With so much of the new music buzz being (deservedly) sucked up by the Ecstatic Music Festival right now, I wanted to make sure that the S21 faithful know about what looks to be a great evening coming up on February 10 at 9 pm at Joe’s Pub, featuring three of “hottest” musician/composers around.
Todd Reynolds, dubbed by ur…me, “the Eric Clapton of the electronically souped up violin,” will perform a few works from his album Outerborough, which was named Amazon’s Best Classical release of 2011, and also perform with the British cellist Peter Gregson, who has collaborated with Tod Machover and Max Richter, among many other luminaries. He will be marking the first US performance of Nonclassical’s latest release, Cello Multitracks (written by Gabriel Prokofiev), which he premiered in London in 2011. Prokofiev, who is also in the US for the world premiere of his latest orchestral work, has gained a unique status as an innovative, far-reaching figure within British contemporary music. His work as a composer has brought instruments such as turntables, electric guitars, and oil drums, to high profile concerts including the BBC Proms, earning him critical acclaim in the process. Meanwhile, as a DJ Prokofiev has carved a singular reputation, playing to audiences at the New York Met and around the world, combining his background in urban music production with a passion for 20th and 21st century classical music.
I just listened to a 1957 radio discussion with Pierre Boulez and four Bay Area composers, Robert Erickson, Arnold Elston, Andrew Imbrie, and Jack Holloway from John Whiting's My KPFA website. The themes of the discussion run precisely into issues of continuity and coherence which were controversial then and continue to make music (and thinking about music) lively. Once again, Robert Erickson's down-to-earth but very smart way of talking about music was most impressive, the former Webern student Elston appeared most sympathetic to Boulez while Imbrie just wasn't buying it. Given the early date, the fact that a room full of musicians was straying into philosophical territories somewhat outside their professional comfort zones, some insecure moments (i.e. when Boulez couldn't recall Heidegger's name) and a presumed orientation towards a general listening public, I'm struck by the thought that a conversation like this, which once took place on an American free-to-air broadcast, probably couldn't happen today. At KPFA or another Pacifica station, certainly, where some social/political achievements of the new left — the (in itself, necessary) opening to a diversity of minority interests — led, in the zero sum game of sharing airtime available in a radio programming day, to shutting out a great deal of the programming, particularly any musics weighed down by any degree of connection to the classical tradition, even the most institutionally fragile of these musics, the new and experimental.* (Baby thrown out with the bathtub, you know?) In principle, the resources of the Internet ought to have restored some balance to this and, to a certain extent they have. I am, for instance, able to listen to this old broadcast anytime I want, and the offerings in online recordings, interviews, podcasts, articles, composers' or performers' or critics' webpages etc. are rich in real content. But are we really having serious public conversations (and productive disagreements) anymore about complex or subtle matters, connecting to the larger cultural and intellectual life, or are we, vulnerable to some extent due to our marginality, focused rather more on the pursuit of accessibility?
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* The Pacifica stations were VERY important for the reception of other "classical" musics neglected by the commercial classical stations, being pioneers, for example, in broadcasting early music or in composers once considered outside the canon. William Malloch, for example, of KPFA (and whose weekly analytical broadcasts were a more vital lesson in 19th and early 20th century music history than any I actually received in University), had a very important role in the Mahler renaissance. And then there are some real commissioning activities of the stations: from Cage's WBAI to Lou Harrison's Homage to Pacifica. What radio station in the US today is commissioning new pieces?
Liturgy comes from a word meaning "public work"; by its performance more is expressed than can be conveyed in verbal formulae. Like music, liturgy holds more than can be explained in a commentary. The meaning is implicit and conveyed by performance. It is not a theatrical performance but more like the performance of a string quartet, not in its aesthetics, but in the thing behind the music.
Illustration shows Julien's Orchestra at a Promenade Concert in Covent Garden. Louis Antoine Jullien (1812-1860) was born in Sisteron in France and after leaving France to escape his creditors established promenade concerts in London; which means that great British tradition the last night of the Proms is in fact of pure French descent. Jullien's first concerts were popular mixed programmes but later introduced symphonies, a trend which which contemporary Promenade Concerts have reversed. There is a topical link to audience interruptions at Promenade Concerts here, and more on music as ritual here.
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The Disquiet Junto is a group I founded on Soundcloud.com. The purpose of the group is to use constraints to stoke creativity. Each Thursday evening I post a clearly defined compositional assignment, and members of the Junto are to complete the assignment by 11:59pm the following Monday. The initial Junto assignment was made on January 5, 2012, the first Thursday of the new year.
The inspirations for the group’s existence are numerous. There are the weekly Beat Battles sponsored by Stonesthrow, and also hosted at Soundcloud.com, in which dozens if not hundreds of participants craft instrumental hip-hop beats from a shared sample. There is the tradition of Oulipo, whose embrace of creative constraints is personified by one of its co-founders, the author Raymond Queneau. Several comics artists with whom I have worked, including Matt Madden, have bonded under the banner of Oubapo, and there is, in fact, a related musical tradition, which goes by Oumupo.
The word “junto” comes from the name of a society that Benjamin Franklin formed in Philadelphia during the early 1700s as “a structured forum of mutual improvement.” In Franklin’s honor, the third Disquiet Junto project explored the glass harp, an instrument he experimented with in the development of what he christened the armonica.
The idea for the Junto arose after the completion of a Disquiet project at the end of December 2011. That project, Instagr/am/bient, was more loosely curated than other such projects I had commissioned, beginning in 2006 with Our Lives in the Bush of Diquiet. Instagr/am/bient proved quite popular, with over 20,000 listens and almost 4,000 downloads in its first month, and this success suggested to me that I experiment with an even looser format — the irony being that this “looser” format is, in fact, dedicated to constraint. Much to my surprise, the very first Junto project resulted, in four days, in 56 original pieces of music by as many musicians. The assignment was to record the sound of ice cubes in a glass and to make something musical of that recording.
If for the musicians involved, the Disquiet Junto is an experiment in creative constraints, for me it is as much an experiment in what I would describe as “community organizing as a form of curation.”
Visit the group — and, better yet, sign up and participate — at soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto. There’s also an email announcement list for the group. If you would like to be added to it, send me an email at marc@disquiet.com with “Disquiet Junto List” as the subject line.
This page serves as an index of the assignments. They are listed here in reverse chronological order. The tag for each assignment links to either a post on Disquiet.com about the project, or to a search return on Soundcloud that yields the tracks in that project:
Mr. Gaffigan to make his debut with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra. In addition he returns to lead the Minnesota Orchestra and the Baltimore, Dallas, Milwaukee, National and Toronto symphony orchestras
American conductor James Gaffigan returns to North America in 2012 to lead nine major orchestras in engagements which include debuts with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Praised for his passionate and energetic performances as well as his ability to connect with audiences and musicians, Mr. Gaffigan has attracted international attention and has frequently been acknowledged as “one to watch”.
In the summer of 2011, James Gaffigan assumed positions as Chief Conductor of the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra and Principal Guest Conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra. This season, in addition to his ten weeks with the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra and four weeks in the Netherlands with the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Mr. Gaffigan made his debut with the Czech, London and Dresden philharmonic orchestras and with the Vienna State Opera where he led performances of La bohème. Following his performance of Dvořák's Symphony No. 9 "From the New World" with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, Mark Haegman of Classical Net remarked, “…if the Czech Philharmonic must have played this work a zillion times, maestro Gaffigan ensured we weren't aware of this. He secured a full-blooded and electrifying reading of Dvořák's most famous work, capitalizing on the orchestra's idiomatic colors.”
James Gaffigan’s first North American concert of the season will be a return engagement with the National Symphony Orchestra (Jan 19-21), followed by concerts with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (Jan 25-28). In February he conducts the Minnesota Orchestra (Feb 9-11) before returning to Baltimore to lead the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra on February 16 & 17 and then will make his debut conducting the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra on February 23 & 25. In March 2012, James Gaffigan makes his debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra (March 8-10) and with the Los Angeles Philharmonic (March 30-April 1). Mr. Gaffigan will then lead performances of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra (April 6-7) and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra (April 12-15) before returning to Europe to conduct La Cenerentola at the Glyndebourne Festival.
In addition, Q2 Music will serve as the digital destination for the festival, making all of the concerts available for audiences worldwide. Q2 Music will carry all of the New Sounds Live concerts on www.wqxr.org/q2music as live audio webcasts with host John Schaefer , and will also record all Ecstatic Music Festival concerts for on-demand streaming.
New York's Columbus Avenue isn't exactly the mean streets – but Chinese conductor Long Yu might not think so anymore. On the eve of making his New York Philharmonic debut last Tuesday, Yu was walking after dinner with a friend when a man approached to bum a cigarette. When Yu waved him off, the man lashed out and struck the conductor in the eye. Yu says he gave chase, grabbed his assailant and punched him back. "Mr. Yu said he went to an emergency room in the middle of the night after discomfort in his eye grew. A doctor said there was a scratch on the surface of his eye, which later acquired a shiner. Mr. Yu went on to conduct the concert Tuesday night, his face swollen. 'A professional is a professional,' he said."
Finnish conductor Paavo Berglund has died at age 82. Principal conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra for most of the 1970s and principal guest conductor of the Scottish National Orchestra from 1981 to 1985, he also served as chief conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic.
Bass Paul Plishka is retiring Saturday after giving his 1600th performance at the Met. As one might expect, the 70-year-old has a treasure trove of stories. One involves a vengeful trombonist and a very rotten fish.
Conductor Richard Bonynge has been named a Companion of the Order of Australia – joining his late wife, Dame Joan Sutherland, in a rare circle of Aussie power couples who are dual holders of this honor.
The Stradivarius cello that used to belong to Bernard Greenhouse – and before that, by Niccolò Paganini – went for a record price last week: "a fair bit above" $6 million. (The dealer declined to specify the exact bid.) Another mystery? The identity of the buyer, described as a "patroness of the arts from Montreal." She promptly lent the instrument out to a young cellist, also from Montreal.
The announcement of the Philadelphia Orchestra's 2012-13 season – its first with Yannick Nézet-Séguin at the helm – included the news that the Philadelphians will record for Deutsche Grammophon, after a few years of partnership with the Ondine label and then experimenting with an in-house effort.
In the Virginia House of Representatives, there's a bill to bar orchestral musicians from seeking unemployment benefits in the summers between their seasons. According to the executive director of the Richmond Symphony, "a quarter of the orchestra's 70 members collect unemployment in any given year, and an even higher number of the Virginia Symphony's members."
Here's a fascinating profile of composer and "futurologist" Tod Machover of MIT, who shares his amazing – really, truly amazing – findings about the power of making music, as demonstrated by patients with severe physical disabilities: "A few patients with hopeless prognoses and no meaningful life had significant enough changes in their pathology that they could actually think about at least partial recovery. Some found a decrease in auditory and visual hallucinations. There were behavior changes in many that allowed for socialization." (There's a fabulous TED video available featuring Machover and one such collaborator, Dan Ellsey.)
Here's an engaging essay on Liszt's massive B-Minor Sonata: "Playing through the work one follows Liszt's brain at fever pitch. It is music of drastic intellectuality, clothed in a Dantesque drama."
Over at the Telegraph, assistant books editor Sameer Rahim – an opera neophyte – has initiated an occasional column about his newfound passion: "I still can't explain why, but a minute into the prelude" – of Wagner's Parsifal, which he more or less stumbled into – "I found myself in tears ... I was certainly hooked and over the next few months saw a dozen or so including Rossini's Barber of Seville, Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, Puccini's Il Trittico – even a modern opera, John Adams' Nixon in China. And I loved every single one."
Opera newbies in Charlotte were welcomed to a free performance of Madama Butterfly: "When Opera Carolina announced in December it would offer a free performance, the requests outstripped the capacity so quickly the company raised money to do another. The two performances – the second is Saturday – will introduce nearly 4,000 people to Opera Carolina."
A similar event was announced for Arlington, Tex.: "Cowboys Stadium will join forces with the Dallas Opera for what the press release called '... first classical music simulcast ever conducted in a North Texas sports venue.'"
Kotaku has the (tongue-in-cheek) score on two dueling game apps involving ... Chopin. "For years I've had to deal with those insufferable Eternal Sonata fans boasting about how their game was the only one to star 18th century romantic composer Frederic Chopin as a playable character. Guess what, Sonatees? There's a new game in town, and it makes yours look like cheap anime RPG fluff ... Frederic - The Resurrection of Music for iOS, a game that not only stars Frederic Chopin, but allows you to perform several of his most famous compositions. Competitively. Against modern-day ethnic musical stereotypes."
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"fullattribution">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
As a music fan, the growing number of free and subscription based streaming services can be a dream come true. Install Spotify (or Rdio, Mog, Slacker, Rhapsody, Deezer, etc.) on your computer, your mobile phone, your internet-enabled stereo, and you have instant access to pretty much all the music that’s out there. Build playlists, see what your friends are listening to, those services have become a great tool to discover and enjoy music. Amazing.
From the artists that create this abundance of music, there’s been a very mixed reaction. I strongly suggest you read this 2011 recap by Bandzoogle friend and Nashville music marketing genius Charles Alexander. In it, he links to many articles and posts about Spotify that give you a good sense of why so many are worried or pissed off about it. You can also read the comments section to any post about Spotify on Hypebot, or Digital Music News and you’ll see that very graphic language is often used.
The short version ?
The revenue that labels and artists get is pocket change (even established artists).
Indie artists and labels are treated somewhat unfairly vs. majors
There is a lack of transparency in reporting (so you can’t know by who and where and how much a certain song was streamed, and how much royalties this means, and who gets it).
All valid concerns (especially the third one, if you ask me). So I’ve been discussing the topic with many musician friends and many Bandzoogle members that aren’t sure what to think. Should I make my tracks available on those services ? Is it going to cannibalize my music sales ?
My answer to the first question is “Yes, I think you should embrace it”. My answer to the second question is “Maybe, maybe not. So focus on other parts of your business and view it as an opportunity to grow those revenue lines”.
Here’s what I mean…
You can look at Spotify as an alternative to fans buying your music. “My fans stream my tunes on demand, for free or almost-free, so they’ll stop buying my records. Man, this sucks. Hard.”
And, from that point-of-view, absolutely, it sucks.
But what I tell my artist friends is: Instead, you should look at Spotify as “a tool that enables millions of radio DJs to add your songs to their radio show (audience = 1)”.
If you’ve ever had the happy experience of learning that a DJ at a radio station in your town, or somewhere else, really loves your new single and has played it many times, it’s an amazing feeling, isn’t it ? You haven’t made any money here, but you know that getting this exposure opens the door to getting more fans interested in you as an artist, your music, you next gig, etc.
There are flaws in my argument, but, usage of streaming services will only keep growing, and through streaming services, fans and potential fans can discover and enjoy your music as much as they want, for almost free, at their fingertips. That’s a good thing. (And by the way, my opinion on private file-sharing is somewhat similar…). Get over the fact that streaming won’t ever pay you in any meaningful way, and focus on the opportunities it opens up.
Your job, as a serious artist, is to then find ways to reach those listeners, engage them, and figure out ways to monetize them as fans of your art (and not just “consumers of your shrink-wrapped product”).
