New Music reBlog

May 17, 2012

Dancers of Ubud

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

reBlogged from: Arcane Candy

on May 17, 2012 at 04:00 AM

May 2nd, 2012 playlist

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

reBlogged from: Music For Internets

on May 17, 2012 at 02:00 AM

April 11th, 2012 playlist

This is only a partial playlist of the first hour.

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

reBlogged from: Music For Internets

on May 17, 2012 at 02:00 AM

April 18th, 2012 playlist

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

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

reBlogged from: Music For Internets

on May 17, 2012 at 02:00 AM

April 25th, 2012 playlist

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

reBlogged from: Music For Internets

on May 17, 2012 at 02:00 AM

May 16th, 2012 playlist

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

reBlogged from: Music For Internets

on May 17, 2012 at 02:00 AM

309 :: 18 May 2012 :: Improvisers

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

 

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


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


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


• Roscoe Mitchell: Eeltwo Part 2, from the album, The Solo Concert, 2009, on AECO
  
  Star Night, from the album, Duets and Solos, 1990, on Black Saint


• Anthony Braxton: Opus 77E, from the album, Alto Saxophone Improvisations, 1979, on Arista
  
  Composition 998, from the album, Compositions, 1989, on Hat Hut Records

reBlogged from: Music From Other Minds

on May 17, 2012 at 02:00 AM

April 4th, 2012 playlist

Post New Music Bake Sale wrap-up

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

reBlogged from: Music For Internets

on May 17, 2012 at 01:00 AM

May 16, 2012

Cage’s Rhetorical Sleight-of-Hand

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

reBlogged from: PostClassic

on May 16, 2012 at 09:00 PM

Carlos Fuentes, composer?

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

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

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

reBlogged from: Secret Geometry - James Primosch's blog

on May 16, 2012 at 08:00 PM

City Opera's Telemann

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

reBlogged from: Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

on May 16, 2012 at 07:00 PM

New horizons in concert publicity

reBlogged from: Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

on May 16, 2012 at 06:00 PM

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

reBlogged from: NPR Blogs: Deceptive Cadence

on May 16, 2012 at 06:00 PM

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

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

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

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

Brett Dean - Photo by Mark Coulson

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

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

Mark Applebaum

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

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

–

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

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

on May 16, 2012 at 05:00 PM

From a Diary: I:xxv

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

reBlogged from: Renewable Music

on May 16, 2012 at 02:00 PM

Roman Haubenstock-Ramati ~ Klavierstücke

	Roman Haubenstock-Ramati ~ Klavierstücke Klavierstücke Roman Haubenstock-Ramati (1963-65) ....For piano....	From: stanchinsky Views: 3 1 ratings
	Time: 09:58	More in Music

reBlogged from: Uploads by stanchinsky

on May 16, 2012 at 01:00 PM

How to Book a Tour: Unconventional Advice

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

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

Three easy solutions:

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


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


3. Post an ad on Craigslist.

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

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


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


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


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


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

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

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

 

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

 

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

reBlogged from: Music Think Tank (primary) RSS

on May 16, 2012 at 12:00 PM

Créations pour Basson au Centre Pompidou, 5 avril 2012

	Créations pour Basson au Centre Pompidou, 5 avril 2012 Jeudi 5 avril 2012 Centre Pompidou, Grande Salle FRÉDÉRIC KAHN Unendlichkeit (2011-2012) pour basson, support audio et dispositif électronique temps réel Commande : Ircam-Centre Pompidou Dédicace : À l'intention de Paul Riveaux (Ensemble intercontemporain) Réalisation informatique musicale Ircam/Thomas Goepfer Paul Riveaux, basson Dai FUJIKURA Calling (2011-2012) pour basson solo Commande International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Tokyo Opera City Dédicace : Rebekah Heller, Ayako Kuroki and Pascal Gallois Création : 2012, États-Unis, par Rebekah Heller Création française Editions : Ricordi Munich Pascal Gallois, basson	From: ensembleinter Views: 5 1 ratings
	Time: 06:46	More in Music

reBlogged from: Uploads by ensembleinter

on May 16, 2012 at 11:00 AM

Holler- Spharen

	Holler- Spharen York Holler's "Spharen" (2006) for large orchestra.	From: John11inch Views: 7 1 ratings
	Time: 39:32	More in Music

