picked up "Taps." However, Villanueva points out, "both armies shared the same manuals, so bugle calls on both sides were the same. The Confederates were close enough to the Union camps that they probably heard 'Taps' being sounded, and pretty soon they were using it."

In today's military, "Taps" is used in two ways: the first, as the regulation call for extinguished lights at the end of the day; the second and certainly more important is its use at military funerals, wreath-laying ceremonies and memorial services. At Arlington National Cemetery, "Taps" is heard about 30 times every day.

Playing "Taps," Villanueva says, is "an awesome responsibility. It is the one piece of music that the people coming to Arlington would hear and that they would go away with. I was striving to make it as perfect as possible."

When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the Army Band's principal bugler, Keith Clark, knew that he might be called soon to perform this duty. "When he heard the news," Villanueva says, "the first thing he thought of was to go get a haircut, because he thought he might be the bugler called to sound 'Taps.' He got the call, went into his spot and stood for about three hours in the cold, waiting for the procession to arrive."

Finally, without much of a chance to warm up, Clark sounded the call — and cracked on the sixth note. "People would talk about that, about how he perhaps had missed it on purpose as a tribute — the nation sobbing for their lost president," Villanueva says, "and Clark remarked that for weeks afterward in the Arlington cemetery, buglers kept missing the same note. It must have been a psychological thing."



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Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.


reBlogged from: NPR Blogs: Deceptive Cadence

on May 18, 2012 at 10:00 AM

Notation: Augmented and Interactive

Since I spend a good part of my life notating music and I often use computers to do it, I pay some attention to developments in the computer notation world. It's a very good thing that the tools available for notation are far from limited to Sins and Fibs. (BTW: If you happen to teach music theory in an institution which presently requires the purchase of Finale or Sibelius*, why not do your cash-strapped and loan-burdened students a favor and encourage them to use an open source program like Musescore? It's free and open source, can do everything that would be required in a university-level theory sequence or orchestration class, and it's constantly getting better.)

The latest item to come across my desktop is INScore, an augmented and interactive program. "Augmented" means it allows all sorts of objects — among them score notation, graphics, text, signals or triggers or sensors of various sorts — to share space (and music-notational space-time) on page or screen and "interactive" means that it can be used in real time to generate and respond to objects and events and scores can even be designed in real time.  The utility of a program like this — for live animated scores for players, triggering electronics, re-arrangeable in realtime — is obvious.  It looks to me to be in an early but very much usable stage of development and is multi-platform and open source.  If anyone reading this gives INScore a spin, please let me know what you think of it.
_____
* AFAIC the one thing worse than a music school or department requiring student to purchase a particular notation program — however good they may be (I use Finale and Sibelius myself, with a half dozen other notation programs as well) and however convenient it may be for classroom management — is giving credit courses for learning to operate one of these programs. 



reBlogged from: Renewable Music

on May 18, 2012 at 12:00 AM

Peter Mennin / Richard Yardumian-Split Release (1971)

Today is the birthday of Peter Mennin, who died 29 years ago- in 1983, at 60 years of age.Notes excerpted from the back cover (enclosed):Born in Erie Pennsylvania, May 17, 1923, Mennin attended the Oberlin Conservatory briefly before serving in the Air Force, later resuming his studies at Eastman School of Music. In 1947 he joined the composition department at the

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A Closet of Curiosities

on May 18, 2012 at 12:00 AM

Visual Music: My God, It’s Full of Dots – Yayoi Kusama Meets Musical Design


Tenori-On and iPad apps, hardware designs and visual creations: set against the beautifully-generative mind of Japanese/New York artist Yayoi Kusama, the flurries of dots and circles and patterns in musical interfaces take on a richer meaning. This video, from a workshop hosted at the Tate Modern alongside an exhibition of Kusama’s work, needs little introduction. Instead, the dizzying cuts of geometric abstraction, the array of visual ideas for musical interface begin to take on the same personality of her expansive creations. The galaxies produced out of the minds of musicians somehow overlap with this iconic artist. I hadn’t really made the connection before, even as a fan of her work, but with this workshop, the sympathetic vibrations – intentional or not – become clear. Description:


Sonic Kusama:

Workshop exploring connections between the work of Yayoi Kusama and creation and representation of new music & sound art through visual audio interfaces.

Presented by Simon Little and Kelvin Brown with Chase Lane.

Audio track by Capstone Music

Video production by Territory Studio


If you’re in London, Infinite Kusama is on view now at the Tate Modern.




reBlogged from: Create Digital Music

on May 18, 2012 at 12:00 AM

May 17, 2012

Bruckner al fresco


That is the view of the Pic du Canigou, the Catalan holy mountain, seen this morning from where we are staying at Le Racou in Languedoc. At the foot of Canigou is Prades where Pablo Casals lived in exile from the Spanish fascists, and in previous years I have followed the path of the refugees who fled from Spain only to be interned in French concentration camps in the last months of the Spanish Civil War. But such is humanity's propensity to do evil to its fellows that just a few years later the flow of refugees was reversed as Jews and other 'undesirables' fled from the fascist powers in Germany and Vichy France into Spain. Their number included Alma Mahler and her third husband the Jewish Austrian-Bohemian author Franz Werfel. Rendered stateless by the Nazis and without exit visas, Werfel and his wife were forced to cross the French/Spanish border by climbing high into the Aspres range, which is an extension of the Pyrénées, to avoid French gardes mobiles who were stooges of the Gestapo. Among the Werfel's baggage were Mahler manuscripts and the autograph score of Bruckner's Third Symphony, which Alma had kept out of the hands of another passionate Brucknerian, Adolf Hitler. This year our travels have been informed by that little-known east to west flow of refugees which was facilitated by the enigmatic American journalist Varian Fry and included a number of prominent intellectuals. The photo below was taken by my wife as we literally followed the path of the Werfels and the Bruckner manuscript over the mountains to safety in Spain. More to follow on this story, meanwhile there is a lighter take on Alma Mahler here.

Also on Facebook and Twitter. Photos are (c) On An Overgrown Path 2012. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk



reBlogged from: On An Overgrown Path

on May 17, 2012 at 09:00 PM

Can You Beat Out The 'Rite' Rhythm?












"creditwrap">London Symphony Orchestra/YouTube





Over the past few weeks, supporters of the London Symphony Orchestra (and a mysterious gent in the back of a car) have been busy teaching Londoners one of the trickiest and most compelling rhythms in all music: the famously jerky 32 beats in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring that usher in the wild "Augurs of Spring."

Once this syncopation is in your head and body, it's there for good — particularly if you go in without expectations of where the beats "should" fall. (And as for unraveling Stravinsky's incredible tonalities in this section, that's another matter.)

In any case, don't worry if you don't get it on the first go-around. You've got a whole year until the 100th anniversary of the Rite's premiere.



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Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.


reBlogged from: NPR Blogs: Deceptive Cadence

on May 17, 2012 at 09:00 PM

Talking up, not down: London Sinfonietta’s new Blue Touch Paper series

I was lucky to have been invited last night to attend a preview of the London Sinfonietta’s three latest projects in their Blue Touch Paper scheme. The main part of the evening involved work-in-progress previews of around 20 minutes for each … Continue reading

reBlogged from: The Rambler

on May 17, 2012 at 05:00 PM

The Sinking of the Titanic: Gavin Bryars Ensemble @ Barbican

Just over one hundred years since the sinking of the Titanic. The tragedy was immortalized with emotional intensity and delicate musical sensitivity in The Sinking of the Titanic, written by British composer Gavin Bryars, and performed by him and his Ensemble at the Barbican on April 15. Bryars is recognised as a diverse musician and composer, his roots as a jazz bassist never far from the surface of this Titanic work. The Sinking of the Titanic (1969) was originally released on Brian Eno’s Obscure label in 1975 and is the composer’s first major work. Along with Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet (1971), this work sold over a quarter of a million copies when re-released in more recent performances. The Gavin Bryars Ensemble was founded in 1981 and continues to perform across the world.


Gaving Bryars and his ensemble performing "The Sinking of the Titanic" at Barbican Centre - Photo http://www.gavinbryars.com

Gaving Bryars and his ensemble performing "The Sinking of the Titanic" at Barbican Centre - Photo http://www.gavinbryars.com


According to some reports of the tragedy, the ship’s string ensemble kept on playing the hymn tune Autumn as the ship sank on April 14, 1912. This was the inspiration for the piece and, as a result, a string quartet forms the core of the ensemble. Fragments of the hymn tune can be heard throughout this work which lasts just over an hour. Philip Jeck’s turntabling added an additional layer of sonic material to the live music, creating sounds that never gratuitously attempted to recreate the sounds of the Titanic yet always suggesting an air of nostalgia. Two large mirrored screens played visuals prepared by Bill Morrison and Laurie Olinder (the images showed footage of the Titanic.) The music was never overstated, and the looped hymn tune became something of a meditation on the disaster rather than an attempt to recreate the experience through the visuals and music, which were always in synergy.


Gaving Bryars and his ensemble performing "The Sinking of the Titanic" at Barbican Centre - Photo http://www.gavinbryars.com

Gaving Bryars and his ensemble performing "The Sinking of the Titanic" at Barbican Centre - Photo http://www.gavinbryars.com


The slow opening accompanying footage of the Titanic about to embark on its journey was coloured by Jeck’s turntabling, rich in crackling sounds that were further coloured by percussion that sought to capture the creaking of the ship commencing its journey. The first time we heard the hymn tune performed by the quartet, we were confronted by the faces of the passengers: a poignant moment. The music always had the hymn tune at its core yet the material that encased it flowed like water, Jeck’s material adding something rather real to the experience: voices and sounds reminiscent of what one would imagine could be heard on the ship. Even with the ebb and flow of the material it remained something quite static, not in a disconcerting way, but rather in a moving meditative way. The silent close to this work was nothing but fitting. This was something beyond a concert but it represented a powerful and moving tribute to the disaster.







Steven Berryman is a composer and teacher working and living in London. Follow him on Twitter: @Steven_Berryman




reBlogged from: I care if you listen(.com)

on May 17, 2012 at 05:00 PM

Music as World Building (1)

In adding Les Troyens to my landmarks list, I forgot to note one other attraction of the opera, which is Berlioz's musical world building.  World building is usually thought-of as an element of fiction — fantasy and science fiction in particular, whether in literature, films, tv, or games — , through which just enough structure and details are presented as to make vivid the suggestion that the location of the fiction is within a larger and plausible (at least within the terms of its own logic) world 

Les Troyens is set in Troy and Carthage and is peopled by Trojans in the first two acts (Greeks are only a background presence) and refugee Trojans and Carthaginians populate acts three through five. The historical status of Troy is, well, complicated, but the myth is vivid, in both Homer and Vergil while the historical Carthage (near modern Tunis)  is much more established, but it is also the myth here, of a thriving city established in only seven years by exiles from Phoenician Tyre, that is at work.  A substantial part of Berlioz's project in Les Troyens was to project the two city-states through distinctive music and while we are now perfectly clear that his was not a reconstructive project and he was composing for western orchestra within a range the limits of which we now readily recognize (compare the range of instruments and scales/tunings Lou Harrison used to contrast Rome with Bythinia in
the original version of Young Caesar),  the composer audibly pushed those limits to suggest these two states as contrasting cultures, if only in the anthems and marches he devised, with the Trojans in particular marked by major-minor contrast, unconventional functional harmony and by reminiscences of French Revolutionary music, repertoire that presumably continued to carry a marker for otherness.

There is some prehistory to this in that the ancient and exotic was a frequent and early theme in opera, but it took some time before the ancient and/or exotic actually was distinguished musically. Rameau's Les Indes galantes, presented four tableau representing non-European cultures, but these were supposed to be contemporary, fictional stories within real worlds, and the music was not strongly distinguished (if at all) from Rameau's usual style.  The tradition of imitating Ottoman military music is more familiar, particularly in Viennese classicism, and even when a composer's contact with actual Janissary music was relatively close (think of the Austro-Turkish War of 1787) this is again in the context of fictions told about real cultures.  Haydn's Il mondo della luna arguably attempts some fictional world (well, okay, satellite) building in the form of the faked moon landing, which is distinguished largely by reserving the key of Eb for the pseudo-lunar scenes.