This is where your creativity as an artist needs to kick in. We’ll post more soon about innovative ways to engage and monetize your fans (and music sales are still a huge part of it), but you can get ideas from this list that the Future of Music Coalition put together a while ago. I’m personally super excited by everything around fan-funding and patronage and, if your tracks aren’t available where people might discover them, you might be missing out on future financial backers and patrons of your art.
Addendum:
The day after I started writing this, the main business news item is “Kodak Files For Bankruptcy Protection”. Apparently, this huge, established, dominant company was not able to foresee and adapt to huge shifts in how people create images, and in what services and products they are willing to pay for. Makes you think, doesn’t it.
Question: What do you think of Spotify? Do you have your music available on Spotify? Why or why not?
Nielsen's Fifth Symphony has been well served by the record industry. I grew to love it through a long-deleted 1975 LP. Producer David Mottley and engineer Stuart Eltham captured the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Paavo Berglund in that wonderfully rich yet realistic sound that was the hallmark of EMI's recordings of the period. Simon Rattle said of Berglund "He is one of the great conductors still among us", an opinion I will happily concur with. I remember a blistering Shostakovich Seventh Symphony in the acoustically magnificent Caird Hall in a freezing Dundee in the 1980s, with Berglund conducting the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.
Paavo Berglund's 80th birthday passed unnoticed on April 14, 2009. The reason is not difficult to find. The Finnish maestro has never been part of classical music's PR circus. One lasting memory of Berglund seen above is his Shostakovich in an arctic Dundee. Another is an appearance by him on BBC Radio 3's In Tune programme a couple of years back. Presenter Sean Rafferty was in the studio in London, Berglund was being interviewed over a line from Scotland where he was conducting. Sean Rafferty asked his usual fawning and vacuous questions. Berglund refused to answer in anything but monosyllables. As Berglund became more taciturn Rafferty became more voluble (if that is possible) until the interview ground to a halt. If it was available on CD it would be a best seller.
Also on Facebook and Twitter. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
Lucky paper lanterns in a shop in Manhattan's Chinatown.
eople everywhere continue to celebrate the Lunar New Year and the Year of the Dragon, which began Monday. The 15-day party includes all manner of feasting, family visits and hopes for good luck and good fortune.
We've been having our own celebration, and our colleagues at WQXR in New York are in the middle of a festival they're calling "China in New York." All week they're taking an in-depth look at native Chinese musicians who have made the transition to the U.S. Composers such as Huang Ruo, Chen Yi, Zhou Long and Tan Dun continue to influence music by blending their ancient traditions with contemporary sounds.
While celebrating China's achievements, WQXR has also taken time to hit the pause button and consider issues of human rights. For the "Conducting Business" podcast, WQXR invited Phelim Kine, a senior China researcher for Human Rights Watch, New York Times arts reporter Robin Pogrebin and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, author of the recent book China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, to join host Naomi Lewin in considering the duties of Western arts organizations in partnering with the Chinese government.
WQXR's Podcast:
Along the way, WQXR has connected the classical community to some of the arteries in New York's thriving Chinese communities — as when they invited the Shanghai Quartet to perform at a gallery in the Chinatown of Flushing, Queens. It's a neighborhood that rivals Manhattan's own Chinatown in size, population and cultural depth:
"creditwrap">WQXRClassical/YouTube
The Shanghai Quartet plays in Flushing's Chinatown.
Meanwhile, Q2, WQXR's online sister station dedicated to new music, has been busy exploring the intersection of tradition and cutting-edge modernity. They invited the Hainan-born, New York-based composer Huang Ruo to sing five of his favorite folk tunes, which he performed in a gorgeously full and joyous voice:
"creditwrap">WQXRClassical/YouTube
Composer Huang Ruo.
And if this taste of China has left you hungry for more, head on over to WQXR, where you can find all sorts of other tasty treats — from videos of the Beijing Guitar Duo performing a casual concert in the station's staff cafe to an inspiring visit with composer Chou Wen-Chung, whose own work and editions of music by his teacher, Edgar Varèse, are hugely important.
D CLASS="STORY" -->
END CLASS="POSTCONTENT" -->
Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
Lucky paper lanterns in a shop in Manhattan's Chinatown.
eople everywhere continue to celebrate the Chinese New Year and the Year of the Dragon, which began Monday. The 15-day party includes all manner of feasting, family visits and hopes for good luck and good fortune.
We've been having our own celebration, and our colleagues at WQXR in New York are in the middle of a festival they're calling "China in New York." All week they're taking an in-depth look at native Chinese musicians who have made the transition to the U.S. Composers such as Huang Ruo, Chen Yi, Zhou Long and Tan Dun continue to influence music by blending their ancient traditions with contemporary sounds.
While celebrating China's achievements, WQXR has also taken time to hit the pause button and consider issues of human rights. For the "Conducting Business" podcast, WQXR invited Phelim Kine, a senior China researcher for Human Rights Watch, New York Times arts reporter Robin Pogrebin and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, author of the recent book China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, to join host Naomi Lewin in considering the duties of Western arts organizations in partnering with the Chinese government.
WQXR's Podcast:
Along the way, WQXR has connected the classical community to some of the arteries in New York's thriving Chinese communities — as when they invited the Shanghai Quartet to perform at a gallery in the Chinatown of Flushing, Queens. It's a neighborhood that rivals Manhattan's own Chinatown in size, population and cultural depth:
"creditwrap">WQXRClassical/YouTube
The Shanghai Quartet plays in Flushing's Chinatown.
Meanwhile, Q2, WQXR's online sister station dedicated to new music, has been busy exploring the intersection of tradition and cutting-edge modernity. They invited the Hainan-born, New York-based composer Huang Ruo to sing five of his favorite folk tunes, which he performed in a gorgeously full and joyous voice:
"creditwrap">WQXRClassical/YouTube
Composer Huang Ruo.
And if this taste of China has left you hungry for more, head on over to WQXR, where you can find all sorts of other tasty treats — from videos of the Beijing Guitar Duo performing a casual concert in the station's staff cafe to an inspiring visit with composer Chou Wen-Chung, whose own work and editions of music by his teacher, Edgar Varèse, are hugely important.
D CLASS="STORY" -->
END CLASS="POSTCONTENT" -->
Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
The composer discusses some of his works, among them a new encore piece for Hilary Hahn
Israeli-born composer Avner Dorman is yet another person that was a late-starter in the classically-trained world where everyone seemingly starts learning what they do at age 3 or 4, but he's now proven to us again, just as quite a few others have in our journeys here, that age is only a number in this game.
If you click on his website, you'll see that he already has a variety of great works and has been premiering even more as we speak, including one of the Hilary Hahn Encores (EDITOR'S NOTE: I couldn't not ask him about that, and believe it or not, he hasn't even heard this piece played yet. Huh?) and a narrated orchestral work titled Uzu and Muzu from Kakamaruzu premiering in March with the Stockton Symphony.
Avner had a few minutes to hang with me via Skype and discuss.
CM: Start from the top, how'd you become a musician/composer?
AD: I started studying cello when I was 9, and then I quit that and started piano at 12--Really late for most musicians, like, if you're going to be a pro, that's late! I think probably the biggest thing was that my dad didn't really want me to be a composer!
CM: Oh boy! both laughing Don't you love the parents when they try to crush your dreams any time you want to do something artistic?
AD: That was a good enough reason to really want to be a composer! But I was very drawn to music early on, even before I started learning an instrument, and even when I was studying piano or cello, I sort of never played what was on the page, I liked improvising and adding my own things. When I would do scales on the piano, I always played in 2 different keys at a time. I would change Beethoven and Mozart and what not--I think it was kind of ingrained in me that creating is the cool part, not playing someone else's ideas. It's fairly basic in my perception of the world that I like to contribute my own thoughts and not someone else's.
CM: When did your composing actually gel?
AD: I'm still waiting for it! laughing Just kidding! I started writing out pieces at probably 15, and then when I was in 12th grade, I was starting to perform my own music--I wrote my Prelude #1, which is on one of my Naxos CDs. I wrote it, and I started performing it, and that was like the first piece that people were like "Oh my God, you're like a composer, you're like the real thing!"--I think every composer has that moment where they're like "Okay, I managed to do it once! I can really do this! I'm not just dreaming!". That piece I played a lot. I was a senior in high school, and I played it at some upper-level, university-level places where there were composition students, and some of them came to me and said to me "I think I'm going to be depressed now for a month that a 17-year-old could write that!", so, that was sort of reassuring!
I remember I had one teacher, a counterpoint teacher I used to take private lessons from--he was a very good pianist, and one day he asked me for some pieces--the copies that he wanted to play, and I think that was also a very defining moment. A professional musician asked me for a copy of my music so he can learn it to play at his recitals.
CM: So, from that point on, you just knew because people wanted to get a piece of it, pretty much.
AD: Well, I'm thinking about it now, when I was a senior in high school, actually, I wrote this concerto for piano, violin, electric guitar and string orchestra, and the orchestra was a a string orchestra plus a drum set--That's essentially what I had in my high school. I put it together, and I recorded it. The composer-in-residence of the Hiafa Symphony came to our school, and he heard the recording from one of those magnetic tapes, and he commissioned a piece from me right away! I think that's probably the defining moment, a real orchestra commissions a piece after they hear something else, I was like "Okay, this can really happen!".
CM: Was that commissioned, or was that something you kind of wanted to try?
AD: I started writing it as a regular violin concerto, just for myself. And then I was taking composition lessons at the time with Amnon Wolman. He asked me what I was trying to do, and I said that I was trying to get the sound of a rock band here. And he was like "Why don't you just write for a rock band? Why are you trying to make the orchestra sound like a rock band? Why not just write for a rock band?". I was embarrassed and I didn't think about it, so I essentially said "Oh yeah, I'm thinking of doing a version like that!", and he was in charge of one of the new music ensembles in Israel, and he said "You know, if you write it, we'll play it at one of our concerts!".
CM: I've heard it, and it reminds me a bit of symphonic rock.
AD: It's close to some sort of '70's progressive rock, I think. I was a big Genesis fan growing up.
CM: How did the call from Hilary Hahn go down about the piece Memory Games?
AD: She essentially gave me a call one day and said 'Hi, this is Hilary Hahn, I'm a violinist...", and I was like, "Yeah, I know who you are!"!
CM: laughing That's so funny, she thinks there's people that have never heard of her in the classical music world!
AD: I'm like "Yeah! I've heard of you!", and she said "I want you to write a piece for me!", and I said "Sure!". That was it! She was like "I'm so happy you want to write a piece for me!", and I was "What did you think?! You're a great violinist, of course I'll write a piece for you!".
CM: Since neither one of us has had a chance to hear Hilary's rendition yet, is there any way you can describe what the piece sounds like?
AD: It's very fast, and it's like this jumpy groove. My copyist said it's like a Balkan samba. It has something Latin in the rhythm, but it's all sevens and elevens and what not. It's actually closer to Balkan music, which I'm very very fond of. What happens is the piano and the violin start together. And then they're going together, and then I think from the audience perspective it just seems like they're sort of drifting apart, but continuing to work with the same material. Technically it's very rigorous--It's kind of a formula that I created, how notes come in and sort of interfere with the patterns, but from an audience point of view, you hear them together, and it's very tight, and then they start veering away from each other, until it gets really crazy and intense. It's a very intense piece, I think!
CM: Wow, I can't wait to actually hear it!
AD: Me too! Both laughing
One more thing about that piece--It's actually conceived in a way that she can play it not only with piano. The idea is that she can play it with clarinet, violin, whatever! As I was doing those versions, it started getting more complex than I thought, so I never finished them, but I will soon! The idea is that when she plays a concert with an orchestra, and if she has a friend in the orchestra, she can play it, and it's the same pattern repeating. She's moving around, but the "accompaniment" is fairly strict in the pattern. It's easy to learn it if you're a good musician. When she goes and plays with an orchestra, she can play an encore with one of the musicians in the orchestra, or 3 of the musicians in the orchestra, and she doesn't need the piano, so it's sort of a modular piece. I just have to finish that version for her because different instruments have different ranges, it gets a little tricky!
CM: What's great about chamber music for violin and piano is that even though there's so much repertoire where the violin is the only thing that matters in those pieces, people like Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Ives, probably because those people were more pianistic, wrote pieces that were more like duets.
AD: Yeah, particularly it was more piano. Actually, if you look at the early stuff, it's only in the romantic period in the 19th century where the violin became sort of dominant in the violin-piano repertoire . I almost feel like when it's violin and piano or like a string quartet, I like to make it like a mass of sound together, like it's not even a duet, they're almost like this one thing, they sort of become like one entity as opposed to one being more important or even like a back and forth or something like that.
CM: Can we talk about Lost Souls, the Piano Concerto? I noticed a lot of references to Bach and other composers.
AD: The whole idea of the piece is that the piano concerto is dead. It's a 19th century format. it's not something of our time. The piece is sort of like a resurrection--The orchestra is doing a seance to resurrect the piano concerto. That's why it's called Lost Souls--Ghosts of piano concertos that come back to haunt the orchestra in this ceremony. And it actually starts without the pianist at the piano. And the lights are half-dim, they play the opening, the lights go down, and when the lights come up, the pianist appears. The pianist actually hides within the violin section, and sort of moves during the darkness, and then at the end the pianist disappears again when the lights go down. There's a whole theater there. All the quotes are from dead composers and are all just part of the dramatic idea of the piece.
CM: But people still write concertos...
AD: Oh yeah, of course! I'm not discounting other people's concertos, but I'm mostly thinking of romantic concertos. I started talking about this with Alon Goldstein; pianist that Avner wrote it for . Even though there's a lot of piano concertos written in the last 50 years, none of them are sticking as repertoire pieces, and we were talking about why that is--Some of them are very good. We got to the idea that maybe it's just a 19th century format that needs to come back from the grave.
CM: Boaz, the piece for soprano, harp and 2 pianos--Was that written for or about somebody in particular?
AD: That's about a brother I had that died as a baby before I was born. He died 2 months before I was born. My mom wrote these poems about the whole process of his illness and death. She wrote them chronologically from the day that he was born until the day of his death, and I took 5 of them and set them backwards. It starts over the grave, and ends with a baby being born, and how beautiful he was. It's a very personal piece and a very hard piece for me.
CM: It's a great idea to set the story backwards...
AD: Yeah, it's sort of the idea that the farther that you are removed from the moment of the tragedy, perhaps the more you remember the beginning rather than the end. It's a little bit like the way the mind protects itself. My mom really remembers very strongly how beautiful he was when he was born, so the mind doesn't want to remember how bad it was at the end. You could say it's a little like losing reality, but it's a way to protect oneself, remembering the moment that was good.
CM: Is there anything new of yours other than Hilary's piece that's coming out?
AD: I'm finishing now a huge, huge piece for narrator and orchestra, and 2 percussionists as well, Uzu and Muzu from Kakamaruzu, based on a beautiful Israeli children's story, and the premiere is in March with the Stockton Symphony. I know Gil Shaham is currently recording the 3rd Violin Sonata. And then I have a piece called Astrolatry that I wrote last year for the Alabama Symphony that they are premiering at Carnegie Hall in May.
Robert Henke at BodyControlled, somewhere deep into a 12-hour performance. Image courtesy LEAP.