reBlogged from: Uploads by john11inch

on May 16, 2012 at 05:00 AM

Stulginska- The Fog

	Stulginska- The Fog Agnieszka Stulginska's "The Fog" (2008?) for string quartet and tape delay.	From: John11inch Views: 8 0 ratings
	Time: 05:37	More in Music

reBlogged from: Uploads by john11inch

on May 16, 2012 at 03:00 AM

Rihm- Ungemaltes Bild

	Rihm- Ungemaltes Bild Wolfgang Rihm's "Ungemaltes Bild" (1994) for orchestra.	From: John11inch Views: 1 0 ratings
	Time: 16:11	More in Music

reBlogged from: Uploads by john11inch

on May 16, 2012 at 02:00 AM

Hosokawa- Floral Fairy

	Hosokawa- Floral Fairy Toshio Hosokawa's "Floral Fairy" (2003) for string quartet.	From: John11inch Views: 4 0 ratings
	Time: 06:16	More in Music

reBlogged from: Uploads by john11inch

on May 16, 2012 at 01:00 AM

Ung- Khse Buon

	Ung- Khse Buon Cambodian-American, Grawemeyer laureate Chinary Ung's Khse Buon (1980) for solo viola.	From: John11inch Views: 14 0 ratings
	Time: 16:59	More in Music

reBlogged from: Uploads by john11inch

on May 16, 2012 at 01:00 AM

May 15, 2012

Justice Ginsburg's favorite records

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

reBlogged from: Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

on May 15, 2012 at 10:00 PM

Kathleen Ferrier: A Voice Not Forgotten

reBlogged from: NPR Blogs: Deceptive Cadence

on May 15, 2012 at 08:00 PM

Skrillex, as Reviewed By Very Young Children

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

“What is dubstep?”

Darned if I know any more, kid.

What have we learned?

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

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

3. Kids can dance.

4. These kids look cooler than I do.

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

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

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

“Where’s the after-party?”

reBlogged from: Create Digital Music

on May 15, 2012 at 07:00 PM

Signals Improv

Sound Clip: Signals Improv by Richard Graham

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

Video documentation

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

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

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

More on this artist

reBlogged from: Sound is Art

on May 15, 2012 at 06:00 PM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep tabs on the film on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/idreamofwiresdocumentary

reBlogged from: Create Digital Music

on May 15, 2012 at 05:00 PM

The Fax Machine as Dubstep Muse (MP3)

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

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

reBlogged from: Disquiet

on May 15, 2012 at 05:00 PM

"Pas de cinq" Mauricio kagel

	"Pas de cinq" Mauricio kagel Mauricio KAGEL " Pas de cinq " Scène à déambuler Enregistré le 11 février à la Cité de la musique Editeur Universal édition Interprétation Frédérique Cambreling Jérôme Comte Éric-Maria Couturier Samuel Favre Frédéric Stochl Coproduction Ensemble intercontemporain Cité de la musique Réalisation vidéo et montage Anne Delrieu Lumière Fabien Leca Opérateurs image Fabien Leca, Céline Metzger Captation sonore Philippe Davesne Producteur délégué Benjamin Bibas / Radiofonies Europe Coordination éditoriale Luc Hossepied / EIC Production exécutive Ensemble intercontemporain Remerciements à Laurent Bayle, Directeur général de la Cité de la musique à ses équipes, et à Christian de Portzamparc, architecte. Remerciements spéciaux à Frédérique Cambreling, Jérôme Comte, Éric-Maria Couturier, Samuel Favre et Frédéric Stochl	From: ensembleinter Views: 3 0 ratings
	Time: 09:39	More in Music

reBlogged from: Uploads by ensembleinter

on May 15, 2012 at 04:00 PM

Princeton Symphony Plays Sarah Kirkland Snider

Princeton Symphony Orchestra

Richardson Auditorium, Princeton, NJ

May 13, 2012

ChamberMusicianToday.com

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

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

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

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

reBlogged from: Sequenza21/

on May 15, 2012 at 02:00 PM

Around the horn: It Gets Better edition

ART AND THE GOVERNMENT

• Weird, the very day that the Huffington Post published my “debate” with Carla Escoda about arts funding, the New York Times published a “Room for Debate” feature on a very similar topic. Something in the water? Anyway, Sean Bowie has a nice summary if you don’t have time to read all eight entries.