A useful case for the potential advantages of world building as a compositional project may be found by considering Roger Session's opera Montezuma as a counter-example. Sessions made no attempt to synthesize distinctive musical styles for the two clashing cultures portrayed and I suspect that this lack of characterization contributed to the opera's failure.



reBlogged from: Renewable Music

on May 17, 2012 at 03:00 PM

Marketing Plan Tactics For Independent Musicians - Part 1 of 3: New Album Preparations



Chris Hacker here, I create Marketing Plans for artists at Cyber PR® and really enjoy working with my many clients. I’ve noticed a huge problem though. Artists call the Cyber PR® offices all the time looking for us to promote their new album, totally fine of course, but the problem lies in that many of these artists call us when their albums are coming out the next week!! It completely baffles me that an artist or band will work so hard on an album, spending hours and hours writing songs and practicing these songs and then spending large sums of money recording, mixing and mastering, to only rush the release with no plan in place! Not planning enough lead time for a press campaign isn’t the only issue, but many people we talk to try to release their album when some of the basic music promotion elements aren’t even in place, for example a website where you can sell the music!



In a three part series I will discuss some basic components of a marketing plan to help properly market you and a new release. This first blog post in the series can eloquently be called the “getting your sh*t together” phase. Here I’ve laid out 5 areas that need to be addressed before any official announcements should be made about a new album coming out.



1. Digital Distribution



Figure out how you’re going to digitally distribute the album, and a physical CD only release or selling the CD and mp3’s strictly on your website is not the way to go. You need to make your music available everywhere digital music can be streamed and bought, such as on iTunes and Spotify, and the best way to do that is work with a digital distribution company like CD Baby or Tunecore. With that said, I talk to people all the time who then take this one step too far and sign up with multiple distribution companies because they think they are covering all their bases this way. Which they are not. All that does is put multiple copies of the same album on iTunes and the like, which looks silly and can cause unnecessary confusion. And if you plan on working with a PR company to promote the release don’t set the release date until AFTER you have talked with them first.



2. Online presence



Make sure your online presence is complete, effective and contains all the necessary promotional tools. There are lots of places online that artists can have a presence, here I talk about three of the most important sites: Official Website, Facebook and YouTube.



Official Website - Your website should have a place where people can easily listen to and buy your music (but not a player that plays automatically when a person enters the site, can’t stress that enough), a homepage that has a news section where people can read the latest happenings with your career, and a newsletter sign up form, one that offers an incentive for signing up such as free music or discounts on merch. Plus it always surprises when I go to an artist website and can’t find any contact information or links to their social media networks.



Facebook - Just as important as your website is your Facebook Fan Page. On the new timeline there are three tabs that are on display; one tab should be a band profile that at a minimum contains a music player, tour dates and press quotes. Next is a newsletter sign up form, and again, this should offer an incentive for signing up. And the last visible tab should be a Store.



YouTube - Another important piece of your online presence is YouTube. I’m always curious how people listen and discover new music and time and time again the response I hear back is YouTube. It’s critical to have videos up on YouTube for every song of the new release by the release date or soon after. Not saying these have to be well produced music videos, but just the songs themselves. To do this some artists just put up an image of their cover and leave it at that, but people are much more inclined to listen to your music if there are scrolling lyrics they can read as they listen or if there is a slideshow to watch. Taking free archival footage and editing together to make a music video is another relatively easy and inexpensive way to create a video for your songs, and can be a lot of fun too.



3. Newsletter



This is real simple. Have one. And contact your mailing list once a month with news. Don’t cut corners on this either, a newsletter is where you’ll see the greatest impact on sales. All the tweets and facebook posts about a new album out for sale won’t equal the results of a well crafted newsletter, so spend money on a mailing list service provider that can help you design a rich looking email and provide analytics and tracking capabilities so you can measure the effectiveness of your newsletters and make adjustments where need be.



4. Touring



Ideally you’ll have a tour booked immediately following the release, which greatly helps a PR campaign. A local blog or local newspaper will be much more inclined to cover a new album for an artist if a show is booked in town. And not saying this has to be a month long tour, just a few regional dates will help with your press efforts. Now timing can be tricky here, just like setting a release date too soon, you don’t want to book a tour and then not have the album ready or press plan in place. So wait until you have a better idea of what that will look like and then start booking a tour, and if the tour doesn’t happen until a month or so after the release that is quite alright.



5. Merchandise



Pretty much everything in regards to your music career takes longer than expected, from making the album to creating the artwork to booking shows, and this definitely applies to any merchandise you want to have available to sell with the new album. And merch isn’t limited to T-Shirts and tote bags, handmade items can make for great unique offerings. Here’s a tip, at your merch booth bundle your music with these items cheaply and easily through download stickers from MerchMusic.com, where 120 codes will cost you just $10. Even though people aren’t buying CDs much anymore, they are still interested in supporting artists they love so give them lots of different ways to support you and purchase your music instead of just having a CD and leaving it at that.



So remember, plan early so you can have these items when you’re ready to release a new album, which I will be getting in to in more detail in the next blog post where I will discuss some basic principles for an effective pre-sale and album launch.



To find out more about the marketing plans I create for artists please visit our page here.


reBlogged from: Music Think Tank (primary) RSS

on May 17, 2012 at 12:00 PM

Spektral Quartet’s Theatre of War (preview)


May 23-24, 2012: Spektral Quartet and High Concept Laboratories Present Theatre of War


by Arlene and Larry Dunn


On Wednesday, May 23 in Chicago, the Spektral Quartet and High Concept Laboratories will present Theatre of War, an artistic investigation into the disconnects between the experiences of those most directly affected by our wars and the experience of the public at large. The event comes at a salient moment, immediately following the NATO summit meeting in Chicago. Theatre of War will be held at the Chopin Theatre and will be repeated on Thursday, May 24. All ticket proceeds are being donated to the Vet Art Project (www.vetartproject.com)


In every era there are artists who are able to use their work as a prism through which the public can examine troubling facts that might otherwise be hiding in plain sight. Examples abound, as diverse as Picasso’s antiwar masterpiece Guernica and Nina Simone’s civil rights broadside Mississippi Goddam. With our personal history in the struggles for civil rights and against the War in Vietnam, we consider this an important role of art. We have been troubled by the lack of public discourse and artistic light shone on a decade of US war-making.


We applaud the Spektral Quartet and their collaborators for embracing this artistic tradition with Theatre of War. The multimedia production will employ music, film, literature, and theater to examine the consequences of our nation being at war. With our modern all-volunteer military, few Americans are directly involved in our war efforts. We as a society hold those who serve in high regard. But we tend to do so with an empty reverence. We worship them as heroes without really understanding what we ask them to do in our names, nor comprehending the physical and psychic toll they pay in doing it. These are the disconcerting realities Theatre of War will confront.


The musical components of Theatre of War will be “Stress Position” by Chicago composer Drew Baker and George Crumb’s “Black Angels.” Guest pianist Lisa Kaplan of eighth blackbird will perform “Stress Position,” a staged piece for solo amplified piano. The pianist is subjected to a kind of torture, stretched to the limits to play constantly at the two extremes of the keyboard. As the volume increases and the lights go out, the audience is engulfed in the experience. The Spektral Quartet will play “Black Angels,” written by Crumb at the height of the Vietnam War turmoil. It is scored for electrified string quartet and the players are also required to vocalize, play percussion, and bow water-filled crystal glasses, creating eerie, otherworldly effects.


Richard Mosse, a filmmaker and photographer who has been embedded with US military units in Iraq and Afghanistan, will provide the video portion of the program. His short films “Theatre of War,” “Gaza Pastoral,” and “Killcam” expose elements of our military efforts of which the everyday public are typically unaware.


The literary and theatrical segments of Theatre of War will come from Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska and Chicago writer Virginia Konchan. Szymborska’s poems “Hatred” and “The End and the Beginning” assay the fundamental nature of human conflict and reconciliation. Konchan’s short story “Blackbird,” adapted for the stage by Molly Feingold of High Concept Laboratories, probes the scars of war borne by a returning soldier and his frustrated search for healing.


In presenting Theatre of War in the wake of the NATO Summit, we hope the Spektral Quartet and their artistic partners will spark a personal-level examination of our ongoing global military operations. Following the program, the audience will be encouraged to share their reactions in discussion with the artists and with each other.


Chicago-based Spektral Quartet was formed in 2010 with a commitment to play a wide-ranging repertory in traditional and genre-breaking venues. The members are Aurelien Fort Pederzoli (violin), J. Austin Wulliman (violin), Doyle Armbrust (viola), and Russell Rolen (cello). High Concept Laboratories, led by Co-artistic Directors Molly Feingold and Kevin Simmons, collaborates with Chicago-area artists and performers to foster the creation and development of new works.









Theatre of War


Chopin Theatre


1543 W Division


Chicago, IL 60642


Wednesday, May 23, 2012 at 7:30 PM


Thursday, May 24, 2012 at 7:30 PM


General Admission: $30.00


Student Admission: $20.00


Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/242801


Arlene and Larry Dunn are avid fans of a wide range of contemporary arts and music endeavors as well as life-long social activists. They are frequent contributors of “audience perspective” blog postings for digitICE, the blog of the new music juggernaut International Contemporary Ensemble. They live in rural LaPorte County, Indiana.


reBlogged from: Sequenza21/

on May 17, 2012 at 07:00 AM

Radiophonic Madrid (MP3)



Not all is grey static in the sound world of the excellent broadcast/podcast series Radius, out of Chicago. As always, it takes the phenomenon, the practice, of radio as its subject, but not every Radius participant tunes to the near-dead space between stations. The entry by Desh & Ekis, “Xprmtal Short Wave Radio B-Side (Radius Edit),” is a mix of serrated, burnished, but still quite audible and intelligible signals, from spoken bits to ceremonial drumming. The duo, who are based in Madrid, Spain, are willfully less easily scannable in their project description:


Site: Argantek Industrial State, AIII Motorway, km 23, MAD ESP.


A landscape of scrapheap hills, rusty heavy-duty machinery, abandoned building sites sheltering engine cults’ followers. A constant metallic buzzing interferes with encoded technical transmissions and radio spectrum “white spaces” while, high above, floats a chaos of frequencies.


Two short wave radio broadcasters establish contact through these airwaves, their dialogue sent back to the listeners of the area who are unaware of such free-form vibrations coming from their speakers.


Nonetheless, their mundane fantasy of subverted communication has a rich narrative groove to it, not the groove of metrically coherent rhythm but the groove of sequence, of found sounds paced and given associative power through contrast and accrual. The slow fade-out is a bit of a cheat in most experimental music, but here, as the sounds wind down, there’s a sense of the disparate noises, bonded by chance intervention, finally giving way to entropy.


Track originally posted at theradius.tumblr.com. More on Desh at digikampradesh.wordpress.com and on Ekis at facebook.com/ard2music.




reBlogged from: Disquiet

on May 17, 2012 at 06:00 AM

Understanding Through Tangential Questioning: Art, Dance Your Ph.D., and the Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider/ATLAS at CERN, image by Image Editor

The Large Hadron Collider/ATLAS at CERN, image by Image Editor


(Shane Crerar received a BSc. in chemistry in 2000, and a BFA in sculpture in 2010.  He lives in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada and is employed by the city where he works as an arts administrator, dealing with public art, collections, film, and community arts organizations.)


Dance and theater make no sense to me.  I was formerly a chemist, and I cannot count how many times I watched someone’s expression go blank  and heard back “I hate chemistry” or some other adverse reaction to math and science when I told them what I do.  I imagine that dance and theater are as incomprehensible to me as chemistry is to, well…everyone else.  It can be a matter of taste: some people love pineapple.  I hate it.  Some people hate licorice.  I love it.  Some people love dance, and maybe I just miss the reference point.  Some people find it hard to relate mathematics to “real world” examples, while I find the relationship between dance and reality overly strained and contrived.  But on the other hand, I’m fascinated by “Dance Your Ph.D.