BodyControlled is a series focused on the intersection of performance and electronics. You can expect future programming to focus around ideas of “feedback” and “bio” related electronic performances. In its first installment back in November, a packed LEAP gallery witnessed performances by Robert Henke, Peter Kirn editor of this site , Stephen Cornford, and Paul Whitty. The event was called “Other Spaces” and took the physical architecture of the gallery as a point of departure. Having the space filled with people made for a secondary concern of space: its use. In a series whose title mentions the body, I witnessed one performance engaging the bodies that were filling the space. Robert Henke’s twelve-hour set activated interactions between the audience, performer, and environment. He moved around, listened and mingled with the audience, even though he had this amazing, souped-up control station complete with ambient lighting.
CDM’s Peter Kirn (neverheardofhim) at BodyControlled in November. Photo courtesy LEAP.
Other artists put more emphasis on the manipulation and dislocation of space through the use and abuse of electronics. Kirn worked with a custom rig with tablet-controlled original software built in open-source software Pure Data (Pd), controlled by a tablet running Konkreet Performer. Excerpt:
Electronic autopsy: Whitty and Cornford at work. Photo courtesy LEAP.
Whitty and Cornford actively deconstructed electronics in front of the audience:
it pays my way and it corrodes my soul (2011)
Stephen Cornford & Paul Whitty’s performance “it pays my way and it corrodes my soul” seeks out musical material by physically dismembering playback equipment. A reel-to-reel tape recorder is switched on and its mechanism amplified with a variety of microphones while it is taken to pieces. The sounds produced are then fed through an array of pedals: the machine’s belts, gears, switches and casing becoming an instrument subjected to a live audio autopsy
Cornford was also interviewed by LEAP for his installation work, featuring repurposed tape machines:
As João Pais, co-curator of the event with LEAP’s Daniel Franke, puts it:
“BodyControlled means the main direction of the series, to present performance and installation works that have a strong, corporal identity. This can be manifested in many ways, not only implying a “moving performer”. The purpose is to avoid the extreme of abstract performances made by a laptop-er, sitting down as if writing emails. In the first event, this idea was shown by interpreting/filling the space of LEAP through a sound-performance (Kirn, Henke), or an installation (Cornford, Mathy, Oliver).”
See also my write-up for ARTSCARDS from last month:
The second event, “matter incompatible,” draws reference to the Transmediale theme: In/compatible, acknowledging the less clear, even dark forces at play in the artistic and political climate today. Matter Controlled questions the idea of the object or anti-object within sonification. See CDM’s write-up from yesterday:
Kristoffer Gansing elaborates on the festival theme in/compatible, as well as the in/compatible symposium: systems | publics | aesthetics.
Tatiana Bazzichelli is the curator for out new project reSource of transmedial culture and speaks about its concept.
Jacob Lillemose speaks about exhibition Dark Drives: Uneasy Energies in Technological Times which he is curating for transmediale 2012 in/compatible.
Sandra Naumann is the curator for this year’s performance programme The Ghosts in the Maschine, which she explains a bit more in detail.
And Marcel Schwierin tells us about his concept for the video programme he is curating for transmediale 2012 in/compatible.
Performances by Echo Ho, Mario De Vega, Alex Nowitz and Ignaz Schick will investigate this blurry region between the immaterial and material. I am curious to see what objects they will bring to play with. As they potentially seek liberation from the physical objects, by reimagining their sonification, I wonder how they are also reliant and maybe even drawn towards their objectification. Bringing these disparate emotions into play is at the heart of tonights investigation. In today’s climate fractures exist between so many aspects of our lives. These performances seek to bring some of them together, compatible or incompatible as we might discover.
Kristin Trethewey is a Canadian video artist, cinema performer, and curator. She holds an MFA from Brooklyn College in Performance and Interactive Media. A multi-disciplinary curator and artist for the past ten years, she has recently completed a residency at the Node Center for Curatorial Arts, was co-Director/co-Curator of the INDEX Festival. She currently lives in Berlin.
In late September 2011, I started following Occupy Wall Street’s (OWS’s) Arts and Culture committee with the goal of understanding, and critiquing, its organizational structures for a Createquity article. However, I soon found that the same way the movement as a whole resists neatly following one set of demands (though its anti-corporate greed and income disparity message has always been clear), its Arts and Culture activities resist falling into one organizational model—or at least the systems are constantly evolving. This is especially the case now, well into the movement’s post-physical occupation phase. At first I thought this might present barriers to participation for artists, or to arts administrators and curators seeking to donate their organizational skills. Yet I eventually came to believe this looseness could be one of the Arts & Culture movement’s strengths—or at the very least, it has opened up a fertile space for debate about an alternative, “Occupied Art World.”
An early sign in Zuccotti Park, September 2011
The early days: Occupation as Art and “Curating by Consensus”
The OWS movement’s inception resulted from a poster call to action by the alternative media organization Adbusters, and as many other writers have noted, arts and culture were nearly inseparable from the core actions of the movement as the encampment at Zuccotti Park grew. Early on, critics like Martha Schwendener in the Village Voice were quick to describe the park occupation itself as “a kind of art object: a living installation or social sculpture,” blurring the lines between art and life. Richard Kim in The Nation described in detail the symbiotic relationship of an Arts and Culture (A&C) working group to various life-sustaining activities in a “culture rich” Liberty Plaza during the occupation’s heyday. A&C subgroups like the Puppetry Guild added a critical visible dimension to rallies and marches, including bringing OWS to the Halloween Parade. Powerful graphic images have helped spread OWS’s message over the social media airwaves.
A Facebook post by the OWS-sympathetic arts nonprofit Creative Time in late-September first brought me (and a group of other intrigued artists/curators) down to Zuccotti Park for an organized discussion about how outside artists can get involved in the movement. This was my first introduction to the now-famous “people’s mic,” as all members of an expanding group echoed and amplified each individual participant’s brainstorms for art actions, then finally tried to reach consensus about a name for a unique art happening (at the time, the group settled on “Occupennial,” with its tone of art world satire). At this meeting, I recognized that truly joining and understanding this movement would take patience—but at the same time, there was something very liberating about this group of both established artists and curators and unknown recent college graduates where no one revealed their job title, tried assert their superiority, or asked for anyone else’s credentials.
The weeks that followed certainly brought some growing pains of what I initially perceived to be a “curating by consensus” model for art production. At another early outdoor meeting of the “Occupennial” committee, new passersby kept joining the circle and re-raising questions such as whether established “art world” professionals should be actively recruited for OWS art shows (see more on this in Art Fag City). Group participants questioned whether there was even a need for the group to exist, making any type of planning difficult. This early tension over whether arts and culture should be treated separately from other movement-oriented activity later reappeared in a more recent Nation article: “a certain suspicion regarding art as a specialized realm is encoded into the DNA of OWS.” Ultimately, rather than put on its own art event, Occupennial instead evolved into Occupy with Art, an online clearinghouse for all OWS-related art activities that also helps organize select occupation-sympathetic projects.
All official OWS groups resist hierarchical leadership in favor of the consensus-based, “horizontal” decision-making model of the NYC General Assembly (GA) (for more detail on this, see Hyperallergic’s October 20 post explaining the A&C meeting process). I have attended meetings where artists’ ideas were blocked by only a few group members, or discussed for over an hour with no agreement. Early on, I also found myself wondering if OWS could provide a viable model for the arts—or if it was in fact hampering artistic freedom and artistic quality.
Occupying Artistic Practice
However, when I decided to participate in the movement as an independent artist while the park occupation was still going strong, I found the opposite to be true. While there is a proposal vetting process within OWS for artists seeking financial and volunteer support for their projects, individual artists and artist groups do not need to go before A&C at all in order to do their own projects that align with the movement. I went to Zuccotti Park on several occasions to create plein-air drawings and paintings, before and during the November 15 park eviction. I was surprised and pleased to find myself welcomed, both by the then-occupiers of the park, and members of A&C. The latter “curated” some of the paintings first into an exhibition at Printed Matter, then into a printed book about the occupation, and shared them widely via social media, bringing the type of instant visibility and relevance that is rarely found these days in more established arts circles.
Storefront Installation of OWS art at Printed Matter
Hyperallergic published an essay by another Zuccotti occupation live painter, Karen Kaapcke, who wrote:
My work has changed — I am not quite sure how yet. I always paint from life, but the pre-verbal need to document something so important has brought me closer to what it might mean to be a painter. The other day, I sat in my studio thinking about “visual meaning,” about how to paint something essential. I knew this thought came from learning and responding to Occupy Wall Street.
Whatever its organizational strengths and shortfalls may be, the movement is full of similar stories from individual artists, as well as arts managers and curators, who have expanded both their visibility and artistic practice through the movement. James Rose, another painter who has been to many A&C group meetings and events and made numerous charcoal drawings of the park, explained, “Though I never realized it at the time, when I fist moved to New York City, I was always painting the 99%–i.e., ordinary people on subways. With OWS, I have a platform to stand on, a network. People take my work seriously. Before that, there was an invisible wall I couldn’t get through. OWS knocked that wall down. It clarified how to get my voice out there…I don’t know of many arts nonprofits that are making headlines every day.”
For others, participation perhaps has more to do with uniting art with collectivism and political engagement. At a November discussion panel, recent college graduate and active A&C member Imani Brown said of first joining the group: “The atmosphere of openness and community was immediately apparent and incredibly addictive.” Another artist participant states: “The process doesn’t lend itself well to art production. It’s more like a process of examining our underlying social values. Focusing on the important questions raised by the movement opens up a space of freedom—i.e., to focus on political process, a formerly marginalized space of discourse.”
Rachel Schragis, "The Declaration of the Occupation of NYC" created for the Occupy Wall Street movement
Some artists have created work in direct partnership with OWS’s General Assembly; Rachel Schragis’s Declaration of the Occupation of NYC, now one of the most iconic images of the movement, was formulated through weeks of consensus-building– a laborious process that some artists might consider stifling to their creativity. But for artists like Schragis interested in collaborative or socially-relevant practice, OWS provides opportunities to explore new territory. This has been a space indeed ripe for artistic experimentation, maybe because there are no “rules” yet for what makes a quality “occupation” art project, or who should have the power to decide.
Painted overlooking Zuccotti Park on the day of the eviction, November 15, 2011
A Post-Occupation Art Occupation
In these post-Zuccotti days, the A&C group, like the rest of the movement, is in flux, and it continues to resist the structures of a traditional arts nonprofit. Regular meetings still occur at 60 Wall Street, of the main A&C group and constantly multiplying affinity groups. A&C was offered office space from the supportive arts blog Hyperallergic back in November, and, from what I last heard, is still determining how best to utilize it. A&C still organizes centralized actions and supports sympathetic movements (such as an upcoming Occupy Town Squares event), and numerous museums and other nonprofits are seeking to archive, present, and discourse with OWS art. Yet according to several members, the official A&C group serves more as a networking body through which new artists introduce proposals and get acquainted with the movement. Most concrete actions are now being carried out by the much smaller affinity groups and guilds, which have more consistent membership.
Some of the most recent projects seem to reinforce questions facing the movement as a whole: whether or not a physical occupation is needed for continued momentum, whether clear demands are needed, and the extent to which the movement should focus its energies on things like national politics, or courting organized labor (as Occupy with Art blogger Ismael Hossein Zadeh suggests).
To quote critic and curator Nato Thompson on the “dysfunction” of the general assembly structure, “At this point it is known that if anyone wants to get anything done, they should just do it and skip the basic organizing meetings. Or join one of the smaller groups…Without that coalescing together, the movement loses its uniqueness and historic specificity. With the loss of the squares, the movement runs the risk of becoming what it once was: A thousand different causes organizing on their issues and only remotely coming into contact with each other.”
Are the artistic activities of OWS evolving into disconnected, mainly symbolic individual efforts, albeit sympathetic and perhaps helpful to a wide range of related issues? Certain direct art actions have continued to focus on Zuccotti—for example, a January 14 event that adapted Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree project to the park and included a two-minute “die in” of people simultaneously laying still on the cold ground. This event and others have continued to draw well-known artists and press coverage. But the crowd that came to Zuccotti for the Ono event was relatively small, certainly in comparison to those of the massive marches of the early movement. At the same time, there are efforts to form stronger ties between the different arts and culture activities in NYC and those in other cities: a recent “InterOccupy Arts” arts and culture conference call involving leaders of different groups, a “Wall Street to Main Street” event bringing OWS-related art to storefronts in Catskill, NY, and various internet-based projects.
"Die-in" at Zuccotti Park, January 14, 2012
Occupying Arts Policy
One place where the OWS arts and culture movement seems not to have lost momentum is in its critique of the art world. In the first days after the eviction, at a November 19 “Occupy Wall Street: Imagining the Future” presentation/discussion at Third Ward, Imani Brown described the group’s new mission as both “actual art-making for the movement” and “actual change within the art world” which has also “been extremely corrupted.”
Martha Schwendener was one of the earliest to pick up on the fact that OWS could also be an opportunity to re-invigorate a critique of arts institutions that was long ago co-opted by those very institutions—and to create highly visible and relevant art in a completely alternative space:
The critiques offered by the OWS General Assembly overlap heavily with the art world: corporate domination of museums; art-school debt; a 1 percent system (less, really) of funding and canonization. The ’70s and ’80s saw an accelerated process of art being absorbed into institutions, and artists tried to resist it. But Institutional Critique, as it came to be called, only reinforced the fact that “liberal” institutions can absorb just about anything, including “critique.”
As shown by the testimonies of individual artists, working outside the structures of the mainstream art world could in itself be a form of institutional critique, or at least a liberating process.
So what implications, if any, do these disparate actions, working groups, and critiques have for the larger arts field?
Some obvious questions have been asked by the sometimes controversial “Occupy Museums” group (whose targets include the Museum of Natural History, Lincoln Center, and the labor union-unfriendly Sotheby’s in addition to visual art museums) and the Arts & Labor group: for example, whether large arts institutions should be admonished based on the concentration of “1%” robber barons on their boards. A December Occupy Museums protest at Lincoln Center calling attention to major donors Bloomberg LLP and Tea Party sympathizer David Koch drew sympathetic speeches from musicians Lou Reed, Phillip Glass, and Laurie Anderson. A recent January 13 occupation and General Assembly meeting at the Museum of Modern Art’s Target First Friday free public hours questioned the ethics of MoMA board members serving simultaneously on Sotheby’s board, and of corporations sponsoring free museum admission.
Arts & Labor is also pointing out the hard truths that a myriad of well-meaning artist service organizations haven’t really been able to address. Says Arts & Labor member Erin Sickler in an Art21 interview, “I have visited hundreds of artists’ studios and heard about their often-precarious economic situations. I have seen art writers, administrators, and other curators struggle to stay afloat on measly salaries with no benefits or health care. Arts & Labor is trying to break the silence around these issues…seeking to build broader solidarity with workers in other creative fields as well as other workers.”
These groups do come close to making some concrete demands: for example, after the MoMA occupation, a letter was circulated to MoMA staff offering to donate the large banner unveiled in the protest to its permanent collection, in exchange for an end to the lockout of Sotheby’s art handlers union, and for honoring the request that “Target Free Fridays” are never publicized by MoMA without citing the Artist Workers Coalition whose protests led to free museum days in the early 1970′s. I have not seen as many ideas for a complete overhaul of the current economic system, a system that includes steep museum admission fees, unpaid internships, and largely un-unionized art workers.
Amid these debates about high art school debt and low or nonexistent salaries, artists, curators, and administrators alike continue to donate countless hours to OWS, sometimes at the expense of steady income. Unlike the unpaid internships in arts nonprofits, for most of these people, OWS doesn’t seem to be a resume builder—some remain anonymous by choice, not wanting future employers to learn of their political activism. Artists, including myself, tend to go un-credited for their work in OWS exhibitions and publications, and almost always un-compensated.
To me, this is testament to the unique intrinsic benefits artists have gained from participating in the movement. Maybe it has to do with the other important components of artistic support artists get from Occupy—a massive social network, mass exposure and instant validation, copious donated art supplies and labor–which may not be possible in traditional arts institutions steeped in competitive application processes for limited space, funding and exhibition spots, not to mention the administrative burden of foundation and government funding and old modes of art criticism and curating. A heavily-involved A&C and Occupy With Art committee member also recently reminded me of the fact that 501(c)(3) organizations are sometimes uncomfortable with endorsing political activism. As the movement itself becomes increasingly disconnected from its once highly visible public square, it will merit watching whether OWS still offers artists the same type of exposure and community, and whether the lines between art and activism continue to blur to the same extent.
Art history is replete with examples of “alternative spaces” and alternative models, but is this something new altogether: something bigger, farther-reaching, and possible only in an age of social media, DIY digital expression and crowdsourced fundraising? Can this new grassroots movement sustain itself, or will it simply get absorbed into larger institutions’ political art archives? Four months after it first formed, a sizable group is still working around the clock to answer the above questions, and still making art in the process. Much like the original occupiers at Zuccotti Park, they don’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon.
From Bora Yoon's "Weights and Balances." Photo: Julia Frodahl
Many of us waited with bated breath during the recent breakdown of talks between management and the orchestra at NYC Opera. Even though the season is proceeding, the company’s plan to keep themselves afloat (if not artistically viable) seems dubious at best. No music director, draconian cuts for the players and chorus, and no base of operations. Instead NYCO will present a truncated season at several venues. After hearing how shabbily the company has treated its employees – while George Steel continues to make in excess of $300,000 – why would they expect their audience to follow them around town? It portends difficult days to come for opera – and opera goers – in the city. Take nothing away from the Metropolitan (although its recent conductor troubles are noteworthy): but a city with New York’s operatic history would seem to have room for more than one major company.
Fortunately, as Zachary Woolfe points out in a recent excellent article in the NY Times, several smaller companies are attempting to fill the void left by City Opera’s vicissitudes. Opera Omnia, Gotham Chamber Opera, DiCapo Opera, and others are making it possible to hear a plethora of works from the repertoire that are unlikely to be programmed any time soon, either at the Met or languishing NYCO: baroque gems, less known Mozart, neglected bel canto, and the like. The remaining challenge, and it’s a daunting one, is to nurture operas by living composers.
To further the efforts of those working towards that end, two longtime champions of contemporary works – HERE’sArtistic Director Kristin Marting and Beth Morrison ofBeth Morrison Projects (BMP) – have recently announced a promising new venture. Prototype:Opera/Theatre/Now, a festival that they plan to be an annual event, debuts in January 2013.
Unlike NYCO, Prototype will have a single performance venue, HERE’s space in Soho, for which they will try to build an audience. And, also unlike City Opera, the festival, with steady hands at the rudder, will pursue a coherent artistic vision, presenting chamber operas in the contemporary classical/post-classical vein. Some of the names being mentioned as participants in the Prototypes‘s initial presentations should be familiar to those who’ve attended recent editions of VOX: David T. Little, Byron Au Yong, and Bora Yoon.
Dare we hope for an open call for proposals for new chamber operas? More information about Prototype as it’s available.
(Talk Like An Opera Geek attempts to decode the intriguing and intimidating lexicon of the opera house.)
Bertrand Langlois/AFP/Getty Images
Soprano Patricia Ciofi sings an aria from Verdi's Rigoletto.
s every day. You're at the opera and the know-it-all next to you starts analyzing arias, cataloging cabalettas and generally running on about recitatives. You gulp your champagne with equal measures of disgust and shame.
If you only knew what the oaf was pontificating about, you could call his bluff on buzzwords from da capo arias to ariosos. For such occasions, a little operatic ammunition — in the form of jargon-busting — is necessary.
This week, a few words on the basic song unit of opera — the aria.
Opera has sometimes been called the most complete art in that it presents an elaborate (if sometimes precarious) assemblage of orchestral music, singing, acting, dancing, stagecraft, etc. But however you slice it, opera is clearly about voices.
The aria has evolved over opera's 400-year history, but a couple of characteristics have stuck. It's sung by a single person, and it's usually separated from the music surrounding it — a song plopped in the midst of things.
However, as with many things that seem simple, the term "aria" carries with it a variety of subtleties, moving parts and confusing contradictions.
As the aria gained emotional complexity and popularity, a certain Baskin-Robbins effect emerged. Arias were categorized for almost every occasion: aria di sortia (exit aria), aria agitate, aria infuriata, aria sentimento, aria di imitazione (where voice and instruments imitate sounds of nature), aria di bravura, aria cantabile (gentle or sad), aria di lamento, aria di sono (sleep) and even the aria di sorbetto written for a minor character, giving audience members a chance to get up and grab a gelato.
The list below addresses a few of the aria's major types to clarify some lingo and keep operatic grandstanders at bay.
Have a few favorite arias? Leave your list in the comments section.
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Cut to the Britten Studio at Snape on Saturday evening (Jan 21) where the 'Returns Only' sign was posted at the box office. So what sold out this remote venue in the middle of January - a pop-up concert by Gustavo Dudamel and his Simón Bolívar band perhaps? Well actually no, the event was an exploration of symmetry presented as part of Aldeburgh Music's Faster Than Sound experimental series. A major factor in the box office appeal was that Marcus du Sautoy was animating the event - author of several best selling books and a frequent TV presenter, his day jobs are Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and Fellow of New College.
Marcus du Sautoy was leading an exploration of symmetry in mathematics, design and music supported by a graphic designer, a multi-disciplinary artist and a multi-sensory artists collective. This Oxford professor of mathematics is also no slouch when it comes to music - he plays the trumpet and his unscripted deconstruction of the Goldberg Variations put many professional musicians to shame. His symmetrical soundtrack included Iannis Xenakis'Nomos Alpha and Olivier Messiaen'sQuatre études de rythme Île de feu 2 in quadraphonic diffusions and a sequenced version of Bach's Goldberg Variations performed on MIDI Piano and Mac mini. All the photos were taken at Symmetry and the central figure in several of them is Marcus du Sautoy.
Symmetry sold out against the odds and Marcus du Sautoy kept his audience captivated for two hours. So someone, somewhere was doing something right. This was not a conventional live music performance and there is no suggestion that Symmetry can provide a template for the future of classical music. But it can provide some pointers to innovative ways of connecting with that elusive new audience, and where better to start than challenging conventions? Jonathan Harvey famously proposed that classical music should drop its silly conventions and Symmetry confirmed that we should be far more willing to experiment - and sometimes fail - with new concert formats.
Allowing the audience to move around during the performance was one of Jonathan Harvey's suggestions. Symmetry was not a live music performance, but I was impressed by how well the no seats Top Gear-style format (hate the programme but let's learn from it) worked in the Britten Studio - see accompanying photos. In the 1970s the seats in Philharmonic Hall in New York were replaced by red rugs and foam cushions, with Pierre Boulez explaining in a pre-echo of Jonathan Harvey "There is so much formality involved in the performance of music that we make it hard for audiences to get emotionally involved." More recently experiments such as Gabriel Prokofiev's classical club nights have dispensed with that formality - we need others to follow their lead.
Overturning established intermediaries was the second pointer from Symmetry. Even in these financially troubled times a not inconsiderable number of middle feeders - agents, impressarios, PR consultants, media companies etc - are making a very comfortable living from classical music. Any change threatens that comfortable living, which is why established intermediaries pay lip service to change while actually resisting it. Credits for Symmetry include graphic designer Richard Rhys, multidisciplinary artist Russell Haswell, visuals and electronics facilitator Farmersmanual, which describes itself as 'a pan-European, multi-sensory artists' collective that presents a stream of events from concerts to interdisciplinary cultural, aesthetic and political experiments', and co-producer Lumin, which creates 'sound led experiments across art forms'. Those are not names you find in the average concert programme - which is a pity.
The third pointer from Symmetry was the power of the visual. This is a familiar theme On An Overgrown Path and Saturday evening reinforced the point that a spoonful of images helps difficult music go down. Big screen organ recitals are popular with audiences, so why not big screen symphony concerts? And that could just be the starting point - at Snape Russell Haswell's oscilloscope images created by real time sound spectrum analysis gave a taster of the further possibilities.
Another pointer from the event was how a really good presenter never talks down to his audience. Marcus du Sautoy stretched his audience - which had one of the widest age ranges I have seen at Snape - and took them with him all the way to Xenakis' Nomos Alpha without once talking down. If you need any more convincing watch this video. In comments about the decline of classical radio a number of readers complained about how the current generation of radio presenters talks down to their audience. Marcus du Sautoy handed out work sheets for the audience to complete in the intermission with the explanation that "mathematics is not a spectator sport". We could well adopt "Classical music is not a spectator sport" as a new battle cry because many of the genres current problems are caused by futile attempts to repackage it as a passive entertainment rather than an active experience.
The key role of the animateur - the final pointer from Symmetry - is also a familiar theme here. Seeing Marcus du Sautoy in action brought home just how lamentable BBC Radio 3's current crop of imported Classic FM presenters really are. Marcus du Sautoy may not come cheap, but ex-Classic FM 'face of the BBC Proms' Katie Derham comes at a reported annual cost of £250,000 - and still the ratings go down. Symmetry was all about seeing things from a different perspective. So, in conclusion, here is a suggestion for an experiment that might just engage with a new audience. Send Katie Derham back to reading the news, recruit Marcus du Sautoy to present the Proms on BBC Radio and TV, and hire Farmersmanual, Lumin et al to give the Proms concerts a much needed makeover. I have a feeling the result would not be spectator sport.
Photos are by Jana Chiellino and come via Aldeburgh Music, whose indefatigable Marc Ernesti receives my thanks for finding me a complimentary ticket for the sold out event. All views expressed here are, of course, my own. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk Also on Facebook and Twitter.
Electronic media artist Mario de Vega (Mexico City/Berlin) says his work plays with the creation of “unstable systems.” As part of the official Vorspiel, or lead-up, to Berlin’s massive Transmediale festival, here we get to visit two artists working with the materiality of live performance, drawing from the festival theme of “in/compatible.” The sonic environments they create seem poised on the brink of sonic chaos, a dance at the edge of entropy.
CDM will again be editorial co-presenter of BodyControlled; you can see the show for free (donation suggested) in Berlin at LEAP, or tune into the live video stream from anywhere in the world, and we’ll be bringing you details of the artwork. We’re a ticket to Alexanderplatz that’s even cheaper than easyJet, in other words. The performances start at 20h CET Thursday, 26 January. (That’s 2p East Coast time / 11a Pacific, so scare your office mates and turn it up loud.) Full details below.
At top, composer/singer Alex Nowitz demonstrates his gestural performance techniques. I got to see his work for the first time at the Patterns + Pleasure Festival in the fall at Amsterdam’s STEIM research center. While at STEIM, Nowitz built on previous work with the Wii remote, and augmented his gestures with a new instrument, entitled the “Strophonion.” You can see that creation here.
With each contortion of his body, Nowitz rips apart sounds, all while sputtering non-lingual utterances with his gymnastic voice. In the Amsterdam performance, one had the sense of following him into the Schwarzwald (Black Forest), an operatic odyssey echoing with forboding birdsong. But the system can also be dynamic and even, at moments, whimsical.
For his part, Mario de Vega’s “unstable systems” flirt even more with this notion of engineered incompatibility, with sounds that seem like they will explode in an earthquake-like tremor.
Mario de Vega for BodyControlled #2 from CDM on Vimeo.
Films by João Pais, co-curator of the series; edited by CDM.
Also on this program, more works engage the idea of what the curatorial statement terms “hidden acoustics”:
Echo Ho (Canada/Cologne, DE)
Tuned to Site #26012012
This title is from a series of concerts, called “Tuned to Site #…”. As a whole, the series formulates the idea of “musification of urban landscapes”.
In the first performance of this series in 2012 Echo Ho will play a set of instruments: a self-fabricated hybrid semblance of the ancient Qin from China, which combines traditional acoustic and digital interfaces in one unique transparent plexiglas body. Like a sensor box, it will enable Echo Ho to make field recordings of inaudible hidden sounds within
the city environment, such as electro-magnetic fields, variation and wind movements. The performance thus marks the process of generating action by outlining situations in which sounds may occur.
Curator João Pais tells CDM that this installment, in keeping with Transmediale’s theme, will “give the performers a room where they can show their ways of working with the dissociation of matter (through sound, in this case) and expression.”
This episode includes two self-made instruments that expand on existing practice, he says, in the case of Nowitz and Ho, and the hacked and modulated machines of Schick and Vega.
The last half of 2011 was intense for a lot of us. The financial news across the world remained bleak, Occupy Wall Street was all over the news as the 99% spoke up to be heard.
The music business continued to take hits with Spotify’s arrival and news of more layoffs at record labels and management companies as we all scratched our heads to blog about positive things and good outcomes.
Many of you may have seen this article (or another one) on setting goals as they crop up at this time of year.
It’s a new year and a clear slate is in front of all of us. The turning of the calendar from 2011 to 2012 is an ideal time to set your goals. I see a marked difference between artists who set finite goals and those who do not regardless of what is happening in the world and in the news.
Ask yourself: Is this the year I want to make a difference for my music career? And if so – what difference and how?
Think of goal setting as if you were driving in a foreign place – You wouldn’t get where you expect to go without a clear set of directions. Goal setting is like drawing a map for yourself.
This article is designed to assist you in creating a personal roadmap for achieving what you would like with your musical career this year, whether you consider music your hobby and you do it part time or you are making a living out of it full-time.
I have included a few links from some of the best musician related posts on how to think about and achieve goals as well. So, bookmark this long article and refer to it throughout the year!
MAPPING OUT YOUR GOALS
Many studies have proven that long-term perspective is the most accurate single predictor of upward social and economic mobility in America. And it has been proven that people who have goals written down are much more likely to achieve them.
FOCUS AREAS – CREATING ORDER
STEP 1: Write Down Your Focus Areas
Here is a list of some areas you may want to focus on. Skip the ones that are not for you and write out each focus area goal.
Branding – Your look and feel your image and health or your pitch and overall messaging.
Marketing – What will you do this year for your marketing plans.
Newsletter - It’s still the #1 way to make money! What will you do to create and send yours 12 – 24 times this year & how many people can you add to your e-mail list.
Website – Building a new one or diversifying your online presence?
Social Networking – How’s your Facebook Fan Page looking? How many tweets do you send each week?
PR – Getting covered on radio, print, or online.