Dance Your Ph.D. works for me. I’m not sure if the original intent was to market science through dance, or to market art to scientists, or maybe it is based on a meme of ridiculous interpretive dance. But it works. A Ph.D. thesis represents a huge investment of time and energy, but it also represents an incomprehensible tome that is rarely read, in full, by more than a handful of people. “Dance Your Ph.D.” provides an alternate way to present years of work as a “real world” phenomenon.


I think there is a common perception that science and art shall not mix. Having been involved in the culture of both, it seems to me that the general attitude is that the other is incomprehensible mumbo jumbo. Dance Your Ph.D., however, flies in the face of that idea.  The winning entry from 2011 uses a stylized video technique created by stitching together thousands of still images. Perhaps it works for me because although it is literally interpretative dance, it is derived from a thoroughly explored concept. The concept is intimately familiar to the artist, if not the audience.


Art and science have a longstanding relationship, and it does a disservice to both to pretend that isolation from one another is the best approach. For example, there is a long history of illustration in biology. Chemistry uses pictograms with specific rules to convey structures and arrangements of atoms and molecules. Many of these traditional methods have specific rules to most accurately represent ideas, or particular aspects of an idea. These methods of visualization are developed to work within the scientific community, frequently to the exclusion of the lay person. But interesting things begin to happen once those strict rules of representation are relaxed. Most specifically, in Dance Your Ph.D. we see scientists imagine their works through dance.


It is my firm belief that art can be an aid to science. One may often find that a concept cannot be understood clearly until that concept can be communicated. Not only do others benefit from the dissemination of knowledge, but working out how to discuss and communicate an idea can solidify it for oneself. Explaining the concepts in a Ph.D. thesis through dance may actually be of great benefit, not only to people who may become interested in the topics danced, but also to the scientist who is finding a new avenue to communicate her idea.


I think that one of the most significant scientific projects currently in progress is in desperate need of such communication. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most extensive and expensive scientific project in history. It is close to answering a problem that has been at the heart of particle physics research for the past 50 years. It seems to me that the magnitude of the project and the public funds dedicated to this international facility demand that its importance be recognized, if not understood.


Since the conception of the Standard Model of physics, physicists have been trying to find every particle and force it predicts, and the Higgs boson is the missing piece of the puzzle. The Higgs boson is incredibly important because it is the particle that (theoretically) gives matter mass, and the Large Hadron Collider is trying to find it. But how often does one encounter references to the LHC in arts writing? The LHC is not a breakthrough technology. It is one more step along a path that started with the first particle collider in the 1950s. Alongside other scientific achievements like atomic energy, space travel, or even relativity (and its time travel implications), the LHC seems like a little ‘c’ concept. The closest the LHC has come to stirring the collective interest of the world was the discovery of time-traveling neutrinos, which turned out to be an error in data caused by a loose cable.


Despite the relative obscurity of the LHC in popular culture, it has managed to capture the imagination of some artists. Kate Findlay has created a series of quilts based on photographs of the Large Hadron Collider. The development of her project appears to be based on images released in 2008, and the article indicates that she is working towards projects that incorporate aspects of the LHC beyond recreating photographs in quilts. I find this rather poignant. The images of the object inspired her to learn more about it, and as she’s developed her quilts, she’s developed an interest not simply in the imagery, but in the concepts the LHC is exploring. I believe this is important. The interest is not drawn by the fact that it is science, or physics, or technology, but instead starts from imagery.


I feel that science can provide inspiration for art, as the above example demonstrates. I also believe that science shouldn’t be afraid to get involved with art. The Collide@CERN project gives me hope that scientists can engage in the development of artwork. The project is a partnership between CERN (the organization behind the LHC) and Ars Electronica, which is an international festival celebrating art, science and technology. This should be a fantastic partnership because CERN is at the forefront of science, and Ars Electronica is a forum for science-based art. The project involves a two-month residency at CERN followed by a one month residency at Ars Electronica Linz. Throughout the residency, the artist (Julius von Bismark) will have mentors from both CERN and Ars Electronica.  The goal is to develop and create works in the second half of the residency.


It seems rare, indeed, for science to seek out the arts. Projects like Dance Your Ph.D. and Collide@CERN are the exception, not the rule.  To me this seems like a failure of both art and science, as there is ample opportunity for each to enrich the other.


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reBlogged from: Createquity.

on May 17, 2012 at 05:00 AM

Dancers of Ubud

Dancers of Ubud


In May and June 2010, I visited the island of Bali in Indonesia for 17 days, mostly the cultural center of Ubud, where I went to amazing art museums, galleries, shops and restaurants by day, and attended performances every night featuring gamelan music and dances such as the Baris, Barong, Fire, Jauk, Kecak, Legong, Mekepung, Tari Belibis, Taruna Jaya and Oleg Tambulilingan. Balinese dancers are among the most beautiful ever, with their delicately painted faces, intricately patterned costumes and mesmerizing movements. Now cue up some Balinese gamelan music and enjoy the Dancers of Ubud slide show over on Flickr! (For the best results, click the full screen icon in the bottom right corner on the Flickr slide show.)


reBlogged from: Arcane Candy

on May 17, 2012 at 04:00 AM

May 2nd, 2012 playlist

Lee Hyla ~ At Suma Beach ~ BMOP
Ingram Marshall ~ Woodstone
Lisa Bielawa ~ A Collective Cleansing
Alarm Will Sound ~ Mt. Saint Michel
Morris Knight ~ The Origin of the Prophesy
Steven Gorbos ~ Plunge
Nico Muhly ~ The Egg
Maestro Subgum and the Whole ~ Rubber Hose
Syzygys ~ Badol Bashimu
Frank Zappa ~ Secular Humanism
William Bolcom ~ Scherzino ~ Prism Quartet
Beata Moon ~ Piano Sonata
Adrian Knight ~ Världens Undergång



reBlogged from:
Music For Internets

on May 17, 2012 at 02:00 AM

April 11th, 2012 playlist

This is only a partial playlist of the first hour.

Dylan Mattingly ~ Lighthouse (Refuge Music by a Pacific Expatriate) ~ Contemporaneous
Alvin Curran ~ For Mg
John Halle ~ Spheres ~ Ethel
Sam Pluta ~ Tile Mosaic (after Chagall) ~ Yarn/Wire
Music for Homemade Instruments ~ Some Bang Goin' On
Aaron Siegel ~ A Diminished Thing



reBlogged from:
Music For Internets

on May 17, 2012 at 02:00 AM

April 18th, 2012 playlist

Also a partial playlist, this time of the first two hours.

Molly Heron ~ Pretty Machines ~ West Fourth New Music Collective
ensemble, et al. ~ In a Crowded Room With Nothing to Think About
Julia Wolfe ~ Early That Summer ~ Ethel
Alex Mincek ~ To Nowhere From Nowhere ~ Wet Ink Ensemble
Art Jarvinen ~ Edges ~ Some Over History
Aaron Siegel ~ Science Is Only A Sometimes Friend
Zack Browning ~ String Quartet ~ JACK Quartet



reBlogged from:
Music For Internets

on May 17, 2012 at 02:00 AM

April 25th, 2012 playlist

Dylan Mattingly ~ Atlas of Somewhere (On The Way To Howland Island) ~ Contemporaneous
Nicholas Vasallo ~ The Fifth World
Marcelo Zarvos ~ Rounds ~ Ethel
Gabriel Prokofiev ~ Concerto for Turntable and Orchestra
Eric Wubbels ~ alphabeta ~ Yarn/Wire
Alvin Curran ~ In Hora Mortis
John Cage ~ 24x24 ~ So Percussion
John Cage ~ Child of Tree ~ So Percussion
Harrison Birtwistle ~ Chronometer ~ realized by Peter Zinovieff



reBlogged from:
Music For Internets

on May 17, 2012 at 02:00 AM

May 16th, 2012 playlist

Alvin Curran ~ Music Is Not Music
David Brynyar Franzson ~ The Negotiation of Context - B ~ Yarn/Wire
Scott Brickman ~ Knotty Pines ~ Duo 46
Nico Muhly ~ Drones & Piano ~ Bruce Brubaker
Tim Hansen ~ Goldbrick Oilslick ~ West Fourth New Music Collective
Evan Ziporyn ~ Big Grenadilla ~ BMOP
Music Of Our Time 1967
Ingram Marshall ~ Peaceable Kingdom
Martin Bresnick ~ Caprichos Enfaticos ~ Lisa Moore and So Percussion



reBlogged from:
Music For Internets

on May 17, 2012 at 02:00 AM

309 :: 18 May 2012 :: Improvisers

On Friday’s program, guest host Harry Bernstein explores improvised music.


 Roscoe Mitchell



  • Muhal Richard Abrams: Panorama, from the album, Sightsong, 1976 on Black Saint

  • Leroy Jenkens: Um Cha Chi Chum, from the album, Leroy Jenkins Solo, 1977, on Lovely Music, LTD

  • George Lewis: Untitled Dream Sequence, from the album, The Solo Trombone, 1976, on Sackville

  • Roscoe Mitchell: Eeltwo Part 2, from the album, The Solo Concert, 2009, on AECO

    Star Night, from the album, Duets and Solos, 1990, on Black Saint

  • Anthony Braxton: Opus 77E, from the album, Alto Saxophone Improvisations, 1979, on Arista

    Composition 998, from the album, Compositions, 1989, on Hat Hut Records



reBlogged from:
Music From Other Minds

on May 17, 2012 at 02:00 AM

April 4th, 2012 playlist

Post New Music Bake Sale wrap-up

Aaron Siegel ~ Every Morning, A History
Tim Hansen ~ Good Times ~ West Fourth New Music Collective
Alex Mincek ~ Pendulum VI: Trigger ~ Yarn/Wire
Zack Browning ~ Secret Pulse ~ Cadillac Moon Ensemble
Matt Frey ~ Compression ~ West Fourth New Music Collective
Tod Machover ~ Towards the Center
Max Eastley ~ Metallophone
Music for Homemade Instruments ~ The Evils of Pots
Alvin Curran ~ Romulus and Remus Make a Ruckus
Péter Eötvös ~ Music for New York
Charlemagne Palestine ~ Strumming Music for Strings



reBlogged from:
Music For Internets

on May 17, 2012 at 01:00 AM

May 16, 2012

Cage’s Rhetorical Sleight-of-Hand

LUBLIN – I’m publishing – to exactly coincide, through the wonders of technology, with the moment of my delivering it in Poland – my talk for the Cage100 symposium in the charming town of Lublin. It’s a rather curmudgeonly examination (and I hope I won’t be stoned by the Cage aficionados here assembled) of Cage’s ...

reBlogged from:
PostClassic

on May 16, 2012 at 09:00 PM

Carlos Fuentes, composer?

According to the obituary for Carlos Fuentes in the NY Times:


Though Mr. Fuentes wrote in just about every genre, including opera (a 2008 work inspired by the life of Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna, the wooden-legged president of Mexico during the Texas Revolution)…


No. Carlos Fuentes did not write an opera, he wrote an opera libretto. José María Vitier, unnamed in the obituary, wrote the opera. Again, the composer goes missing.





reBlogged from: Secret Geometry - James Primosch's blog

on May 16, 2012 at 08:00 PM

City Opera's Telemann

I caught the New York City Opera version of Telemann's Orpheus at El Museo del Barrio last night, and find myself in accord with the Zerbinetta estimation. I'm happy to have seen the work, and Rebecca Taichman's staging has some...

reBlogged from:
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

on May 16, 2012 at 07:00 PM

New horizons in concert publicity



Another striking announcement from the Spektral Quartet.

Previously: New horizons in classical poster design.


reBlogged from: Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

on May 16, 2012 at 06:00 PM

Classical Music Is Supreme Today At The Nation's Highest Court












Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a dedicated advocate of classical music.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a dedicated advocate of classical music.






big week for classical music at the Supreme Court. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg provided Alex Ross at The New Yorker with a list of her favorite records. Not only does Justice Ginsburg have impeccable taste in opera — from Placido Domingo's classic Otello to the Nathan Gunn/Ian Bostridge Billy Budd — but her son, James Ginsburg, has become an important force in promoting Chicago-area musicians via his record label, Cedille.