Booking – Touring or local gigs this year or a combination?
New Music – How much will you release?
Money – How much money you would like to earn?
Film & TV Placements – Will you work towards them this year?
Expanding Your Fan Base – How will you do this?
Team – Will you be trying to get a manager or a booking agent?
Time – How will you manage to balance your time this year to make sure you can focus on your musical goals?
Songwriting – Recording an album or EP this year or just releasing singles as they come?
Instrument – Buying a new instrument or taking lessons?
Personal Health – So your performance is better – exercise, eating etc.
STEP 2: Write Your Goals Down
• Write each goal as if it is already happening – use the present tense
• Give dates by when you want to achieve each one
• Your goals should involve you and only you (they can’t be contingent on someone else)
• Make them so they are realistically achievable
• Start with small goals so I can get them checked off the list and get in momentum fast!
• Make sure they make you FEEL MOTIVATED to complete! Derek Sivers wrote great commentary on this: http://sivers.org/goals
STEP 3: Look At Them Everyday
I highly recommend writing your goals neatly on paper or creating a vision board that illustrates them. Use colored pens or make a collage that brings them to life and hang them in a place where you can see them everyday.
Keeping them within your sights will keep them in your mind
Carla Lynne Hall at Rockstar Life Lessons has a fabulous guide on how to create a vision board on her blog: http://bit.ly/CarlasVisionBoard
TECHNIQUES FOR ACHIEVING GOALS
1. Start With An Easy Goal And Complete It
One of the main reasons people don’t end up achieving their goals / keeping their new years resolutions is they set themselves up for failure by choosing goals that take a lot of discipline and time to achieve. There is nothing wrong with having big goals however, here’s what I recommend to overcome this issue…
Choose a simple goal and get it achieved within the next two weeks. This will start your momentum and get you feeling like you are in full forward motion.
Think of a small, achievable goal that only takes four to five hours to complete.
Choose something like:
Organize cluttered studio
Clean off desk
Delete unwanted files from computer & emails
Recycle last years unwanted papers
Write one new song
Next, set a date when you will get it done by and go for it.
Now that you have achieved a goal within the first two weeks of the new year, the rest of your goal setting will seem a lot easier to accomplish, and you will be able to get things off your plate.
2. Make Lists To Stay On Track
• Make daily lists of what you need to do to get your goals met – the night before! Do the hardest thing first in the morning – don’t procrastinate.
• Do something everyday that moves you towards the goals
• Delegate the little activities that waste your valuable time to other people (you would be amazed what you could do with 4 hours it takes to clean your house).
• Don’t overload yourself – studies show that 6 tasks is the maximum you can achieve in one day!
3. Get Help
Build a TEAM to help you!! Get an intern or two – log on to http://www.entertainmentcareers.net and read http://www.internlikearockstar.com/ for inspiration and post as an employer seeking interns – you will be amazed at how many bright young people would like to get their feet wet in the business.
If you are not comfortable with the idea of an intern then ask a friend or a family member to help you. Schedule just 2 hours a week with that person to attack the goals and get them in motion.
4. Structure Time to Achieve Goals
They won’t happen unless you have time to make sure they do!
Make sure you set aside time and stick to it with pigheaded diligence
5. Remember You Can Change The Goals As You Go
Goals should be looked at as beacons and guiding points for you to keep yourself on track along your journey. I would not recommend changing them every week but the music industry is changing so rapidly it’s hard to know what goals are reachable in this landscape. So if the course of the year your goals change its OK to cross one off or modify as you go.
6. Write Down 5 Successes Each Day
I’m inviting you to write down five little victories a day for this entire year.
I learned this powerful technique years ago from T. Harv Eker. Once you start getting into this habit, you are training yourself to put the focus on the positive and get your brain to stop being so critical.
So put a notebook in your gig bag or next to your bed and each day write down 5 things. Make one or two of them music or band related.
Here are some examples:
1. Went to gym.
2. Wrote lyrics for a new song.
3. Called three clubs for potential booking.
4. Did the dishes.
5. Posted a blog.
7. MY FINAL PIECE OF ADVICE – GO EASY ON YOU!
This is a process intended to take a whole year and you will have your days where you may get frustrated, and you will start to beat yourself up (sound familiar?)
Self-criticism will interfere directly with achieving your goals and dreams. So, the next time you are making yourself wrong, take a step back and instead acknowledge the good, and celebrate your achievements.
Another thing that will stop you is not taking time for YOU so schedule time to reflect and take it all in. Maybe that’s a walk in the woods, maybe that’s cooking yourself a decadent meal, or maybe it’s spending time with people you love and turning down your power for a few days without the pressure of a holiday or an event….
Here’s to your success in 2012!
PS
WANT A GUIDE TO HELP YOU?
I wrote one
My completely new THIRD edition of Music Success in Nine Weeks is available for presale now! (and it’s $5 less than last year!)
This edition is completely revamped and now includes a full chapter on YouTube as well as new sections on Fan funding, and new blogging techniques.
Each book comes with My Cyber PR® Mastermind Forum – Get goal support for $27.99 (ebook) $29.99 (physical book)
Many fabulous musicians and I will be there help you along with your goals. 1 Membership comes with each purchase.
When the excellent Kikapu netlabel announced a return from extended hiatus, there was reason to be excited. One of the earliest netlabels, it was in existence from 2001 to 2008. In an interview here after the label was shuttered by its founder, Brad Mitchell (aka the musician Pocka), he said the idea of closing it down had been on his mind for close to two years. Mitchell is an innovative musician and proprietor who considers things thoroughly. He isn’t one to bring the label back lightly. And now, four years after closing, Kikapu is back — albeit at kikapu.org, a new URL. Its first release speaks of its newfound energy and adventurous spirit. The release, a single MP3, is in fact a fully original score to a 1928 silent surrealist film by Antonin Artaud and Germaine Dulac: La coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman). The music is by Roto Visage, who was apparently hired by Transflux Films to create the score, though the project was shelved. He recorded two versions, this being one of them. In addition to providing the MP3 for free download, Kikapu shows the full film with the audio synced. It’s a dense and haunting score, with a voluble mix of orchestral and noise-based approaches, putting front and center the dread inherent in the film’s eerie goings-on.
The Bource Supremacy: Oscar 2012 nominations were announced today, and the ones in the “Music (Original Score)” category seem to serve as a retrograde industry analgesic to the groundbreaking win last year by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for their work on The Social Network. John Williams, whose name is synonymous with old-school, was nominated for not one but two films (The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse). Howard Shore was nominated for Hugo (like Tintin, an animated film). The remaining two scores are Ludovic Bource‘s for The Artist and Alberto Iglesias‘ for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Not only are all five scores orchestral (or large-scale chamber), but as if to emphasize their old-schoolness they’re all associated with movies that take place in the past. (Iglesias also did Steven Soderbergh’s two-part Che, which means he has become the go-to composer for Cold War atmospherics.) The moribund aura hovering around this sort of antiquated approach is emphasized by the nomination of just two songs in the “Music (Original Song)” category. The caption to this situation is: The Academy didn’t get excited about much this year. Fortunately, Drive and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (two of the year’s most sonically conscious films) were acknowledged in, respectively, the Sound Editing and Sound Mixing categories. Full list at oscar.go.com. I’ll be posting my favorite scores of 2011 shortly.
Pedal Power: Yes, there is “A Blog about Hand-Made, Analog Effects Pedals.” The name says it all. Well, the site’s subtitle does. The name of the site, blog.8302.net, is a little more opaque, and according to its author, Barcelona-based Arturo Castillo, the four-digit number signifies nothing in particular. Typical posts feature such language as “Quite often I get asked about the difference between overdrive, fuzz and distortion,” or pay homage to filmmakers (note the last 30 seconds of a video posted in earlier this month). As the videos on his site, as well as his descriptions of pedals, might suggest, Castillo recognizes the equipment as tools for sonic invention unto themselves as much as for traditional employment in the service of guitars. If you prefer your pedal coverage in tidy bursts, Castillo is also at twitter.com/8302net. The pedal blog parallels Castillo’s online shop at, you guessed it, shop.8302.net.
Unmute the Commute: “If an escalator was lubricated to within an inch of its sonic life, it would have much less of one,” writes Peggy Nelson at hilobrow.com. She’s pondering the ramifications and cultural context of a piece by Chris Richards at washingtonpost.com in which he pays close attention to the sounds of public transportation, and in the process interviews Emily Thompson, author of the indispensable book The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933. Richards’ stated and implicit question (“Could this be music?”) is one that is almost frustrating in its obviousness. The affirmative answer is self-evident to, certainly, the majority of readers of this site, and Richards himself cites, of course, the now almost ancient if not fully canonized teachings of John Cage. And yet the question still, in a paper as widely read as the Post, seems to need to be stated as some sort of fresh observation yet to become conventional wisdom. What event, what milestone, would — will — move us beyond having this question repeated? (The New York Times tread on this terrain last year in its “Arts of Summer” coverage.) Nelson, for her part, brings admirable philosophical force to the discussion: “For a thing to function is for it to be in use. And in its use is its constant failure. And in that failure are gaps that force different activity, and allow for different perspective. This is true for cities as well as escalators. And for music. And for us.”
Fantastic Voyage 2012: The sciencemag.org website reports that a “nano-ear” is being developed that “can detect sound a million times fainter than the threshold for human hearing.” This falls under the category of “acoustic microscopy.” The creative and diagnostic potentials are mind-boggling. What confuses me is that I haven’t seen the development mentioned on several bioacoustics and field-recording lists to which I subscribe. It may be just a result of an interesting needle of information being lost in a news-feed haystack, but I wonder if there’s an unfortunate myopia in those areas that focuses on sonic observation of the more immediately visible world. (Tip from Paolo Salvavione, salvagione.com.)
Is “Free” a Gender?: First at actsofsilence.com and then at uncertainform.com, fellow free-culture traveller David Nemeth ponders the statistical gender patterns inherent in electronic music. He quotes Tara Rodgers’ book Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound (“Another artist remarked that her entree into the world of electronic music felt as if she had landed on a planet where something had happened to make all the women disappear”) and documents the numerous incongruities. In brief: there are a lot more men than women represented in the free/netlabel scene. In the process, Nemeth notes that one of my recent projects, the Instagr/am/bient compilation, has but one woman among its 25 participants. I fully agree with Nemeth that it’s unfortunate, and as Rodgers suggests, even eerie, the extent to which it appears that men outnumber women in electronic music, and in the free-music subset of electronic music. In his follow-up post, Nemeth says he has decided to cover one female artist a week at minimum henceforth. I’ll just note two things at this stage of the discussion: first, that the next major Disquiet.com curatorial project, due for release shortly, has three women among its eight (or nine, depending on how you count them) contributors: Kate Carr, Paula Daunt, and Marielle V. Jakobsons; second, that the majority of music I write about is made by people with willfully peculiar monikers, and it’s only late in the process of reading up on them as artists that I learn who is behind that moniker and if it’s a man or a woman.
Digital Commerce Watch: In a promising development, the record label Stonesthrow now offers a $10/month subscription fee for digital versions of “all” its releases. It’s a pretty solid deal: 320kbps MP3s, no DRM, month-to-month billing, and apparently some set of “exclusive” materials: stonesthrow.com.
Nick, is known for his role in duo The Books (with Dutch-born Paul de Jong), and their distinctive, rhythmic, homebrewed-original sound. Here, he covers his manipulations of everything physical and temporal. Sound sampling is a tangible process, the poetry of things put together and assembled in surprising ways. So, too, is his life in music, as he talks about raising kids and literally building a home. They are all of these activities a way of stopping and shaping time, of composing yourself and your loved ones into the future. The resulting sounds and stories might just make you want to move around.
Internationally Acclaimed Violinist and Pianist Visit Boston, NYC, Chicago, Seattle and San Francisco to Perform Repertoire of Brahms, Stravinsky, Pärt, Franck, Schnittke and Shostakovich
In February 2012, violinist Vladimir Spivakov and pianist Olga Kern will embark on a rare joint recital tour in the United States, visiting top concert halls in Boston, New York City, Chicago, Seattle and San Francisco. This is the powerful duo’s first ever joint recital tour outside of Europe, and they have created a dynamic program of works by Brahms, Stravinsky, Pärt, Franck and Schnittke. At the Carnegie Hall concert only, Spivakov and Kern will be joined by celebrated cellist and 2012 Musical America Artist of the Year, David Finkel of the Emerson String Quartet for a special performance of Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2. (complete repertoire list below).
Throughout his career, spanning nearly four decades, violinist Vladimir Spivakov has been praised by critics for his deep insight into composers’ intentions, the richness and beauty of his tone, his fine phrasing and nuance, his emotional impact on his audiences, and his refined artistry and intelligence. Mr. Spivakov made his United States recital debut in 1975 and international engagements quickly followed. He has performed as soloist with the most important orchestras in the world, and collaborated with some of the 20th century’s most eminent conductors, including Svetlanov, Kondrashin, Temirkanov, Rostropovich, Bernstein, Leinsdorf, Ozawa, Maazel, Giulini, Masur, Chailly, Conlon and Abbado. In addition to performing major traditional works, Mr. Spivakov has continually treated his audiences to new and innovative repertoire, both in chamber music and orchestral works. Mr. Spivakov plays a violin by Stradivari. Spivakov is equally renowned as Conductor and Founder of the Moscow Virtuosi and as Founder, Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the National Philharmonic of Russia.
Olga Kern is the striking young Russian Gold Medal winner of the 2001 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Her performance of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3 made her the first woman to achieve this distinction in over 30 years. Kern made her New York debut at Carnegie's Zankel Hall in May, 2004, and eleven days later returned to New York to play again, this time on the stage of the Isaac Stern Auditorium at the invitation of Carnegie Hall. Ms. Kern is a magnetic performer with one of the most prodigious piano techniques of any young pianist. Last season, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and Van Cliburn Foundation honored Ms. Kern’s Cliburn victory 11 years ago with a co-presentation of her talents in March and April of 2011. Also in 2011, Kern performed with the symphonies of Detroit, Anchorage, Nashville, Dallas, Virginia, St. Louis, Rochester, Pittsburgh, Madison, Johnson City, Syracuse and Colorado. Additionally in North America, she has been invited to perform at Longwood Gardens, the Sanibel Music Festival, the Winter Park Bach Festival, the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, and Drake University. Ms. Kern records exclusively with Harmonia Mundi, and her Chopin Sonatas CD was released in 2010.
Vladimir Spivakov and Olga Kern 2012 Recital Tour
February 17 Boston, MA - Sanders Theatre
February 18 New York, NY - Carnegie Hall
February 19 Chicago, IL - Orchestra Hall
February 25 Seattle, WA - Benaroya Hall
February 26 San Francisco, CA - Herbst Theatre
Program:
Johannes Brahms, Violin Sonata No. 3 in D Minor, op. 108
Igor Stravinsky, ‘Suite Italienne’
Arvo Pärt, Spiegel im Spiegel (dedicated to Vladimir Spivakov)
Cesar Franck, Sonata in A Major
Program – February 18 (Carnegie Hall):
Johannes Brahms, Violin Sonata No. 3 in D Minor, op. 108
Igor Stravinsky, ‘Suite Italienne’
Alfred Schnittke, Prelude in Memoriam Dmitri Shostakovich
Dmitri Shostakovich, Piano Trio No. 2 in E Minor, Op.67 violin (with David Finkel)
Bach Violin Concertos Nos. 1 & 2 plus Bach Concerto for Two Violins featuring Meyers on both parts
Violinist Anne Akiko Meyers’ newest recording for eOne entitled Air – The Bach Album will be released on Valentine’s Day, 2012. This is Anne Akiko Meyers’s first orchestral album for eOne and features the English Chamber Orchestra with Steven Mercurio conducting. The album includes Bach’s Violin Concertos Nos. 1 & 2, the Double Concerto for Two Violins, and arrangements of Bach’s “Air”, “Largo” from the Harpsichord Concerto in f minor, and the Bach/Gounod “Ave Maria.”