Meanwhile, Justice Ginsburg has also invited one of the true giants among pianists, Leon Fleisher, to play for the Court today. In previous years, she has invited such current opera favorites as Stephanie Blythe and Anthony Dean Griffey, extending a musical tradition at the Court formerly fostered by Justice Harry A. Blackmun.

To top it off, Justice Ginsburg — who has made cameo appearances in Ariadne auf Naxos and Die Fledermaus at the Washington National Opera — hosted last year's NEA Opera Awards. In her remarks, she observed that Wagner's Ring cycle "centers on a breach of contract — Wotan's repudiation of the agreement he made to compensate the giants for building Valhalla. What better illustration of the well-known legal maxim pacta sunt servanda; in plain English, agreements must be kept."





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"fullattribution">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.



reBlogged from: NPR Blogs: Deceptive Cadence

on May 16, 2012 at 06:00 PM

SFCMP Zone 5: in which discussing a plan leads to some confusion

Artistic director Steven Schick and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) concluded their fortieth season with a program featuring a broad mix of new music. Everything from pure electronics to solo viola was represented. One is struck by both the diversity of programming and the highly polished performance presented by SFCMP. Unfortunately I missed the pre-concert discussion, but in catching the tail end of it I noticed that all the composers represented on the program were present, and they were discussing their music and new music in general with Schick.


Aaron Gervais’s piece Culture No. 1 began with a short sample played by pianist Karen Rosenak on a laptop. The less-than-5-seconds clip was the inspiration for the following section of music. This “call and response” between short audio clips and music based around and inspired by them continued throughout the piece a total of five times. Each of the samples, according to the program note, was found “left over” from other projects on the composer’s hard drive. The piece was about 9 minutes long, and is, to the best of my knowledge and a recent google search, the only piece currently in the repertoire for piano and harp. Through delicate amplification of Karen Gottlieb’s harp, the balance was worked out quite satisfactorily.


Violist Nancy Severance performed Australian composer Brett Dean’s Intimate Decisions (1996), which was ten minutes of beautiful viola writing (not to mention playing!). The title comes from one of Dean’s wife’s paintings, and the character of the piece holds true to Dean’s experience writing for a solo stringed instrument, which his program note compares to writing a personal letter or having an intense discussion with a friend. Dean himself is a professional violist, and premiered the work himself even though it was commissioned by his colleague Walter Küssner. Perhaps because of the composer’s intimate knowledge of the instrument he was writing for, Intimate Decisions hold true to the title: the solo viola at times seemed to have a quite conversation with itself.


Brett Dean - Photo by Mark Coulson

Brett Dean - Photo by Mark Coulson


Mark Applebaum’s piece Pre-Composition began with what sounded like somebody on stage testing a mic out to see if it is on, perhaps in preparation for a verbal introduction to the piece that was to follow. Shortly after, the audience realized that this was no introduction, and the piece was already being performed. Simultaneously an 8-track tape piece built from samples of spoken words and an examination of the composer’s creative process, Pre-Composition is a conversation between the composer and several of his selves. One self is particularly interested in making the electronics more complex, suggesting mono, a flange, and various other things. Another self is the “spiritual” self, and keeps making “deep” comments about the goings-on amongst the other “selves.” The audience laughed through the whole piece, which was simultaneously a brilliant comedy sketch and an insightful piece on the composer’s creative process.


Also programmed was Nathan Davis’ The Bright and Hollow Sky for flute/alto flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, trumpet/piccolo trumpet, steel string acoustic guitar, and percussion. I read the program note before the performance, and I must say the piece was quite surprising because it was not quite what I had expected. I kept waiting for the trumpet’s predicted “explosion into an ecstasy” that I must have missed somehow. The performance was stellar, although there were a couple tense moments towards the end where it was revealed that yes, you can hear when a trumpeter coughs through their instrument. Beginning the second half of the program was Lou Harrison’s wonderful work for guitar and percussion, Serenade (1978). While I know the piece to be a wonderful work, it seemed that David Tannenbaum was perhaps having an off day. The performance was less than technically precise, although Tannenbaum managed to capture the spirit of Harrison’s open harmonies.


Mark Applebaum


The world premiere of Edmund Campion’s new commission Small Wonder (The Butterfly Effect) brought the concert to a brilliant close. The orchestration (two violins, two clarinets, two percussionists, string bass) fell into the shape of a butterfly. The bass in center stage formed the thorax along with the plugged-in conductor (click track), while the other instruments were arranged symmetrically to form the antiphonal “wings” fluttering around this central body. The materials used to create the piece were taken from a computer program designed by the composer to generate random yet ordered sets of percussive materials. This flirtation with chaos played a central role in the composition, and the setting of ordered materials against the disordered electronics had a wonderful effect. I loved the piece, and the performance was secure as well. The rhythmic patterns (judging by what I could observe/hear) were very complex, and I commend the ensemble for a solid interpretation of this new piece.


In a way, the order of the program sums up the subtitle for the concert: in which discussion of a piece (Applebaum and Dean) leads to some confusion (Campion). I look forward very much to SFCMP’s coming season, announced at tonight’s concert: they will be playing 4 hours and 33 minutes of music by Cage in celebration of his centennial, plus music by a diverse crowd of composers and a Reich program at the San Francisco Conservatory.



Kelsey Walsh is a pianist and currently resides in San Francisco. Follow her on twitter: @kwpianist




reBlogged from: I care if you listen(.com)

on May 16, 2012 at 05:00 PM

From a Diary: I:xxv

Communicate?  I want music that communicates in the same way a copper pot handle communicates heat.



reBlogged from:
Renewable Music

on May 16, 2012 at 02:00 PM

Roman Haubenstock-Ramati ~ Klavierstücke







Klavierstücke
Roman Haubenstock-Ramati
(1963-65)
....For piano....

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on May 16, 2012 at 01:00 PM

How to Book a Tour: Unconventional Advice

There’s plenty of advice out there for booking a tour. In fact, I’ve written on it a few times (including this step-by-step guide). People generally talk about the same kind of stuff: how to approach a venue, where to book, promoting, etc. However, I want to cover some of the territory that people don’t talk about, the pitfalls that you’ll come across along the way.


When the Promoter Wants You to Fill the Bill
Some promoters/venues prefer that you pitch them an entire show (with locals) before confirming the show. It makes their life easier (they don’t have to find bands for the show) and local acts make booking a touring/unknown act a safer bet. So if you don’t have any contacts in an town far away, who do you find band?


Three easy solutions:



  1. See who is already playing the venue on a weekend

  2. Look up bands in the city’s alt-weekly paper

  3. Post an ad on Craigslist.


When you can’t fill in a date or run out of venues to ask
Sometimes it seems that everyone in town is booked or no one is interested. You don’t have many options because you’re on a tight tour route or have dates/before and after that are already confirmed. These things happen. When they do, this is what I usually do:



  1. Use Google, Google Maps, Yelp, City Search, or Four Square to look up “live music” and the city name. Sometimes, there are places that host bands that don’t pop up in the usual venue databases. You might also try contacting a store or organizations that would suit your ideal, target audience. Examples include: skateboard shops, youth groups, non-profit fundraiser, goth clothing store, music store, independent record store, etc.

  2. Contact: breweries, wineries, colleges, and fans in the area.

  3. Use Craigslist and search in the “Gigs” section. Often times, new bars/venues will post there looking for live music, as well as people throwing house parties, fundraisers, or events looking for a band.

  4. See what shows are booked and ask the bands on those bills if they’d be willing to add you to the bill. Be sure to pitch how you will get them new fans, make more money, or bring people to the show.

  5. Consider doing an acoustic version and do some busking. I know some acts who busk in Santa Monica, CA and make $200-$400 per day in donations and CD sales. You can also contact the local Occupy Movement encampment about working with their cause by performing (if there’s one there).


When You Don’t Know Anything about the Venue that You’re Booking


It’s always a good idea to know what kind of situation you’re booking into: Will they have an adequate stage? Will they have a sound system and engineer? What kind of audience is there? If you’re booking a venue that you haven’t worked with before, do a quick search online about them. Check out their website, see what kind of acts perform there normally. Look up reviews on Yelp. Ask bands that are on their calendar.


 


These are just some of the areas that few people talk about when giving advice about booking a tour. What have you run into that you’d like advice about? What areas can you speak to for other bands?


 


Simon Tam is owner of Last Stop Booking and author of How to Get Sponsorships and Endorsements. Simon’s writing on music and marketing can be found at www.laststopbooking.com


reBlogged from: Music Think Tank (primary) RSS

on May 16, 2012 at 12:00 PM

Créations pour Basson au Centre Pompidou, 5 avril 2012







Jeudi 5 avril 2012
Centre Pompidou, Grande Salle

FRÉDÉRIC KAHN
Unendlichkeit
(2011-2012)
pour basson, support audio et dispositif électronique temps réel
Commande : Ircam-Centre Pompidou
Dédicace : À l'intention de Paul Riveaux (Ensemble intercontemporain)
Réalisation informatique musicale Ircam/Thomas Goepfer

Paul Riveaux, basson


Dai FUJIKURA
Calling
(2011-2012)
pour basson solo
Commande International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Tokyo Opera City
Dédicace : Rebekah Heller, Ayako Kuroki and Pascal Gallois
Création : 2012, États-Unis, par Rebekah Heller
Création française
Editions : Ricordi Munich

Pascal Gallois, basson


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on May 16, 2012 at 11:00 AM

Holler- Spharen







York Holler's "Spharen" (2006) for large orchestra.

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on May 16, 2012 at 05:00 AM

Stulginska- The Fog







Agnieszka Stulginska's "The Fog" (2008?) for string quartet and tape delay.

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on May 16, 2012 at 03:00 AM

Rihm- Ungemaltes Bild







Wolfgang Rihm's "Ungemaltes Bild" (1994) for orchestra.

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on May 16, 2012 at 02:00 AM

Hosokawa- Floral Fairy







Toshio Hosokawa's "Floral Fairy" (2003) for string quartet.

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on May 16, 2012 at 01:00 AM

Ung- Khse Buon







Cambodian-American, Grawemeyer laureate Chinary Ung's Khse Buon (1980) for solo viola.

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on May 16, 2012 at 01:00 AM

May 15, 2012

Justice Ginsburg's favorite records

The list that I hinted at the other day has now been published on the New Yorker website.

reBlogged from:
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

on May 15, 2012 at 10:00 PM

Kathleen Ferrier: A Voice Not Forgotten








The English contralto Kathleen Ferrier had a voice like no other. She was born 100 years ago.

Decca

The English contralto Kathleen Ferrier had a voice like no other. She was born 100 years ago.






ed years ago, a musical marvel was born. She grew up in a tiny hamlet in the North of England, but made a huge impression on the world of classical music.

"Unique" is an overused word, yet it truly fits the sound of Kathleen Ferrier's voice. If you've never heard it, prepare to be amazed — stop reading now and click on the link below.

Her voice was a true contralto, radiant and rich with velvety purple tones reaching deep into a manly range. In addition to the sheer beauty of her sound, there's a palpable sense of communication. All the greatest singers have it — from Billie Holiday and Edith Piaf to John McCormack and George Jones — and when you hear them, it sounds like they are singing to you and you alone. Ferrier had it in spades.

To mark the 100th anniversary of her birth on April 22, 1912, Decca has issued a 14-CD Ferrier box set that includes an hour-long documentary on her life and career. It's a treasure-trove of incredible singing, from a complete recording of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice to British folk tunes to riveting live broadcasts of songs by Schubert, Schumann and Brahms from the 1949 Edinburgh Festival.

Ferrier was an unlikely candidate to become one of classical music's most extraordinary singers. She had no upper level institutional musical training. She excelled at the piano as a kid, but her only singing took place in the bathroom of her Lancashire home. At age 14, her parents, worried by finances, took her out of school and she landed a job at the telephone exchange of the local post office.

Later she met and married a bank manager. In 1937, on a lark, she took him up on a bet that she wouldn't dare enter a regional singing competition. She took home first prize and along with it the confidence to start accepting singing engagements around Northern England.

In just a few short years, while World War II was ripping Europe apart, Ferrier's career bloomed. By war's end, she had moved to London, hired an agent, signed a recording contract and begun attracting leading figures in music, including conductors Bruno Walter and John Barbirolli and composer Benjamin Britten, who wrote for her the lead role in The Rape of Lucretia. She made her stage debut in Britten's opera at Glyndebourne in 1946.

Of all of these men Ferrier probably cherished most her time with Walter. "To learn with him the songs of Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Mahler, is to feel that one is gaining knowledge and inspiration for the composer himself," she wrote in a letter. "It is very exciting and sometimes almost unbearably moving."

With Walter, Ferrier found herself on the forefront of a Gustav Mahler revival. The composer's music was banned during the war in countries occupied by Germany, and Walter, as a personal friend of the composer, was keen to bring it back.



Kathleen Ferrier: A Voice Not Forgotten



Katleen Ferrier Centenary Edition

Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde - "Der Abschied" (excerpt)



  • Artist: Kathleen Ferrier

  • Album: Centenary Edition: The Complete Decca Recordings

  • Song: Das Lied von der Erde - "Der Abschied"





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Purchase Featured Music



  • "Das Lied von der Erde - "Der Abschied""

  • Album: Centenary Edition: The Complete Decca Recordings

  • Artist: Kathleen Ferrier

  • Label: Decca

  • Released: 2012











 



!-- END CLASS="CONTAINER PLAYLIST" ID="CON152746969" PREVIEWTITLE="PLAYLIST" -->

Perhaps the greatest of the Ferrier-Walter-Mahler projects was the 1952 recording in Vienna of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth). When Mahler wrote the work's final movement, "Der Abschied" (The Farewell), he showed it to Walter, who said, "I was profoundly moved by that uniquely passionate, bitter, yet resigned and benedictory sound of farewell and departure, that last confession of one upon whom rested the finger of death." Mahler, only in his 40s, had been recently diagnosed with a heart condition that would eventually lead to his early death.

What makes this particular recording special, beyond the riveting performance by Ferrier, is the fact that she was dying of breast cancer while singing Mahler's soaring, valedictory music. Ferrier died peacefully in her sleep Oct. 8, 1953 at just 41.

It was a huge loss for Britain. Ferrier had become almost as beloved as the newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II. It was an even bigger loss for music, as a voice like Ferrier's appears only very rarely. Her friends and colleagues remember her as a simple, warm person, radiant with life, obsessed with music and equipped with a bawdy sense of humor — all attributes that leap from these recordings.





>


"fullattribution">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.



reBlogged from: NPR Blogs: Deceptive Cadence

on May 15, 2012 at 08:00 PM

Skrillex, as Reviewed By Very Young Children


This may already be the image you have in your mind of Skrillex’s fan base, but let’s get real: these are actual kids, and they really are getting introduced to electronic dance music through Skrillex for the first time.


“What is dubstep?”


Darned if I know any more, kid.


What have we learned?


1. All kids sound cooler when they have English accents. (It’s unreal. They can be throwing a temper tantrum and still sound oddly sophisticated, or at least charmingly in-character. CDM’s sizable readership of English people may wonder what the heck I’m talking about, then dare me to buy an umbrella and take up babysitting until I come to my senses.)

2. This video will prompt haterade in comments so long as you have a soul made of ice.

3. Kids can dance.

4. These kids look cooler than I do.

5. Saying you need to take substances to understand Electronic Dance Music is a fair statement – that is, provided you have entirely lost connection with your inner child or ability to dance. (That’s not to judge the use of such substances one way or another, only to say viewing any substance as a prerequisite to music appreciation may be overstatement. This does bring new meaning to candy ravers, however.)

6. VICE got kids dancing to Skrillex. What should CDM introduce them to? (Xenakis might terrify them; how about Aphex Twin?)


After all, I do hear dance music advocates routinely point out that Skrillex could be an introduction to young folks to electronic music that opens more doors later. These kids are absolutely getting a fresh start.


“Where’s the after-party?”




reBlogged from: Create Digital Music

on May 15, 2012 at 07:00 PM

Signals Improv


Sound Clip: Signals Improv by Richard Graham


The following demonstrates cognitive model mapping based on Tonal Pitch Space abstractions between performance “space frames” (cf. Emmerson, 2007).


Video documentation


The sustainer pick-up allows for one to interrogate string profiles within spatial music (specifically within the context of multi-channel speaker arrays). Contrasting monaural and polyphonic feeds also allow for one to interrogate performance space frames, whereby monaural audio may occupy a local (stage) frame, whereby expectancy schemas are met, in terms of musical gesture (both physical and figurative), and field (arena) may present processed materials in a more environmental context where gestural expectancy may be challenged. Interaction between space frames is encouraged in order to establish compositional narrative between abstract tonal pitch space abstractions and physical performance space (cf. Emmerson, 2007). A series of perceptual effects result in relation to typical monaural technology, including the ability to construct unconventional chord voicings relative to complex timbral and spatial configurations. The multi-channel system allows any composer to utilise dissonant tone combinations with reduced roughness or psychoacoustic dissonance, due to the physical separation of each pick-up. Auditory Scene Analysis (cf. Bregman, 1990, 1993, 1994) principles apply here, as spatialising tones apart may encourage stream segregation, relevant to similarities and differences in other concurrent cue configurations.Perceptual groupings ubiquitous within instrumental practice may be challenged by adopting contrasting differences in pitch, timbral and spatial location cues.


The live performance system is constructed in the open source object orientated programming language, Pure Data and allows for the real-time manipulation of each of the strings, allowing various pitch, timbral and spatial morphologies per string-profile. The system consists of a DSP library providing contrasting distortions, granular synthesis abstractions, reverberation, delay, and ambisonic spatialisation abstractions, decodable to stereo, quad, or octagonal speaker arrays. Algorithms have been established based on extraction and interpolation of various hierarchies of effective and figurative performance gesture per string, such as note attack and melodic contour.


Contours may be extracted globally for the whole instrument or independently for each string, treating each string as an individual voice. Contours may be directly applied to an array of synthesis parameters, such as the azimuth of an ambisonic spatial gesture. Scaled amplitude may be applied to distance.


More on this artist



reBlogged from: Sound is Art

on May 15, 2012 at 06:00 PM

I Dream of Wires Documentary: Carl Craig, Canada, and Modular’s Beauty and Agony [Video]


Like the modulars themselves, an upcoming documentary on these analog synth beasts has been lurking behind closed doors. But that won’t be the case for long. “I Dream of Wires,” the crowd-funded documentary that probes artists’ fascination with making music by connecting patch cords, will see a public showcase at Montreal’s MUTEK Festival. This and an upcoming film release, atop a big get-together in New York, could make this a proper summer of modular.


In anticipation of their showcase, MUTEK has released two significant excerpts from the film. One talks to Carl Craig, Detroit techno legend, top. Craig describes how this tech has influenced his music, and what inspired him to look at modulars. The other clip – true to MUTEK’s Canadian home base and the origin country of the film itself – looks at Canada’s contribution to electronic music history. Detroit’s place in techno certainly needs no introduction, but it’s about time Canada got its role in synthesis recognized (below), having given the world pioneer Hugh Le Caine and the University of Toronto Electronic Music Lab, among other highlights. This excerpt turns the clock forward to modern-day synth goodness. We’re of course happy to know of a certain digital synth designed in Canada, but here the modular Renaissance gets the spotlight. As the film creators explain:


Recently, Canada has again come to play a significant role with the modern day resurgence of modular synthesizers; it is home to two highly respected manufacturers: Modcan, founded by Toronto’s Bruce Duncan, was the first company to reintroduce modular synthesizers to the post-MIDI marketplace, and Intellijel, founded by Vancouver’s Danjel Van Tijn, is one of the fastest growing and most respected lines of Eurorack synthesizer modules.



The MUTEK showcase will include live modular performances by Sealey/Greenspan/Lanza (Orphx/Junior Boys), Keith Fullerton Whitman (Kranky/Editions Mego), Solvent (Ghostly International/Suction Records), Clark (Warp Records), and Container (Spectrum Spools).


The film itself is a production of director Robert Fantinatto and Jason Amm (aka Ghostly International recording artist Solvent); Solvent is also composing the musical score. This isn’t simply a history of electronic music; instead, it focuses on the modern revival of the instruments. (The history is a subject of a future film, but we’ll let them finish this one first.)


It’s worth saying that modular synths aren’t all pleasure – they bring some pain, too. That’s why it’s worth watching the interviews excerpted in the November promo for the film. In that piece, even as they sing the praises of modular analog’s joys, musicians talk about challenges ranging from live performance setup to tuning. It’s impossible to understand the love for these instruments without grasping some of their idiosyncrasies. In the earlier clip, you see everyone from builder Lori Napoleon to pioneer and custodion of electronic music history Joel Chadabe to composers like the late Richard Lainhart and the legendary Morton Subotnick, as well as builders and the film’s own Solvent.


The filmmakers continue to raise funds from fans. A recent West Coast USA tour, funded by IndieGogo, added interviews with Trent Reznor, John Tejada, cEvin Key, Jack Dangers, Bernie Krause, Richard Devine, Make Noise, Cynthia, The Harvestman, SynthTech/MOTM, Metasonix, Intellijel, and others.



Round 3 funding: http://www.indiegogo.com/IDOW-round3


Keep tabs on the film on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/idreamofwiresdocumentary




reBlogged from: Create Digital Music

on May 15, 2012 at 05:00 PM

The Fax Machine as Dubstep Muse (MP3)

When we speak of dropped lines, we mean breaches in communication that are severe enough to cause the connection to end: a severing beyond mere degradation of transmitted information. In the capable hands of Schrödinger’s Dog, the dropped line takes on a double meaning. This is because the fragile sound of a fax handshake, the scratchy short-circuiting noise of that fading technology, serves in his song “Automatic Negotiation” as the source material for a track that takes dubstep as its genre model. And like many a dubstep track, “Automatic Negotiation” takes a break midway through for a lengthy — and nearly silent — pause, when the fax’s ringing is heard on its own, before letting loose a half-speed variation on what had come before. This pause is known in the trade, to the point of cliché, as a “drop.” It’s a stellar track. The fax sound isn’t transformed significantly beyond its originating mix of squelch and jitter, so the familiar noise is no less a part of the “musical” aspect of the piece as are the tones and beats that lend it framing context.



The track is by Schrödinger’s Dog, aka British musician Mike Wolf, who thanks the American musician Margaras (aka Ryan Abbott) for some of the sound manipulation. Track originally posted for free download and streaming at soundcloud.com/schrodingers-dog. More on Wolf at twitter.com/strangeloup.




reBlogged from: Disquiet

on May 15, 2012 at 05:00 PM

"Pas de cinq" Mauricio kagel







Mauricio KAGEL
" Pas de cinq " Scène à déambuler

Enregistré le 11 février à la Cité de la musique


Editeur
Universal édition


Interprétation
Frédérique Cambreling
Jérôme Comte
Éric-Maria Couturier
Samuel Favre
Frédéric Stochl


Coproduction
Ensemble intercontemporain
Cité de la musique

Réalisation vidéo et montage
Anne Delrieu

Lumière
Fabien Leca

Opérateurs image
Fabien Leca, Céline Metzger

Captation sonore

Philippe Davesne

Producteur délégué
Benjamin Bibas / Radiofonies Europe


Coordination éditoriale
Luc Hossepied / EIC


Production exécutive
Ensemble intercontemporain

Remerciements à
Laurent Bayle, Directeur général de la Cité de la musique
à ses équipes,
et à Christian de Portzamparc, architecte.