After her recent acquisition of the “ex-Napoleon/Molitor” Stradivarius violin from 1697, Meyers decided to become the first violinist to record both solo parts of the Double Concerto on two different violins. Meyers joked that this was the first time she agreed with all of her “partner’s” musical ideas.
Meyers believes the golden purity of the tone of the ‘ex-Molitor/Napoleon’ Strad, contrasts beautifully with the darker timbre of the 1730 “Royal Spanish” Strad, on which she recorded the second violin part. The distinctive voice of each violin inspired Meyers to record both parts of the Double Concerto, as she feels like she sounds like a different violinist on each instrument.
Degenerate Music or Entartete Musik was a label applied in the 1930s by the Nazis to music that was proscribed because it was deemed harmful or decadent. Degenerate Music from the 1930s is now a fashionable cause but Entartete Musik from our own times is ignored, presumably because the regime doing the proscribing makes iPhones, hosts the Olympic Games and buys an awful lot of Bentleys. That great travel writer Colin Thubron takes up the story in his indispensable To A Mountain in Tibet:
In a land maimed since 1950 by Chinese occupation, by mass killings and displacement, the Cultural Revolution, with its wholesale destruction of all things old, struck at Tibet's heart. Amid the executions and 'struggle' sessions, all public vestiges of Buddhism were erased, the Buddha denounced as reactionary, sacred images tossed into latrines, and scriptures converted into shoes for disgraced monks. By 1976, out of more than 6000 monasteries and temples, thirteen remained.
One of the any great monasteries destroyed in the Cultural Revolution was Tashi Lhunpo, which lost many of its precious scriptures, statues and images. Of the six thousand monks in the monastery, only two hundered and fifty were able to follow the Dalai Lama into exile, yet in 1972 under the patronage of the Dalai Lama, Tashi Lhunpo Monastery was re-established at Bylakuppe in the south of India.
The Panchen Lama is the spiritual head of the Tashi Lhunpo monastery and the second most important figure in Tibetan Buddhism. In 1989 the 10th Panchen Lama died unexpectedly after delivering a groundbreaking anti-Chinese speech. The lineage then passed to Gedun Choekyi Nyima, the six-year-old boy identified by His Holiness the Dalai Lama as the 11th Panchen Lama. But in May 1995 Gedun Choekyi Nyima disappeared and suspicions that he had been kidnapped were confirmed in May 1996 when the Chinese leadership admitted to holding him and his family in "protective custody."
Above is one of the few photos of the 11th Panchen Lama. At the time of his disappearance Gedun Choekyi Nyima was the youngest political prisoner in the world and despite repeated attempts, no international agency or human rights organisation has since been allowed to visit him or his family, and today their condition remains uncertain. As part of their policy of subjugating the Tibetan people the Chinese leadership nominated and selected their own 11th Panchen Lama in November 1995 who was quoted by the Chinese state news agency, Xinhua as saying:
"All the lamas of Zhaxi Lhunbo (Tashilhunpo) Lamasery, including myself, and the believers should love the Communist Party of China, love our socialist motherland and love the religion we believe in,"
Degenerate Music from the land of the iPhone comes in the form of Time of the Skeleton Lords - the latest in a series of CDs made on location at the Tashi Lhunpo monastery in exile as a joint venture with the 30 IPS label. This new release traces the journey of the consciousness through Bardo, the intermediate period between death and rebirth. Recording and mixing were in the very capable hands of Mark Tucker whose other credits include the Spice Girls and Dario G. Not so long ago this kind of recording would be of interest only to ethnomusicologists. But the quality of today's solid state portable recorders and the involvement of a recording professional means the Tashi Lhunpo release tick the sonic as well as ethnomusicological box - the visceral sound of the dungchen (long horns) establishes a direct lineage to Jonathan Harvey's Body Mandala. More on the Tashi Lhunpo sound in Wagner and the Tantric Orchestra.
* January 27th is Holocaust Memorial Day here in the UK, an event dedicated to learning lessons from the past and using them to challenge hatred and persecution in the present. 'Entartete Musik from the land of the iPhone' is one in a series of three articles that will remember acts of hatred and persecution that have also become victims of collective amnesia.
Also on Facebook and Twitter. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
Despite its anniversary tie-in, Big Beautiful Dark And Scary isn't a retrospective, though it does gesture at some basic BoaC tenets. There's music by all three of the group's founding composers: Julia Wolfe's throbbing title work, David Lang's delicate and then driving sunray and Michael Gordon's haunting and nearly apocalyptic elegy For Madeline, with particularly arresting klezmer-style clarinet wailing.
Other compositions reflect the BoaC stalwarts' wide-open ears and admirable disdain for genre divides. There's three movements from clarinetist and composer Evan Ziporyn's graceful, gamelan-shaded Shadowbang, not to mention three short works by David Longstreth, better known in most corners as a member of The Dirty Projectors.
It's a bit odd that music by Conlon Nancarrow, who was born exactly a century ago, still qualifies as "new" music, but BoaC's arrangements of his player piano studies are as happily demented and wildly fun as ever — as you can hear in Ziporyn's take on Study 3a for the Bang on a Can All-Stars:
!-- END CLASS="CONTAINER PLAYLIST" ID="CON145665414" PREVIEWTITLE="PLAYLIST" -->
There's also a generational shift, as evidenced by the presence of Louis Andriessen's four-part Life (which, on the CD version, includes films by Marijke van Warmerdam). It's followed immediately by Ridgeway, a piece by one of Andriessen's students, Kate Moore. Bang on a Can may have become a venerable institution over the past 25 years, but as this release shows, they're still kicking down doors.
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"fullattribution">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
Can I have this fun, wacky, sound-shaping Arturia monosynth and the new Moog Minitaur, please? Actually, at their prices, you really could – and still spend less than the cost of a lot of standalone synths.
There’s lots of new stuff for musicians. Sometimes, the best thing to do is to leave some of it out, and skip to what’s really interesting.
Neil Bufkin did a great job last year covering NAMM for CDM, shooting some lo-fi, informal videos that got right to the heart of what we wanted to know. So, I’m pleased to share Neil’s work again, since unless you’re following forums (fora?) closely, you might miss it.
He picked out some of our absolute favorites. Highlights: Moog sums up the Minitaur in one, excellent word (“knobby”!), the Arturia shows off its sound shapers, Teenage Engineering flaunt their DIY prowess (hint: you can make your own inputs for next-to-nothing for the OpLab), and we get some up-close highlights of other hardware, too.
Bonus: I’ve included a quick upload from my, cough, phone of the QuNeo hardware. We’ll wait to shoot prettier videos when this gear actually ships. In the meantime, find a really old CRT (maybe from an old Commodore) and plug into that, if you can.
Minitaur: It’s Knobby!
I didn’t get to shoot a video, because I was too busy for the few minutes I had with the Minitaur just playing. The controls are simple, elegant, and – here’s why you know it’s a Moog – absolutely every conceivable position of the parameters sounds brilliant. It’s a bit spooky, or unfair, or something. I’ll have a full hands-on hopefully around April from Berlin. Here’s a tour with the Chief Engineer of Moog.
It has a name that sounds Moog-like, and it might be an analog hardware synth, but make no mistake: this synth is all-French, and un-Moog. The feel of playing it different, it has a great rotary-controlled arpeggiator, and the sound shapers and oscillator mix controls can take it into some very different sonic territory. I made repeat visits to the booth just to wrap my head around the feel, and got to really love it.
Akai MAX49
So now that you’re looking for a keyboard with MIDI and CV to go with all these new sound modules, here’s a surprising candidate – Akai. Yes, we’re utterly relieved to see the company that was recently making tiny keyboards for iPhones and things with only USB MIDI on them return to MIDI DIN and CV.
In my hands-on with the MAX49, I was very impressed by the feel. The keybed feels terrific and just springy enough, and the pads are more traditional MPC-style pads shared on the new MPC controllers. They’ve also sorted the velocity response. (That is, they aren’t the pads readers were complaining about on previous Akai keyboards.) Also, the red color that looks so garish in the product photos looks very nice in person; it’s a high-gloss, thick finish that is reminiscent of car paint.
Here’s a more detailed look at all the features via Neil:
Smithson Martin Emulator
It’s likely spendier than what at least some readers will want – especially with the iPad as an everyman’s alternative – but I really enjoy Neil’s detailed look with Smithson Martin at the custom control layouts on the Emulator hardware.
Our friends at The Verge also take a look at the new hardware. (I’ve become a great fan of Joseph Flatley’s general tech writing, so I’m really pleased to see him covering the music tech area … and Joseph, one of these days we’ll be in the same place at the same time.)
Teenage Engineering OP-1 Update, Oplab
While some may resent the gloss of marketing around their work, the truth is, the Teenage Engineers are also doing some great engineering. The OP-1 updates take a synth that was conceptually interesting and make it more musically inspiring and productive, finally starting to realize some of its original potential.
And then there’s Oplab. At $300, it’s not an Arduino – but what it is is a unique, programmable combination of CV, MIDI, and USB hosting (that’s the key) to which you can connect virtually any hardware or custom sensor or hardware creation. Some onlooked misunderstood what it was initially, comparing its pricing to boxes that only to CV-to-MIDI conversion, and missing the advantages of USB hosting.
Here’s a better look at what it actually does, and I can guarantee, having talked to the TE crew, that there will be more details to come. I hope that this will also inspire other DIY projects, even those not involving the Oplab per se, so we’ll document those aspects, too.
Again, The Verge gives us a second look with a nicer camera.
Livid
Livid has been very, very busy of late. And their latest controller, in collaboration with Richie Hawtin and M-nus, is an extraordinary example of what iteration can do for hardware. The first pad-and-fader-and-knob controllers from Livid were very, very good. This is even better. Quietly, Livid is making the kind of all-around controller many musicians will appreciate, even as big makers struggle to find the formula artists want.
Since I hear there’s some association between M-nus, techno, and Berlin, let’s hope we can get a closer hands-on. Anyone interested in that? Show of hands?
Watch This Space
We have more photos and hands-on details of new tech from NAMM to bring you. I’m working through them slowly, as is my speed, so we can go into the stuff we really care about in greater detail. And since I can’t only look at new gear, new music coverage coming, as well. Be seeing you.
Exclusive pre-release download from iTunes available February 15
Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) and the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) will release a hybrid SACD recording of works by John Adams in conjunction with its month-long American Mavericks Festival in March 2012. Self-produced on the Orchestra’s SFS Media label, the recording features the SFS commission Harmonielehre and Short Ride in a Fast Machine, a work commissioned by MTT. The recording will be available for pre-release by download exclusively from Apple’s iTunes Music Store beginning February 15, the composer’s birthday. The San Francisco Symphony’s e-store is currently accepting pre-sale orders for the Adams recording at sfsymphony.org/store and on February 15 it will become available at the Symphony Store in Davies Symphony Hall. National and international retail release for the recording will be March 13. On March 15, MTT leads the SFS in world premiere of Absolute Jest, a new work by Adams commissioned for its centennial season, with additional performances in Chicago, Ann Arbor and Carnegie Hall.
The SFS commissioned, premiered and recorded Harmonielehre in March 1985 under Edo De Waart during Adams ’ tenure as SFS composer in residence. Adams recalled, “I was a young composer when I wrote Harmonielehre and I had really only written two other orchestra pieces at that point and one of them was Harmonium, which was premiered by the San Francisco Symphony only a few years before that. Harmonielehre was tough coming out… I was searching for what I wanted to say. I knew that part of what I wanted to write for the orchestra was a music that would kind of strum the strings of its repertoire that would play to its strengths… with Harmonielehre I really confronted who I was, who I am, John Adams as a composer - somebody who grew up listening to classical music, classical orchestral music, who played in orchestras when I was younger, who conducted, who loved that repertoire, but at the same time was somebody who also grew up listening to jazz and rock and who was very influenced by minimalism. So it’s this rather strange marriage of the driving pulse of American minimalism and the sensuous and emotional and expressive world of the great European masterpieces.”
Michael Tilson Thomas, who conducted the work during his first season as SFS Music Director in 1995 and multiple times since, said of the work, “When a new piece is premiered, it can make a stunning impression. But the real story of that piece is what emerges over time. When the SFS first performed Harmonielehre in the mid-80s it was a life changing moment for everybody who heard it. I heard it first on the recording and I was drawn into the piece in so many ways, its enormous power, but also its tenderness and depth of expression. And now, decades later, the piece still stands up.”
MTT commissioned Short Ride in a Fast Machine from John Adams in 1986 for a Pittsburgh Symphony performance in Massachusetts. Adams shared, “Michael called me back in 1986 when he was opening a new music festival in Massachusetts with the Pittsburgh Symphony and he asked me to do a fanfare. The sort of traditional fanfare with blaring trumpets didn’t really appeal to me, and how do you write a fanfare when Copland has already done it so well? I thought about it and for some reason the connection with Cape Cod came to mind. Years before that I had been there with a former brother-in-law and he had asked me at about 1 in the morning if I would like to take a ride with him in his Lamborghini. I did and once he started up I wished I hadn’t because he drove very, very fast. The idea of a piece that had that combination of excitement and thrill and was just on the edge of anxiety or terror was the motivating force for Short Ride in a Fast Machine. The piece starts with the click of the wood block and that wood block never changes, it just keeps driving and it’s sort of like a gauntlet through which a 100-piece orchestra has to pass.”
Twitter’s 160 character limit forces users to communicate efficiently. Concise communication helps people understand what you want. It lets them know exactly what you’re asking them to do.
4. Seeking Out Best Practices
There are thousands of articles that advise us on the best Twitter practices. Absord them. Implement them regularly. Before you know it, you’re conditioned to seek out the best practices in other areas of your business.
5. Adaption To Change
Forces outside of our control can change the whole playing field in an instant. Look no further than your own Twitter feed. New trends and opinions are constantly flowing in and out the landscape.
It’s not just important to take notice of these changes. The deeper skill is recognizing which changes apply to you, and how adapt your business accordingly.
It seems unlikely now, but the forces of change can bury Twitter alongside MySpace and Google Buzz. Depending on your perspective, that’s the wonderful thing about change. It doesn’t discriminate, and it can happen in an instant.
So going forward, take the larger lessons of Twitter and apply them to your music career.