Remerciements spéciaux à
Frédérique Cambreling, Jérôme Comte,
Éric-Maria Couturier, Samuel Favre
et Frédéric Stochl


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on May 15, 2012 at 04:00 PM

Princeton Symphony Plays Sarah Kirkland Snider

Sarah Kirkland Snider


Princeton Symphony Orchestra


Richardson Auditorium, Princeton, NJ


May 13, 2012


ChamberMusicianToday.com


PRINCETON – The Princeton Symphony’s final concert of its classical season included two repertory staples – Brahms’s Fourth Symphony and Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major – as well a revised version of Sarah Kirkland Snider’s sole work to date for orchestra, Disquiet. Although Snider is a rising star in the world of contemporary music, she has thus far made her name as a formidable composer of vocal works, notably the song cycle Penelope, as well as theatre music and chamber compositions for groups such as yMusic and NOW Ensemble.


She first conceived some of the material for Disquiet back in 2000, and the original version of the piece was premiered at Yale while she was a graduate student there in 2004. The revised version given by the Princeton Symphony, conducted by Rossen Milanov, is a single movement tone poem around a quarter of an hour long. Rather than depicting “disquiet” primarily via its pitch or rhythmic language, creating abundant dissonances or angularity, Snider takes another approach: uneasiness is primarily delineated by the work’s formal design. Thus, one may at first be surprised to hear the its often lush harmonies and strong melodic thrust. But as Disquiet unfolds, a labyrinth of disparate gestures and contrasting sections, often supplied in quick succession, imparts the title’s requisite restive sensibility.


Milanov brought out the piece’s wide dynamic shifts, exhorting brash tutti and hushed sustained chords from the orchestra. The piece’s quick sectional shifts allowed several performers brief turns in the spotlight: concertmaster Basia Danilow, clarinetist William Ansel, and flutist Jayn Rosenfeld noteworthy among them.


One hopes that, with this performance under her belt, Snider will get the opportunity to create more works for  orchestra. Given  Disquiet’s colorfully cinematic use of motives, one also wonders whether she might try her hand at film-scoring.


reBlogged from: Sequenza21/

on May 15, 2012 at 02:00 PM

Around the horn: It Gets Better edition

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT



MUSICAL CHAIRS



  • Andrew Taylor is leaving his longtime post as the head of the University of Wisconsin’s arts administration program to join the faculty at American University in Washington, DC. Quite a coup for Sherburne Laughlin and company.

  • Anne Corbett is moving on from her role as executive director of CulturalDC (formerly Cultural Development Corporation) to lead a commercial real estate development project in northwest Washington, DC.

  • Congratulations to Mary-Kim Arnold, new arts program officer for the Rhode Island Foundation…

  • …Wayne Martin, new executive director of the North Carolina Arts Council…

  • …and Earl Lewis, new president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, succeeding Don Randel. Mellon continues its record of hiring its head honchos from academia – Lewis was provost of Emory University and already serving on Mellon’s board.

  • The Center for Effective Philanthropy recently published an interesting analysis of the winding career paths of foundation CEOs.


IN THE FIELD



  • A huge gift from Oregon philanthropist Fred W. Fields will go to the Oregon Community Foundation to support education and the arts.

  • Nina Simon shares some lessons learned from her first year as executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History.

  • Liz Lerman has choreographed a performance of Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun for the University of Maryland Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra played from memory and danced around the stage during the piece. While the dancing is about at the level one would expect from classical musicians, there’s enough there to suggest a vision of what might be if people actually pursued this as a serious subgenre. The video and further discussion, from Andrew Taylor, are available at the link.


INTERVIEWS, CONVENINGS, AND CONVERSATIONS



  • The Animating Democracy project at Americans for the Arts hosted a wonderful blog salon during the first week of May on impact and evaluation of social change in the arts. The posts are well worth sifting through, but some of my highlights included contributions from Rachel GrossmanMark Stern (and again), Chris Dwyer, and former Createquity Writing Fellow Katherine Gressel. And now, just a couple weeks later, the Public Art Network is doing a blog salon on evaluation in public art.

  • Barry Hessenius has another interesting interview, this time with Association of Performing Arts Presenters director Mario Garcia Durham.

  • Nina Simon reports from the 2012 American Association of Museums conference.

  • The Foundation Center’s PhilanTopic blog has a “Flip” (video) chat with Courtney O’Malley, VP of the Starr Foundation, about foundation transparency. It’s an interesting choice of topic (and thus, conversation), given that Starr is probably one of the least open and transparent foundations supporting the arts in its size group.

  • The NEA’s Art Works blog did a week’s worth of posts on art and science (or “artscience”). Here are a few examples. In the last link, the NEA’s Senior Advisor for Program Innovation, Bill O’Brien, notes that the NEA will be encouraging grant applications that involve collaborations with science across all of its programs.


RESEARCH CORNER



  • The NEA co-organized a convening at the Brookings Institution last week on the topic of “The Arts, New Growth Theory, and Economic Development.” I was fortunate to attend and may share some of my notes later, but in the meantime, audio from the day’s sessions is available here.

  • Great list of data and visualization blogs worth following from stats blogger Nathan Yau. You can find Createquity’s version of this here. Nathan also shares five common statistical fallacies. Have you been guilty of at least one of these in the past week?

  • GiveWell is doing some interesting and important research into strategic cause selection (the merits of supporting international aid over domestic education, e.g.). After some preliminary investigation on what large funders are most likely to support today, they have identified four priority cause areas for future exploration: global health and nutrition, scientific research, something called “meta-research,” and mitigating catastrophic global risks such as climate change and nuclear war. I’m particularly interested in the meta-research cause area, which GiveWell defines as “trying to improve the systematic incentives that academic researchers face, to bring them more in line with producing maximally useful work.” I wonder if they will focus on non-academic research as well. As for arts and culture, GiveWell announces that it will not be a priority; while I’m not surprised at this outcome, I’ll be curious to read their justification for it as promised in a future post.

  • House Republicans have acted on their dislike of the American Community Survey and voted to eliminate it (this has no chance of passing, thankfully). Here is more on the American Community Survey. The politicization of government data collection is a very troubling trend.

  • Child mortality in Africa is going down, down, down – is this a vindication for international aid, free markets, or both?

  • Mark Kramer says we need a flexible paradigm for evaluation, because social problems are complex. I couldn’t agree more. Talking about evaluation in blog format is hard because the conversation requires a lot of subtlety and nuance. There isn’t one right way to do it, but at the same time there are countless wrong and/or dumb ways to do it.

  • The online education revolution is only in its infancy: Harvard and MIT have just committed $60 million toward a new online course platform called EdX.


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reBlogged from: Createquity.

on May 15, 2012 at 02:00 PM

Why Music is Less Valuable Than Expertise and Information...?


Today had me thinking about two questions that i want to address with you… Is music less valuable than expertise and quality information? And is this why music cannot be sold for high prices?


Unfortunately, just knowing something, or having experienced something, doesn’t mean all that much. At least in terms of creating and adding value to peoples lives. Although there are many things that you can grasp and understand creatively and in the realms of your own thinking, this is NOT where the value comes from. With any content that you create, whether its an article, a book, a program, or a song… The value doesn’t come from your knowledge, the value is created by you speaking directly to an immediately recognizable issue/thought or feeling. With information products, you then of course uncover the solutions that you’ve found and explain how people can use them to improve some aspect of their lives or business.


Since art, (in our case music) at its very nature is highly subjective, it is obviously different in the way it creates value for people. The only requisite here is that it speaks to someone or resonates in some way , shape, or form. The solution can sometimes be offered in a freshly illustrated perspective that could be helpful, but it’s more about recognition and feeling understood.


Is this why music cannot be sold for $2,000? Because it is not valuable in a practical way…What do you think?


It is perhaps the reason why music must be sold in volume to make any real profits. The fact is, that you are selling a subjective experience to each individual.


So, then begs the question, how do you use your creativity, talent and musical skills to increase profitibility and would you if you knew how?


Do you think you could create something that would provide value to someone else’s life to the extent that they would pay you for it, and that could pay for you to explore and continue to have fun making and performing your music?


For daily tips on leveraging your content, and building your online presence for better brand development, traffic, leads, and sales…. Follow me on Twitter


Connect with me on LinkedIn


Join Me on Google+



Jamie Leger is an Independent Singer Songwriter, and Internet Business Coach for experts and creative professionals. He specializes in helping people turn their knowledge and experience into high value products and programs and a real business. He has been making music in his home recording studio and writing content for various online publications since 2004. Please enjoy his free guide for how to setup a home recording studio.


reBlogged from: Music Think Tank (primary) RSS

on May 15, 2012 at 12:00 PM

2012 Outsound Summit lineup revealed

The San Francisco Bay Area’s underground music scene will come together this coming July in an annual celebration of its tremendous range of styles, its love of improvisation, and its collective obsession with new and unusual timbres and techniques.  It’s the 11th Annual Outsound New Music Summit!  All events will take place at the San Francisco Community Music Center at 544 Capp Street near 20th Street in the Mission District, and tickets can be ordered online from Brown Paper Tickets or purchased at the door.


The ever-popular Touch the Gear Expo kicks off the Summit on Sunday July 15, 7-10 pm.  It’s designed especially for anyone who’s longed for a closer look at an experimental musician’s gear on stage, and for the opportunity to mess with it.  25-30 sound artists will be there to demonstrate everything from oscillators to planks of wood with strings attached and answer questions.  Visitors of all ages have free rein to make sound and experience how these set-ups work, and best of all, it’s free.


The second Summit night is also free, and this time the composers take over.  In the Tuesday night Composers’ Symposium (July 17, 7-10 pm), John Shiurba, Christina Stanley, Benjamin Ethan Tinker, and Matthew Goodheart will all discuss how they navigate the modern compositional techniques, while combining them with improvisation and their own individual forms of experimentation. The public is invited to talk freely with the composers and ask them questions.


Performances begin at 8:00 pm on Wednesday, July 18th with the first of four themed concerts – Sonic Poetry.  This night is curated by Outsound Board members Amar Chaudhary and Robert Anbian, who’ve recruited three leading Bay Area poets to collaborate with improvising musicians to create new word and sound compositions.  Words are by Ronald Sauer, rAmu Aki, and Carla Harryman, with music by Jacob Felix Heule, Jordan Glenn, Karl Evangelista, Jon Raskin, and Gino Robair.


The Tuesday night Composers’ Symposium prepares everyone for the second performance evening on Thursday, July 19th – The Composer’s Muse.  Christina Stanley, Matthew Goodheart, and John Shiurba will all premiere new works running the gamut from graphic scores for string quartet, to prepared piano with sonified metal percussion, to a major work for large ensemble celebrating the newspaper.


Thwack, Bome, Chime on Friday night, July 20th, curated by Outsound Board member Pete Martin, will feature the world of percussion in all its coloristic and dynamic glory.  David Douglas will combine percussion instruments with custom-built delays, loopers, samplers, and other effects to create The Walls Are White With Flame, a series of highly spatialized sound sculptures.  In Seems An Eternity, Benjamin Ethan Tinker will assemble three percussion trios of metal and skin percussion to explore the same musical material in canon.  And finally the San Francisco percussion ensemble Falkortet will show off its versatility combining traditional percussion, hand drums, and electronics with influences from Indonesian music, Brazilian music, Jazz, minimalism, and rock.


The final day of the Outsound Summit, July 21st, will be a big one starting with a 2-4 pm Harmolodics workshop led by Dave Bryant.  Dave will share material from his years of Harmolodic Theory performance and study with Ornette Coleman, plus his own compositional and improvisational techniques developed on his own and with his ensembles.  The 8 pm final concert, Fire and Energy, curated by Outsound founder Rent Romus, will feature Dave Bryant with his Trio, along with Jack Wright, the Vinny Golia Sextet, and Tony Passarell’s Thin Air Orchestra.


reBlogged from: Sequenza21/

on May 15, 2012 at 05:00 AM

Harrison / Felciano - Split Release (Cambridge CRS 2560)

Today is the 95th birthday of Lou Harrison, who died in 2003, aged 85.

The following notes are from the album sleeve (enclosed):


Richard Felciano's "In Celebration Of Golden Rain" for the unique combination of Javanese Gamelan and Organ, the composer conducting, intrigued the imagination all the way. Felciano

reBlogged from:
A Closet of Curiosities

on May 15, 2012 at 02:00 AM

ArtPractical.com Podcast

Catherine McChrystal and Kara Q. Smith have co-hosted a podcast that complements the sound-focused current issue of artpractical.com, in which I have a story about the San Francisco area’s role in the sonic infrastructure of global arts. The audio track (available as a single MP3, and streaming at the “contemporary art talk” site badatsports.com) mixes excerpts from the issue and audio related to the stories, including a lovely early percussion piece by Paul DeMarinis, and another by Pauline Oliveros. To accompany my story, they play a bit of Shane Myrbeck’s audio from his Sent Forth art installation. There is also audio of artists Joshua Churchill and Chris Duncan in conversation.



Download audio file (Bad_at_Sports_Episode_348-Sound_Issue.mp3)

Read my story at artpractical.com. Podcast originally posted at badatsports.com.




reBlogged from: Disquiet

on May 15, 2012 at 01:00 AM

May 14, 2012

From a Diary: I:xxiv

A friend recently made the argument — and quite convincingly — that we're in a golden age of two media — the television serial and the comic book — that has come about entirely because of two related factors, (a) the establishment of non-mass production and distribution channels and (b) the aging into a kind of aesthetic consuming maturity of at least two generations of audience who are fully fluent with the literature, conventions, and terms of the particular art form.  This combination means that there is a critical mass of demand and appreciation for thematic, formal, and technical innovation (not the least of which is smart play with the conventions of the genre) while at the same time, the economy of the niche is adequate to sustain production, and, in the case of the US subscription television networks, Showtime and HBO and the like, provide added value, above and beyond not-quite current movies, that actually brings customers in and keeps them subscribed (yep, the weird stuff can be part of profitability.)

New/experimental/radical music may not have figured the economics out yet, but it certainly operates in a niche and has done so for a very long time. I suspect that we're just beginning to understand how important Schoenberg's establishment of the Society for Private Musical Performances (Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen) had been and just how little thinking-through that there has been for the potential for such a tactical retreat from mass presentation, in terms of audience development, cooperative organization and finance, and not least, innovative freedom.  (The most common argument against a new/experimental/radical music niche is that it is "elitist".  I don't buy this argument and believe that it is unsustainable because while new music may make demands of listeners, these demands are musical and intellectual and can be met by any potential listener willing to make the effort, and it is simply not elitist in the only meaningful sense of elitism in this world, which is a connection to real political, economic or social power.)

So, yep, it may be useful to think of the future of new/experimental/radical music more in terms of The Wire or alternative comics.



reBlogged from:
Renewable Music

on May 14, 2012 at 11:00 PM

Garth Knox: One Viola And 1,000 Years Of Musical History
















Audio for this story from All Things Considered will be available at approx. 7:00 p.m. ET





May 14, 2012



 



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On Garth Knox's new album, Saltarello, the adventurous violist creates surprising musical juxtapositions.

Dániel Vass /ECM Records

On Garth Knox's new album, Saltarello, the adventurous violist creates surprising musical juxtapositions.






http://www.npr.org/artists/92745287/garth-knox">Garth Knox was born to play the viola. As a youngster, he already had two sisters who played violin and a brother who played cello. "So for the family string quartet," Knox says, "it was very clear from the start which instrument I would play."

On his new album, Saltarello, Knox traverses almost 1,000 years of music history, playing not only the viola, but also the medieval fiddle and the viola d'amore, a forgotten member of the viola family with an extra set of strings vibrating underneath the fingerboard. Knox says the instrument appeared and then disappeared in musical history.

"A lot of babies were thrown out with the bath water," he says in an interview with All Things Considered host Robert Siegel. "And I thought the viola d'amore was a particularly big baby that had been thrown away by mistake. I and others are trying to bring it back and show just how beautiful it can be."



Hear The Music




Hildegard von Bingen / Guillaume de Machaut: 'Ave, generosa' / 'Tels rit au matin'



  • Artist: Garth Knox

  • Album: Saltarello





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  • "Work(s) Ave, Generosa - Tels Rit Au Ma T In Qui Au Soir Pleure "

  • Album: Saltarello

  • Artist: Garth Knox

  • Label: ECM

  • Released: 2012











 



Kaija Saariaho: 'Vent Nocturne (Dark Mirrors)'



  • Artist: Garth Knox

  • Album: Saltarello





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  • "Vent Nocturne, for viola & electronics I. Sombres Miroirs Dark Mirrors "

  • Album: Saltarello

  • Artist: Garth Knox

  • Label: ECM

  • Released: 2012











 



!-- END CLASS="CONTAINER PLAYLIST" ID="CON152693303" PREVIEWTITLE="PLAYLIST" -->

The instrument appears in the album's opening track — "Black Brittany," an arrangement of a traditional Irish song — and in a stripped-down version of a Vivaldi concerto. Instead of the standard orchestral accompaniment, Knox arranged the work for just two instruments: the viola d'amore and a cello.

"I noticed over the years that baroque players like to lighten things up and make it clearer by reducing the number of people playing," Knox says. "And I thought it would be nice just to see how far I could go, and in this Vivaldi piece I think we've reached the limit. I think it gains something. I think it's exciting to hear it played like this."

The oldest music on Saltarello is by the 12th-century abbess and composer Hildegard von Bingen; Knox plays it on the medieval fiddle, an instrument that he says looks like what you see depicted in renaissance paintings.

"You usually see angels playing them," Knox says. "They usually have five strings, and their bridge is flat and you can play all the strings all the time, which is the idea. It's a very beautiful instrument, and it has a very earthy sound."

Immediately following the ancient sounds, Knox jumps more than 900 years to a new piece, Vent Nocturne (Dark Mirrors), written for him by Kaija Saariaho. It's all part of Knox's musical journey.

"I thought it would be very interesting to put things together which normally you don't hear together," Knox says, "and see just what the differences are."







llattribution">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.



reBlogged from: NPR Blogs: Deceptive Cadence

on May 14, 2012 at 11:00 PM

Michael Mantler - No Answer (1974)


Today is Jack Bruce's birthday. He is 69 years old. Also, the 11th of May was Carla Bley's 76th birthday.They are featured artists in this album,which is by far the darkest and most unrelentingly disturbing of Michael Mantler's albums of which I am aware.I'm not even sure why I like it, but I do-with Carla Bley's turgid ostinati like whirlpools less and lessJack Bruce's angry declamatory

reBlogged from:
A Closet of Curiosities

on May 14, 2012 at 08:00 PM

Music for Plants, Music by Plants, in Two Eco-Themed Album Releases [Listen, Galleries]


These green things, for once, are the stars, in Data Garden Quartet. From the installation version in Philadelphia. All Data Garden photos courtesy the artists.

“On lead synthesizer, a philodendron …” (And the crowd goes wild…)


Vegetation may not be the first association you have when thinking of electronic music. But two new albums, each released via Bandcamp, celebrate biological life of the green, leafy variety. One is a benefit compilation, with proceeds going to help trees and music inspired by that green goodness. The other uses plants as “performers,” generating its form from plant life in an installation and extended “live” release.


It seems a fitting time to think about trees and plants, as those of us in the Northern Hemisphere see the coming of summer. As I write this, outside my home office’s window, everything has become a calming canopy of maple leaves. And so, just as those trees have a chilling, soothing emotional impact, I confess that this is all really enjoyable music, gimmicks aside. The tree-themed compilation is not a bunch of aimless Earthy music; the plants are not, as you might assume, screechy noise. Instead, you get two full-length albums of terrific-quality ambient music.



Cover image to “Take to the Trees,” as shot by John Koch-Northrup.


Each also works to plant something living – literally. “Take to the Trees,” a compilation for Arbor Day, directs proceeds from sales to the Arbor Day Foundation for conservation and education. That means money from the release could protect and plant trees. The Data Garden Quartet is more literal: embracing the idea of “plantable music,” the ephemeral digital download code is printed on paper that can grow. For instance, on the recent “Cheap Dinosaurs” release, you get “hand-made seed paper with screen-printed album art and download code on reverse side.”


Download Cheap Dinosaurs, plant this art under a thin layer of soil in full sun to partial shade and add water. With proper care, blue lobelias will begin sprouting in the first two weeks and finally begin blooming about 4 weeks later.


Released on Sound for Good, a benefit label, “Take to the Trees” gives you four hours of music for a minimum of just US$1. The collection is eclectic, spanning fairly traditional ambient music to beats, breaks, and experiments. Some tracks sound influenced by the cadence of traditional Japanese music or Tibetan meditation. They evoke impressions of trees and forests, but often via electronic (even traditional analog) timbres, recalling the sensation of trees and experience as much as painting those scenes directly. There are epic, sprawling tracks and more compact, rhythmic compositions. Sometimes nature itself sneaks in, in jungles and mountain sojourns. More often, warm, fuzzy electronic pads glow like sunlight. Many, many artists participate, going far beyond the San Francisco scene, including our friend, technologist, blogger, and musician Mark Mosher. Jack Hertz, also a prolific blogger and performer, heads up the comp.



Artists:


John Koch-Northrup, Ian Boddy, Burning Artist, Chromasonic, Crystal Dreams, Todd Fletcher, Groupthink, HG Fortune and Inner Dreamer, inside/ outside, Oskar Menzel, Joe McMahon, Mesawzee Eagle, Mirada, Shane Morris, Mark Mosher, Mystified, redgreenblue, John Sherwood, Symatic Star and Tange.


http://sound4good.bandcamp.com/


If “Take to the Trees” is hours of human playing and human experience recalling the feeling of plant life, “Data Garden Quartet” turns to the plants to “generate” the score, in nearly two hours of extended listening. Blending minimalism and ambience, the product is a wash of sound, with waves of timbres crested by gentle buzzes, glitches, and hums, all in extended rhythms and cycles (sometimes recalling nothing so much as the occasional stroke of a Javanese gong).



The project looks to make natural phenomena audible, “information which we cannot perceive through our biological senses”:


The musical compositions you are about to listen to were generated by the electronic impulses produced by four tropical plants. This data, interpreted by humans with the help of computers, has been employed to organize sound into beauty perceivable by the human ear. While the means of producing this beauty can be described in technical terms, the natural creative force generating this experience is less apparent.


These 116 minutes were recorded during an installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in April, in a “quartet” of a philodendron, two schefflera plants, and a snake plant. (Images here are from that exhibition.) The team:


Sam Cusumano: electronics

Joe Patitucci: sound design

Alex Tyson: production, graphic design


More images, though I think my favorite of all is the wonder of the gawking young girl. It’s too easy for us to become jaded, and forget, sometimes, the magic of the things we make.






Quartet: Live at The Philadelphia Museum of Art datagarden.org

http://datagarden.org/about/


Data Garden also do an interview with Abigail Bruley for Creators Project:

Interacting With Plants To Create Polyphonic Music




reBlogged from: Create Digital Music

on May 14, 2012 at 08:00 PM

C'est une harpe qui fait ces sons?








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reBlogged from:
Uploads by ensembleinter

on May 14, 2012 at 06:00 PM

Sweet spot

Reviewing Emanuel Ax.
Boston Globe, May 14, 2012.



reBlogged from: Soho the Dog

on May 14, 2012 at 05:00 PM

Brooklyn Village at Roulette, by the Brooklyn Philharmonic (Est. 1857)

Last March, and for two nights only, Brooklyn Village was performed in Downtown Brooklyn. Advertised as a “multimedia spectacular,” the show took the audience on a time travel to honor the cultural heritage of Downtown Brooklyn, and showcased the trifecta of what some people call Brooklyn’s cultural renaissance: the newly “rebooted” Brooklyn Phil, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus (BYC) and Roulette.


Alan Pearson and the Brooklyn Philharmonic - Photo by Joshua Simpson

Alan Pierson and the Brooklyn Philharmonic - Photo by Joshua Simpson


From the very beginning, the retro, era-bending tone was set since the program itself came in the form of a fake issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle whose date had been carefully smeared to remain intentionally vague. The “articles” introduced the pieces, the performers and the composers in a mockingly sensational way (Brooklyn Indie Rock Musician Sufjan Stevens Detained by NYPD). The dramatic dimension was introduced by Alan Pierson who greeted the entire hall with great enthusiasm (I’m paraphrasing): in these uncertain times of crisis, what Brooklyn needs is more music! Pierson thanked the people who bravely crossed the frozen east river on a sled, and the audience seemed to enjoy the good-natured, humorous atmosphere.