To Alex Ross' growing list of Cage centenary events I would add Aldeburgh Festival's John Cage Musicircus curated by James Weeks and Exaudi on June 23. As the Aldeburgh Festival brochure explains - a plethora of Festival artists and others fling open the doors of the Hoffman Building and let the sound stream out. Centrepiece of the Musicircus is a repeat of Exaudi's performance of the John Cage Song Books. Their first performance at Snape of the Song Books provides my header image and an article here, while you can listen to James Weeks talking to me about Elisabeth Lutyens and more in an iTunes podcast here.
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Celebrating Chinese New Year, last year, in New York's Chinatown.
Year — Chinese New Year, that is. Today marks the first day in the Year of the Dragon and, according to the Chinese calendar, the end of the winter season. The Chinese think of it as their spring festival.
Today also marks a different kind of festival, a week-long celebration of Chinese music and its Western intersections. Our colleagues at WQXR have organized "China In New York," a series of events and broadcasts surrounding the New Year and the Tuesday night New York Philharmonic concert (webcast on this site) with Chinese pianist Lang Lang and conductor Long Yu.
In the mid-1970s, after the Cultural Revolution — which aimed to strip China of capitalist and Western elements — young Chinese composers streamed back into the reopened conservatories. Some even made their way to the West.
Below are five such musical adventurers, each of whom came to America to explore Western music styles, fusing them with their own ancient traditions to create vibrant new music that has had its own influence on classical composition.
Have a favorite Chinese composer or piece of music? Let us know in the comments section.
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"fullattribution">Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.
“One of the finest among the astonishing gallery of young virtuoso cellists” (Gramophone)
On January 31, 2012, Hänssler Classic releases the latest album from the charismatic young virtuoso, Johannes Moser. Following his extraordinary recording of concertos by Martinů, Hindemith and Honegger released in May of 2011, Moser returns with a stunning new release featuring two distinguished cello concertos of the mid-20th century: Dimitri Shostakovich's Cello Concerto No. 1 from 1959 and Benjamin Britten’s Cello Symphony premiered in 1964.
Both works were originally composed for the great Mstislav Rostropovich who was the teacher of Moser’s own teacher David Geringas. “The Shostakovich is very precious to me,” Moser says, “so in a way, I feel like I am continuing the family line. The Shostakovich Concerto has been my most important musical companion since my teenage years. I played it at most of the defining, often competitive moments in my early career.” Those moments included the Jugend Musiziert competition where Moser won first-prize at age 16 and it was the piece he played when auditioning to study with David Geringas. Moser then performed the concerto with orchestra for the first time on his 18th birthday and again in the finals of the Tchaikovsky competition which he won in 2002. Moser has also performed the concerto with Mariss Janssons and the Concertgebouw Orchestra.
The Shostakovich concerto is characterized by vitality, humor and is very much an expression of the cellist’s virtuosity, but also has incredibly intimate moments. In the finale, Shostakovich quotes Stalin’s favorite song "Suliko" and turns it into a grimace. Since it had been six years after Stalin’s death, Shostakovich felt that he could be political in a sarcastic way without being deported right away.
As the title suggests, cello and orchestra are equal partners in Britten's "Symphony for Cello and Orchestra" op 68, creating what is at times the clarity of chamber music. This new recording continues Moser's exploration of 20th century cello concertos while building upon his masterful interpretations of cello sonatas by Britten.
“The Britten Cello Symphony is the total opposite of the Shostakovich,” Moser explains. “The cellist’s virtuosity and individual voice are no longer in the foreground and Britten truly turns the cello solo part into an integral element of very symphonic writing. I appreciated the opportunity not to be a counterpart to the orchestra but an integrated part of it.”
Both concerti are very personal statements of the composers, who were both outcasts in their society: Shostakovich being on the edge of deportation because of his controversial writing, and Britten because of his homosexuality. Both composers longed to be part of the society that was rejecting them in such a cruel way.
Mention “St. Paul’s Chapel” to most New Yorkers and they will think you are referring to the downtown church associated with Trinity Church, near the site of 9/11. There is another St. Paul’s Chapel, and this is uptown on the Columbia campus. Organist Gail Archer will play a fine program of contemporary American music there at 7:30 this coming Wednesday, Jan. 25: Tower, Persichetti, Barber, David Noon, and a Hayes Biggs premiere. (This is the first in a series of American music concerts by Archer at several locations – more info at her website.) There is a wonderful Aeolian Skinner organ in the Columbia chapel. I know it first hand from my days as a music minister for the Catholic Campus Ministry at Columbia. Here is a shot of the current console, a 1997 installation, but looking similar to the console I experienced about a decade earlier.
Among the delights of the instrument is a dome division, with a very powerful reed stop as well as speakers for an electronic 32′ pedal stop. I would reserve the use of that reed (what is called the “crown trumpet” in the stop list – see the link above) for special occasions. I remember using it to intone the last hymn of a big Easter Vigil service, and hearing somebody at the back of the chapel cry out in shock, pinned to the wall by the sound – although a joyous delirium brought on by beauty and length of the service as well as the strict Paschal fast may have also been factors in that reaction. More about my Columbia classmate Hayes Biggs here and here; my experience with organs here. Paul Dinter, Catholic chaplain at Columbia during my time there, has a memoir worth reading.
All of which is, of course, small beer compared with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. But the infringement of human rights in China is very big beer indeed; so it is worth noting that the London Philharmonic returned a few days ago from a seven concert tour of China with pianist Hong Xu while tomorrow (Jan 24) the New York Philharmonic gives a Chinese New Year concert in Avery Fisher Hall under guest conductor Long Yu.
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Photo: Martha Vdovin, snapped for CDM in the mood lighting of the Line 6 press room at the NAMM show.
Few things are as essential to music making as the experience of a live show. So it’s about time someone took some risks to see if there’s a better way to run live sound. Line 6′s new StageScape M20d is important because it does just that – it finally says the mixer as you know it doesn’t have to be sacred, and tries to build a better one. Traditionalists might be skeptical – and with good reason, as we see if this idea works in practice – but it features some bold ideas worth considering.
Centered on a touchscreen interface, the StageScape mixer eschews traditional channel strips in favor of images and virtual touch controls. Want to tweak your vocalist’s sound? Instead of remembering which channel she’s on, tap the picture of the singer. StageScape brings up an elaborate array of processing options, all performed behind the scenes by Line 6′s DSP tech. You can even store in internal memory twenty seconds of a band playing, then adjust multitrack audio after the fact until it’s right, wandering around a venue using an iPad as a remote control. From processing to preset settings, control to sound experience, StageScape is completely and totally digital. It even “knows” what kind of input you’re using when you plug in the jack.
The solution is radically different than what we’ve seen before. It’s likely to scare away some users, and we’ll have to see how it works in practice. But coupled with some sophisticated sonic capabilities, it just might win over new users and adventurous live sound vets. Here’s a first look, after CDM got to meet with Line 6 at the product’s unveiling.
A Better Mousetrap
For the most part, all mixers are designed with the same basic assumptions in mind. To connect multiple microphones and instruments, the mixer presents a series of columns that represent “channels,” and lines up parameters for each of those channels. To amplify and treat the sound of a singer, then, you connect the vocal microphone to a channel number, then adjust the settings for that particular channel. The challenge is, you are restricted to the knobs and faders on physical hardware, so anything you do is limited to a fixed number of controls – and you have to remember the abstraction of which instrumentalist is associated with which channel. Just writing this out seems redundant and obvious; we’re so used to the arrangement that it’s hard to even think about it. But if you do think about it, there is a layer of abstraction between what you’re doing and the way you’d think about the actual musical ensemble.
Adding a touchscreen interface means these kinds of abstractions don’t have to be there, but most software simply recreates the same setup. It may be easier to label channels once you have a display, but otherwise digital mixers have generally replicated the same setup. And even software has generally aped the lineup of channel strips, rather than design a visual metaphor more closely tied to how we think.
StageScape tosses all of that out the window.
It starts from the moment you plug in a cable. I/O jacks on the back, featuring combo Neutrik connectors, “know” what sort of cable you’ve connected. So, for instance, plug in an XLR, and the mixer guesses you’ve got a mic. Add a 1/4″ line jack, and it works out you’ve connected something that’s line level or instrumental. (I’m still researching just how much the auto-sensing considers, but it at the very least knows which connection you used.) The feature works with both input and output, and sets paramters like channel gain, EQ, effects and routing.
Live sound has already benefited from going digital. Having hung out front-of-house with the rival Avid Venue system, I can already tell you live sound engineers adore the change. Let’s assume you have a lineup of three bands. Already, the ability to label channels for those three different ensembles, set levels, and then store presets for instant-recall of settings for each is huge. In fact, I’d wager almost everyone reading this has been in a live situation – front-of-house, onstage, or both – where the show didn’t sound right because some setting from soundcheck was lost in translation. Digital presets are already a breakthrough.
What’s different with StageScape – apart from the fact that it’s far cheaper than something like Venue – is that the whole process is instantly focused on players, and it’s visual. Got a singer? You place a picture of the singer on a virtual stage on the screen, dragging their position in place with your finger. Got a guitarist? Drag a picture of a guitar. (Note that this view is called Perform Mode – you can also see more traditional views if that’s more convenient.)
The same graphical workflow applies to tweaking sound. X/Y pads take a bunch of DSP functions and label them in everyday English, so instead of adjusting a bunch of EQs and dynamic controls, you drag to settings like “punch” or “bright.” Line 6 emphasized that this will help folks who lack audio engineering backgrounds, but it might be useful to experienced users, too. Dynamics, equalization, and effects are also available as a separate, traditional “Deep Edit” view. Multiband compression and multi-point parametric EQ naturally benefit from touchscreen interfaces, since you can manipulate these graphical views directly. But you can also create your own X/Y presets, so when you need to make quick adjustments, you can quickly navigate favorite settings.
Of Touchscreens and iPads
It’s worth noting that the interface on the SoundScape mixer isn’t an iPad. Various vendors at the NAMM show last week had iPad dock solutions, but there’s an advantage to using a custom touchscreen. What’s wonderful about capacitive touchscreens (like the iPad and iPhone) is the instant response you get from a feathery touch. What’s terrible about capacitive touchscreens is that a feathery touch can quickly screw up your settings in a live show. That’s bad.
Photo: Marsha Vdovin, CDM.
Line 6 joins a number of other music products in instead using a resistive screen. This technology requires some pressure before it senses your finger, which makes accidental touches less likely. It’s also less susceptible to, for instance, sweaty fingers.
Instead of making the iPad the main interface, Line 6 employs Apple’s tablet as a remote control. There, it makes far more sense than locked into a dock. You can wander around a venue and control the SoundScape mixing settings, hearing how they sound in different spots. (Especially useful: those 20 seconds of multitrack recording can be looped, as Line 6 showed off in a press conference featuring Colbie Cailet. It’s a simple thing to pull off, but so badly needed in live sound, it was met with enthusiastic cheers by the gathered crowd.) You do need an optional USB WiFi adapter to enable this functionality.
You’re also not without physical controls. Endless encoders, color-coded to match on-screen controls, provide physical, hands-on control. I don’t think anyone is going to like this arrangement quite as well as motorized faders (or faders, generally), but it does mean you get tangible control. (It’s also not hard to imagine Line 6 offering a motorized fader module if this box is a hit. In fact, I’d very much love to see a USB input on there, unless I missed one.)
Recording and Sound Processing
In addition to being a mixer, the SoundScape M20d is a multi-track recording device, so it can capture the same performance it’s mixing – perfect for preparing downloads of a live show. It records 24-bit lossless WAV to SD card or a connected USB drive or computer.
You also get various effects – no surprise with a Line 6 product – including:
Parametric EQ
Multi-band compression
Feedback suppression
Studio reverb
Delays
Vocal doubling
These in turn are bundled into channel effects.
I/O
While it eschews the channel strip metaphor, the M20d is otherwise a conventional mixer under the hood:
12 digitally-controlled mic/line combo ins (using that auto-sensing feature mentioned earlier)
2 digital inputs from computer, USB, or SD
Stereo line inputs
4 monitor outs, 2 mains, each with auto-sensing on balanced XLR
Line 6 also has something called L6 LINK, a multi-channel, digital networked format via an XLR plug that allows you to connect and intelligently-configure Line 6′s own speakers. At NAMM, they were showing off their own StageSource speakers and subwoofer. They sounded terrific, though I am a little sad there isn’t a standard protocol employed on the mixer that would allow you to choose vendors.
What it’s Not
As part of the “let’s put an iPad in everything” trend at NAMM (which included almost everything but a harpsichord dock for your iPad), Mackie launched the DL1608.
In fact, the DL1608 basically is the Line 6, conceptually speaking, but minus all the critical refinements I mentioned – made more obvious when you look at images of these two units side by side.
It immediately reproduces a virtual mixer screen on the touchscreen, which has the effect of demonstrating … why physical faders make more sense when you’re trying to reproduce physical faders.
Using an iPad as a primary touchscreen saves some scratch, but then your iPad is stuck in your mixer, you have a capacitive touchscreen that can be too touchy when used live, and you have annoying things like notifications popping up while you’re trying to mix.
You don’t get a fully-integrated system.
When you do want walk-around wireless control, you leave your mixer without any controls at all. (The Line 6 solution, by contrast, supports even more than one iPad, so your sound guy or gal can stay front of house while you and your bass player wander around the room.)
So, sorry. If I’m going to save money, I’ll just buy one of Mackie’s (excellent) non-touchscreen mixers. I think we have to see how touchscreens work for mixer in general, but if I were to go touch, the Line 6 product looks both more practical and better-equipped to actually innovate with the concept.
No official pricing or availability has been announced, but early numbers I heard made this sound accessible.
To me, the big question will be who actually uses StageScape. Line 6 kept talking about bands who lack their own live sound person. But while the idea of a band running their own sound is appealing, that means the same band who couldn’t afford a tech now are buying and lugging around this PA system – possible in some cases, but surely not in all. Someone, it seems, is sure to buy it: venues, perhaps, and certainly academic and institutional settings where its user-friendly features are doubly valuable.
Once in place, we’ll see whether the “magical” interface can really replace a traditional mixer. I can certainly see some live sound people very badly missing the ability to hover their hands over physical faders. Oddly, the folks who might appreciate this most are the people who do live sound, and find its preset storage, built-in processing, and seamless configuration appealing in the field. I look forward to when we get to try it out.
But I applaud Line 6 for rethinking the mixing interface itself. The company certainly has a track record – co-founders Marcus Ryle and Michel Doidic gave us ADAT and then single-handedly popularized digital DSP for guitarists. We’ll see now if this is their third grand acheivement in transforming the business. In the meantime, this could easily be, amidst an avalanche of new gear, the most daring and promising new music product announcement this year.
This is what they did wrong from a marketing perspective:
They didn’t share the stories of those affected by piracy. Some of the bill’s biggest supporters, the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), vouched their support but the messaging came from their executive staff. They didn’t tell the story of the thousands of workers affected by piracy: film hands, aspiring writers, the struggling artist. People launched attacks against the entertainment industry’s wealthy while ignoring the possibility that multi-billion dollar Internet companies probably have their own lobbyists influencing legislation as well. People don’t mind hating a big corporation but it’s hard to dismiss the power of a single story.
They Communicated in the Wrong Places. Nearly all of the messaging supporting SOPA were featured on industry sites (such as ASCAP and BMI) but that information wasn’t being shared much outside of that. On the other hand, anti-SOPA/PIPA messaging prominently featured on social media and Internet sites (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.), making it easy to spread quickly and effectively.