The program began with the Scherzo from Beethoven’s Eroica (Symphony No. 3—the first work played at the Brooklyn Phil’s inaugural concert in 1857): an honorable performance even though the horn section reminded us, at times, how hard their instrument is to play. The piece didn’t come to a real end as it faded out and gave way to a young singer from the BYC sharing some personal thoughts about Brooklyn, from the perspective of genuine Brooklynite while the rest of the chorus was getting on stage. Sarah K. Snider’s piece Here (2012) followed, performed impeccably, a cappella and from memory by the BYC conducted by Dianne Berkun. One never knows where to start when talking about the BYC since their overall musicianship is remarkable (solid pitch, diction, sense of shape and textures.) Snider’s musical fresco was supported by pictures of Parkslope townhouses (?) projected in the background.


Brooklyn Youth Chorus and Dianne Berkun - Photo by Joshua Simpson

Brooklyn Youth Chorus and Dianne Berkun - Photo by Joshua Simpson


The program continued with Aaron Copland’s Prelude from his Symphony No. 1 (1924/1928) with its bittersweet flute/strings doublings and crepuscular crescendi, and morphed into the next piece: Matthew Mehlan’s Canvas (2012). More hybrid in its idiom, Canvas moved through various moods and featured some very colorful instrumentations. Halfway through the piece, soprano Lauren Worsham walked on stage to sing along with 4 young boys from the BYC and they all painted a vivid image of Brooklyn with neon signs and brass hits. The first half ended with an overall tame rendition of Sufjan Stevens’ Isorhythmic Night Dance with Interchanges from “The BQE” (2007) although the flute section (David Wechsler and Jeanne Wilson) played Sufjan’s crazy arpeggios perfectly.


Even if the first half was overall musically satisfying, the program still remained far-fetched and looked like the result of a late night dare at the Brooklyn Social: start with the Eroica, end with the BQE and make it look legit.


Brooklyn Youth Chorus - Photo by Joshua Simpson

Brooklyn Youth Chorus - Photo by Joshua Simpson


The second half started with another dramatic episode setting the action on the imaginary final day of St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn, about to be destroyed to give way to the Brooklyn bridge. The BYC sang Idumea (1763) by Charles Wesley—a hymn from the Shape Note tradition—and so did some audience members since a score came with the program.


Francis Guy’s painting “Winter Scene in Brooklyn” (on display at the Brooklyn Museum) was the inspiration behind Am I Born by David T. Little on a libretto by Royce Vavrek. Scored for the BKPhil, the BYC and solo soprano, Am I Born felt like a powerful musical immersion in a naive representation of a small Dutch village as well as a space/time travel (the idea behind the whole concert). The focus kept on shifting from the shopkeepers and the villagers frozen in their 1820 life to a 2012 spectator’s point of view: what does this modest piece tell us about the history of Brooklyn? About its future? What has changed? What has remained the same?


Musically speaking, David T. Little’s craft was remarkable. In a previous interview, Little told us about his collaboration with the BYC, his interest in the Shape Notes tradition, and the orchestration challenges that he had to overcome. The result was stunning: Little’s fresh orchestration, rhythmic and colorfully grounded in the low register, was emotionally effective and made great use the resources that were available to him. Each moment of icy stasis was an opportunity for (the ubiquitous) soprano Mellissa Hughes to shine and deliver Vavrek’s libretto with her most expressive voice.


Brooklyn Phil and Melissa Hughes - Photo by Joshua Simpson

Brooklyn Phil and Mellissa Hughes - Photo by Joshua Simpson


I have been thinking a lot about this concert in the past weeks, trying to pinpoint what made me so uncomfortable. It may be unfair, but I can’t help but to relate this kind of project to the ongoing artisanal trend in Brooklyn (the use of the expression local composers in the press kit had something to do with it). Could one say, without playing too much on words, that the more we go local the less we go global? At which point does deserved pride turn into navel gazing? It is, of course, too early to tell and I am looking forward to the Brooklyn Philharmonic’s next season.



Thomas Deneuville, the founder and editor of I Care if You Listen, is a French-born composer living in NY. Find him on Twitter: @tonalfreak




reBlogged from: I care if you listen(.com)

on May 14, 2012 at 05:00 PM

Modular Lovers to Gather in NYC, Celebrate Legacy of Buchla, CV


You could almost call it Buchlafest.


Led by Manhattan electronic music hub Harvestworks, fans of modular synthesis, composition and performance with patch cords, and Don Buchla’s modular synths are set to gather in New York this summer. In the video below, they introduce not only their event plans but also provide a neat and tidy introduction to what analog synthesis – and the Buchla name, not nearly as well-known among laypeople as Moog – are all about.



The lineup is looking terrific. This event lacks any kind of corporate sponsor or big event production; it’s a labor of love for people who are passionate about modular synthesis and music. In the lineup: Morton Subotnick, Alessandro Cortini, Carlos Giffoni, Mark Verbos, Xeno & Oaklander, and Loud Objects. Subotnick will debut the premiere of a live performance, and there will be a presentation of tape music by the late Richard Lainhart, all in quad sound. There’s also an exhibition of boutique analog synth producers, the likes of which has been more of a rarity on the US’ East Coast. And if you wish to support this from afar, there’s a lovely poster and compilation record in the offering.


The event will be effectively community-produced, with an IndieGogo campaign supporting costs. (IndieGogo is a cousin to Kickstarter, but is a bit better-tailored to the needs of not-for-profits and this kind of event.)


More information:

http://www.indiegogo.com/sourceofuncertainty”>http://www.indiegogo.com/sourceofuncertainty”>http://www.indiegogo.com/sourceofuncertainty






reBlogged from: Create Digital Music

on May 14, 2012 at 04:00 PM

Musician's Arsenal: Killer Apps, Tools and Sites - GigFunder






Fan funding: it is the saving grace for the broke independent band. Where before bands couldn’t consider studio time or hiring promotional companies to support their release, with a little hard work, some social media love, and good old fashioned word of mouth spread, bands can raise the cash they need to fund their dream projects. With the big four players fairly entrenched in the field (PledgeMusic, Rockethub, KickStarter and Indie GoGo), it’s hard to imagine a new player coming into play. However, GigFunder has found a unique need to fill in the fan funding world.




“There were always particular bands I wanted to come to my college town, but they skipped over us every time” says Matt Pearson, founder of GigFunder. In response, Matt started a fan funding platform that would provide fan driven tours. It’s a novel approach to touring that works out beautifully for all involved. In this model, the band builds a campaign by stipulating their tour expenses. GigFunder has considered all the variables by determining if the band tours in a van, in a small car, with/without a trailer, cost per band member per meal, accommodation expenses, etc. GigFunder also allows you to build profit margin into the equation.



Once you have all the expense accounted for, your fans essentially ask you come to their city. When a fan requests you come to their city, GigFunder runs the expenses and determines what it will cost the band to tour to that city. At that point, the band and fans work to promote the tour in much the same way any other fan funding campaign is promoted. If enough money is raised, the tour happens. If not, then no go. In this scenario, the band is happy because they have a tour paid for and guaranteed attendees, fans are happy because they get the band they want in their city and the venue is happy because the tickets are pre-sold. It’s a win-win-win! Artists can also fund a pre-planned tour. This is the more traditional fan funding model in which a goal specific goal is set and fans help the band realize this goal.



As in any fan funding campaign, the success of these campaigns depends on the vitality of your social media presence and the quality of your incentives. The obvious and base incentive for GigFunder will be entry to the show. But, Matt Pearson tells me artists have been very creative so far, offering up free guitars after shows, meet and greets, allowing fans to request specific cover songs and even bringing fans on stage with them. GigFunder launches today, so head over there and check it out! Start planning your tour today, or let your fans decide where you’ll be going.




What do think of fan funding campaigns? What’s your take on fan driven tours?



Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. 




reBlogged from: Music Think Tank (primary) RSS

on May 14, 2012 at 12:00 PM

SoundCloud as Sketch Book (MP3)

SoundCloud.com turns a particular idea of the bootleg on its head. The term “bootleg” is often associated with black market recordings, but much of the realm is actually more grey market: not fake versions of commercial goods, but commercial versions of uncommercial goods, such as live recordings or studio outtakes. SoundCloud is where many musicians, professional, aspiring, and casual, post their works-in-progress. In other words, these are free versions of uncommercial goods. For a particular sort of listener — a listener increasingly characterized as a SoundCloud sort of listener — that is an enticing operation. Which means informed musicians are posting the very things that previously would have been considered the things one gets out of the way before posting something. Tautologies aside, it makes for good listening, and for a great social experiment in sound. Take Greg Surges, who besides having a great family name for someone eking the most out of experimental electronics, is an accomplished participant in the online music world. His mundanely titled “patch 052012 sketch_2″ seems to take a filename for its name, but that’s true to what it is: an “improvised sketch,” as he puts it, for a forthcoming live concert (in Tijuana later this month). He explains his process briefly: “Using homebrew computer-controlled hardware into a custom software filterbank. Slower drones and percussive effects here.” The piece is a mix of slight fluctuations in tone and gentle if insistent percussion, like a Martian drum circle heard from beyond a massive sand dune.



Track originally posted soundcloud.com/greg-surges. More on Surges, who is based in San Diego, California. at gregsurges.com and twitter.com/gregsurges.




reBlogged from: Disquiet

on May 14, 2012 at 09:00 AM

May 13, 2012

Go west, pure fool

"Mrs. Edgar Peixotto, smart white silk gown with square decolletage. In her hair she wore a silver glitter crown, matching the trimming of the gown. Mrs. C. R. Krauthoff was most becomingly gowned in a heavy cream cloth gown on...

reBlogged from:
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

on May 13, 2012 at 10:00 PM

Well, what do you know

A chap in Switzerland sent a message, out of the blue, inquiring after Timbrel and Dance, the choir-&-percussion setting of Psalm 150 which I wrote for the November 2003 Evensong at the Cathedral Church of St Paul in Boston, an event generously organized by then-m.d. Mark Engelhardt.

More news: But first, the backstory to the news: Although it has been performed relatively frequently as a piece for flute, and even for alto flute, I originally wrote The Angel Who Bears a Flaming Sword for trumpet solo.  It’s one tough piece for trumpet.  A long blow, as my old R High mate Steve Falker trenchantly observed.  An Atlanta trumpeter has agreed to have a gander at it.



reBlogged from:
henningmusick

on May 13, 2012 at 09:00 PM

Music PR agencies please note

'About Fray Martín de Villanueva as a composer, it is important to emphasise one thing: he was not a master but a good craftsman who knew the trade and composed correct works. These works are not in any case comparable with the one by his coevals Guerrero, Morales, Victoria, etc.'
In an age when every neglected work is a masterpiece and when every musician is a genius, that disarming description of the 16th century Spanish composer Fray Martín de Villanueva should serve as a case study for aspiring PR agencies. It is taken from the sleeve notes for the CD seen above of Villanueva's music in the 'Maestros del Escorial' series recorded by the Escolaria del Escorial on their own label - YouTube sample here. One of Villanueva's more arcane claims to fame is that he does not have a Wikipedia entry. Despite this, although not at genius level, his sacred music is well worth seeking out; especially his thirty minute long Pasión seguin San Juan (Passion according to St John) which inhabits a beguiling twilight zone between plainsong and polyphony. 'Maestros del Escorial - Fray Martín de Villanueva' was bought in the monastery shop at L'Abbaye Sainte Madeleine a few days ago and this post is being uploaded from the French/Spanish border. A contemporary setting of the St John Passion features here.

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reBlogged from: On An Overgrown Path

on May 13, 2012 at 07:00 PM

Preview of coming attractions



reBlogged from:
Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

on May 13, 2012 at 02:00 PM