They Focused on the Wrong Message. People don’t care about industries or companies, they care about themselves. When the entertainment industry talks about lost revenue or lost jobs, eyes glaze over (they’re tired of hearing that tale). It’s why piracy continues to rise. On the other hand, hen someone hears “the Internet will break” or that they could lose their favorite social media site, they begin to listen and more importantly, want to take action.
The Brand Suffered but They Didn’t React. The bill supporters assumed that people would use reason and read the bills themselves (especially as they got updated throughout the process) but in reality, most people didn’t care enough to follow. They had one poor impression and it was enough. In the customer service industry, if manage negative touch-points aren’t managed, customers are lost. By then, it’s too little, too late. Many of the bill’s supporters began jumping ship simply because they didn’t want to be associated with SOPA or PIPA.
Even if the bills undergo major overhaul, I doubt they’ll get the support that they need. My recommendation would be to change the name (the brand) and begin with fresh messaging, highlighting the stories of the people who would be affected by its passage. Have independent artists reach out to their fans, show case budding directors and fashion designers. Show that it was more than the entertainment industry who had a stake. Share the a real story that people could relate to and spread.
Most of the bill sponsors involved never expected such a strong reaction since major laws are nearly ignored everyday. However, when you mess with the largest supply and delivery information services in the world, expect some sort of retaliation. In the end, it’s just business. But remember, a lot of spending, just like voting, is emotional and not necessarily rational. The story or idea that spreads and sticks is the one that wins.
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Simon Tam is owner of Last Stop Booking, a full service agency that offers tour booking and music consulting services. Simon has appeared on stage at over 1,200 live events and has traveled North America presenting ideas about the music industry. Simon’s writing on music and marketing can be found at www.laststopbooking.com
Conférence sur HU
(Analyse musicale d'Inori de Karlheinz Stockhausen)
Conférence donnée pendant les "Stockhausen courses"
Kürten, 17 août 2003 - Sülztalhalle Kürten
Présentée et chantée par Kathinka Pasveer
Projection de sons : Karlheinz Stockhausen
Diffusée avec l'aimable autorisation de Stockhausen Stiftung für Musik
www.stockhausen.org
Digital Performer, and Performer before it, has been a Mac-only program for almost as long as you’ve been able to buy a computer called “Macintosh.” The first Performer release was available in 1985. (Professional Composer, before that, was out in ’84.) Performer, accordingly, has had a big impact on the history of the sequencer, and later the audio and MIDI arrangement hybrid that came to be known as Digital Audio Workstation, throughout the history of the genre. But it’s never run on any Microsoft platform – until now.
In an announcement I doubt anyone saw coming, MOTU has announced they’re shipping Digital Performer 8 for both Mac and Windows, in both 32-bit and 64-bit modes. That means, of the major conventional DAWs, nearly all run on both platforms: Pro Tools, Cubase/Nuendo, and now DP, to say nothing of tools like Ableton Live or Reason. All that’s left are Cakewalk’s SONAR, and Apple’s Logic – and Logic is the one made by Apple. Of course, being cross-platform isn’t always good for business – just ask the ghost of Opcode Studio Vision Pro – but recent changes in how software is developed have made cross-platform compatibility and testing more straightforward than they once were.
For Windows users, you get VST plug-in support and ReWire compatibility.
Other new DP8 features for both Mac and Windows:
“Punch Guard” adds four seconds of audio before and after each record, in case you punch in too late or out too early.
A new video engine supports 720p or 1080p with flexible output options – aside from your main screen, you can use a second display or HDMI or (very cool) SDI. In the producer community, I often hear skepticism about who uses DP. One major answer: the scoring and video production markets, in a big way. And MOTU’s recent developments in video hardware (hello, Thunderbolt) make them a player to watch, even when industry heavyweight Avid is casting its shadow.
New guitar amp and bass cabinet plug-ins, guitar pedals, modeled analog delay, multi-band dynamic EQ, de-esser, kick drum enhancer, and modeled vintage spring reverb. Give a DSP programmer a cookie, and … you wind up with a DAW full of fun sound design toys.
Themes for the UI, including “None More Black,” ensuring full Spinal Tap joke compliance for this industry-leading DAW.
That means that Mac users still have plenty to sink their teeth into.
Also, if you happen to be using the CueMix FX software in MOTU’s audio interfaces, you can now control that software via an iPad. Here’s what’s cool there: they’ve done the implementation in OSC (OpenSoundControl). It’s great to see a big industry player throw some weight behind that format.
That’s all we’ve got now – that and a screen shot – but I’m interested to know, any Windows users intrigued by getting to run DP? Or do you have no idea what it actually offers?
In fact, SONAR is in the cold when it comes to multi-platform support, but it has its loyal users, so that’s the question – would Windows users who miss Logic or use SONAR or Cubase consider switching, now that DP will be available on their OS of choice?
Gustav Leonhardt conducts La Petite Bande in Rameau's 1748 opera 'Zais'. This complete recording was made at the studios of the WDR in 1977 and is one of the few recordings by Leonhardt and this group which was not released by Deutsche Harmonia Mundi. I bought a copy at the Paris Bastille FNAC in 1999 for a large number of French Francs. I vividly remember listening to it a few weeks later on a Sony Discman while wandering through Regents Park in London during a light rain. My extreme depression on that day found solace in the beauty of Rameau's music.
If forced, in a variant of the 'desert island' question, to select only one composer that I could 'keep', it would be Rameau, and my very favorite recordings of his music are those made in the 1970s by Leonhardt and Sigiswald Kuijken with La Petite Bande – 'Pygmalion', 'Zoroastre' and selections from 'Hippolyte et Aricie'. Since 'Zais' (not to be confused with the same composer's 'Nais'!) is not presently available on disc – this recording is long out-of-print – I thought I would mark Mr. Leonhardt's passing by sharing it with you. I obtained this recording before I had developed the true collector's mentality and long ago lost the libretto, but have included scans of the portions of the packaging that remain.
As noted below, this blog has been retired – but I reserve the right to come out of retirement from time to time. I cannot, alas, reupload the other files on this site as they expire ....
In September, the San Francisco Symphony and MTT launched the Orchestra’s milestone Centennial Season with a celebratory gala concert dubbed “Fanfare for a New Century” at Davies Symphony Hall. The gala concert will be presented as a two-hour special, San Francisco Symphony at 100, by Great Performances on PBS on Friday, March 30 at 9PM (check local listings). The broadcast is hosted by Bay Area author Amy Tan and directed for television by Gary Halvorson and features MTT conducting the Orchestra and two of the leading artists of our time, violinist Itzhak Perlman performing Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor and pianist Lang Lang performing Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major. The concert opens with Aaron Copland’s vivid portrayal of American prairie life, the Billy the Kid Ballet Suite and concludes with Britten’s orchestral showpiece The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra of which the San Francisco Chronicle said: “…as Thomas led his colleagues, section by section and soloist by soloist… the listener could only marvel at the level of individual excellence and communal artistry on display.” Capping off the concert is an encore of Bay Area composer John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine featuring moving images of San Francisco projected throughout Davies Symphony Hall. (An audio recording of this performance of Short Ride in a Fast Machine, a work commissioned by MTT in 1986, will also be available on an upcoming all-John Adams recording on the Orchestra’s own SFS Media label along with their 2010 performance of Adams’ Harmonielehre, a work SFS commissioned and premiered in 1985. The recording will be available on March 13, with a special pre-release on iTunes and in the San Francisco Symphony store in Davies Symphony Hall beginning on February 15, the composer’s birthday.)
Lyric’s website (www.lyricopera.org) is a comprehensive source of information, handsomely designed and easy to navigate. Videos about each opera are available for viewing throughout the season, including highlight reels introduced by Sir Andrew Davis and Renée Fleming, commentaries by Anthony Freud, and interviews with other artists and directors. In early February, Lyric will post Anthony Freud’s 2012-13 season overview video.
98.7WFMT will air locally and stream live (on wfmt.com) the opening-night performance of each opera in Lyric’s 2012-13 season. The WFMT Radio Network will rebroadcast eight of the nine operas nationally and internationally in May and June of 2013.
San Francisco Opera General Director David Gockley today announced the Company’s 2012–13 repertory season, guest artists and performance schedule, in addition to three world premiere commissions slated for 2013 by Nolan Gasser and Carey Harrison (The Secret Garden), Mark Adamo (The Gospel of Mary Magdalene), and Tobias Picker and J.D. McClatchy (Dolores Claiborne). Gockley also announced the extension of his contract to lead San Francisco Opera through the 2015–16 Season along with the extension of contracts for the artistic leadership team of Music Director Nicola Luisotti, Principal Guest Conductor Patrick Summers and Resident Conductor Giuseppe Finzi.
The Company’s 90th season opens Friday, September 7, 2012 with a gala performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto. Maestro Luisotti leads an international cast of singers, including acclaimed Serbian baritone and Verdi specialist Željko Lučić in the title role, and the Company debuts of Polish soprano Aleksandra Kurzak as Gilda and Italian tenor Francesco Demuro as the Duke of Mantua. Opera Ball, the Company’s celebrated signature benefit event, co-produced with the San Francisco Opera Guild in support of the San Francisco Opera and Opera Guild education programs, will precede the opening night performance at the historic War Memorial Opera House.
In addition to Rigoletto, which features two international casts of singers, San Francisco Opera’s 2012–13 Season offers Vincenzo Bellini’s bel canto gem I Capuleti e i Montecchi (The Capulets and the Montagues); the Bay Area premiere of Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick, commissioned and produced by San Francisco Opera, The Dallas Opera, San Diego Opera, Calgary Opera and the State Opera of South Australia; Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin; Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca, interpreted by two casts of widely acclaimed singers; Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann); Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Così fan tutte; the world premiere of Mark Adamo’s The Gospel of Mary Magdalene; and the world premiere of Nolan Gasser and Carey Harrison’s The Secret Garden, a co-production with Cal Performances.
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 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturday from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m.
If you’re an emerging composer looking to produce and promote your work, hear it played before live audiences by first-rate musicians, learn from and hang out with music notables like Christopher Theofanidis and Irvine Arditti in the historic drop-dead gorgeous Northern Italian city of Pavia, check out the highSCORE Festival, Italy’s leading annual contemporary music festival and master classes program. The date are July 23 – August 4.
“Last year’s program was a huge success,” says Artistic Director Giovanni Albini. “In 12 intense days we had nine lectures, several hours of both master classes and private lessons, 54 new music scores performed (of which 35 were premieres) in seven concerts, 30 participant composers and performers, and many guest artists. Plus Italian classes, a guided trip of the City of Pavia, and an outstanding workshop on Italian cooking.”
This year’s guest of honor is the legendary violinist Irvine Arditti, who has recorded more than 180 CDs with his own String Quartet and more than 30 as a soloist, premiering the music by the most important composers of the contemporary period. Arditti will present a lecture on contemporary violin performing practices, providing participant composers with his expertise and knowledge of modern music.
Christopher Theofanidis, fresh off the success of his opera Hearth of a Soldier, staged by the San Francisco Opera, is the Faculty Chair of the Festival for the third year in a row.
“Christopher is a great artist and an amazing teacher with an enormous experience,” Albini says. “A wonderful person, entirely dedicated to participants during the days of the event. He is able to offer so much, from both artistic and human point of view.”
Mario Garuti, Head of the Composition Department of the Conservatory of Milan, Dmitri Tymoczko from Princeton University, Amy Beth Kirsten, Ugo Nastrucci, Marina Giovannini, and Giovanni Albini complete the faculty roster.
Once again this year, the highSCORE Prize will be awarded to the best participant composer, who will have the chance to come back for free in 2013. In the previous editions, the highSCORE Prize has been awarded to Jenny Beck (2010) and Riho Esko Maimets (2011).
The 2012 edition will focus on the music for String Quartet, solo Violin, Viola, Cello, and Guitar (classical or electric), but participants are also invited to submit music for theorbo and lute, with or without electronics. In 2010, Ugo Nastrucci gave a lecture on contemporary music for early instruments. To see some tips on how to write for such instruments, see last year’s highSCORE Proceedings.
Among the many call for scores dedicated to participants the clarinet ensemble led by Denis Zanchetta, piccolo clarinet at Teatro La Scala, Milan, stands out.
Performances during the festival will be presented at cultural and historical sites throughout Pavia. Such venues will include the famous church of St. Peter in the Golden Sky where St. Augustine and Boetius are buried, while the “F. Vittadini” Higher Institute of Music Studies, with its 20 plus large, well-equipped rooms with Vertical and Grand Pianos, is the core of the festival.
The event, under the artistic direction of Giovanni Albini and the executive production of Paolo Fosso, is produced by the highSCORE New Music Center. The Center has just published the CD “Quintets,” containing five scores for electric guitar and String Quartet written by the best composers of the 2010 festival. A new CD, including the best compositions of highSCORE Festival 2011 for solo guitar, will be recorded in the next few months.
Proceedings and video excerpts from the last editions can be found on the highSCORE New Music Center brand new portal.
Here is a paper that continues what was put forth sometime back here in part 1. It is perhaps needs more explanation, but since the interest is probably limited to a small group I thought not to say too much.
The Disquiet Junto is a group I founded on 
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Much of the Mizati album ydna, released late last year, is a collection of slight elements aligned in unlikely combinations, among the most delectable of such combinations being those that mix emotionally remote piano lines with slender fragments of electronic percussion. There’s something special to how the piano here is almost inhuman in its simplicity, and how that spare quality allows for a camaraderie, a kind of cold simpatico, with the far more mechanized beat. The track titled, simply, “G” may be the highlight, its chords spaced apart to such an extent that they often decay fully before a new one enters in — an effect that is amplified, so to speak, as the close nears, when the decay fades into a drone that never quite seems to end (
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Among the many good things that have come from the increasing prevalence of drone-based music is a clarification, a realignment, of the word “industrial.” Thanks in addition to the rise in field recordings as broadly produced and consumed sonic media, the word “industrial” has ceased meaning simply a pounding nightife nihilism akin to an ersatz jackhammer beat, and come to mean a sonic aura akin to or actually resulting from a mechanical process. And that why it is a term that can be applied to much of Colliding Textures, a four-song release by Mon0 on the great Test Tube netlabel. The album’s initial two tracks, “Cathedral of the Lost” (
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The so-called “long read” is a symptom of our time. It isn’t called the “considered read,” because anything, long or short, can be read with determination and attention. And it isn’t called the “long write,” because for one thing short pieces can take longer to write than do long ones, and for another phrases like “long read” are more likely to take root as common utterance if they flatter the audience. 
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The Search Engine is the first album from Strictly Kev, Ninja Tune regular (and the label’s art director), in over a decade. Recording as DJ Food, Kev welcomed guests Matt Johnson (The The) and J.G. Thirwell (Foetus), among others, to the project. In an extensive podcast interview, hosted by the label, he talked about the intersection of sampling and songwriting. “The phrase ‘keep it real’ in hip-hop just makes me despair,” he said, expressing no interest in sonic reality and everything in a studio-production basis for the manipulation of sound and for the construction of tunes (the file is available not as an MP3 but as a sizable 