• The National Governor’s Association, which has been friendly to the arts in the past, has released another study highlighting the economic role of arts and culture in state government.


• Marisela Treviño Orta has a good take on a bill proposed in the California Assembly that would have placed a tax on live theater tickets. Thanks to advocacy by the LA and SF arts communities, the bill has been withdrawn.

MUSICAL CHAIRS

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


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


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


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


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


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

IN THE FIELD

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


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


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

INTERVIEWS, CONVENINGS, AND CONVERSATIONS

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


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


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


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


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

RESEARCH CORNER

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


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


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


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


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


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


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

="a2a_dd a2a_target addtoany_share_save" href="http://www.addtoany.com/share_save#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcreatequity.com%2F2012%2F05%2Faround-the-horn-it-gets-better-edition.html&title=Around%20the%20horn%3A%20It%20Gets%20Better%20edition" id="wpa2a_2">
Related posts:

• Around the horn: Japan edition


• Around the horn: Occupy Wall Street edition


• Around the horn: St. Patty’s edition

reBlogged from: Createquity.

on May 15, 2012 at 02:00 PM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connect with me on LinkedIn

Join Me on Google+

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

reBlogged from: Music Think Tank (primary) RSS

on May 15, 2012 at 12:00 PM

2012 Outsound Summit lineup revealed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

reBlogged from: Sequenza21/

on May 15, 2012 at 05:00 AM

Harrison / Felciano - Split Release (Cambridge CRS 2560)

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

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

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

reBlogged from: A Closet of Curiosities

on May 15, 2012 at 02:00 AM

ArtPractical.com Podcast

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

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

reBlogged from: Disquiet

on May 15, 2012 at 01:00 AM

May 14, 2012

From a Diary: I:xxiv

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

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

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

reBlogged from: Renewable Music

on May 14, 2012 at 11:00 PM

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

reBlogged from: NPR Blogs: Deceptive Cadence

on May 14, 2012 at 11:00 PM

Michael Mantler - No Answer (1974)

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

reBlogged from: A Closet of Curiosities

on May 14, 2012 at 08:00 PM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Artists:

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

http://sound4good.bandcamp.com/

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

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

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

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

Sam Cusumano: electronics

Joe Patitucci: sound design

Alex Tyson: production, graphic design

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

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

http://datagarden.org/about/

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

Interacting With Plants To Create Polyphonic Music

reBlogged from: Create Digital Music

on May 14, 2012 at 08:00 PM

C'est une harpe qui fait ces sons?

	C'est une harpe qui fait ces sons?	From: ensembleinter Views: 0 0 ratings
	Time: 01:18	More in Music

reBlogged from: Uploads by ensembleinter

on May 14, 2012 at 06:00 PM

Sweet spot

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

reBlogged from: Soho the Dog

on May 14, 2012 at 05:00 PM

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

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

Alan Pierson and the Brooklyn Philharmonic - Photo by Joshua Simpson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–

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

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

on May 14, 2012 at 05:00 PM

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

You could almost call it Buchlafest.

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

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

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

More information:

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

reBlogged from: Create Digital Music

on May 14, 2012 at 04:00 PM

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

---

---

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

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

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

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

---

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

---

Leave me your thoughts in the comment section below. 

---

reBlogged from: Music Think Tank (primary) RSS

on May 14, 2012 at 12:00 PM

SoundCloud as Sketch Book (MP3)

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

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

reBlogged from: Disquiet

on May 14, 2012 at 09:00 AM

May 13, 2012

Go west, pure fool

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

reBlogged from: Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

on May 13, 2012 at 10:00 PM

Well, what do you know

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

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

reBlogged from: henningmusick

on May 13, 2012 at 09:00 PM

Music PR agencies please note

'About Fray Martín de Villanueva as a composer, it is important to emphasise one thing: he was not a master but a good craftsman who knew the trade and composed correct works. These works are not in any case comparable with the one by his coevals Guerrero, Morales, Victoria, etc.'

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

Also on Twitter but not Facebook while mobile. 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

reBlogged from: On An Overgrown Path

on May 13, 2012 at 07:00 PM

Preview of coming attractions

reBlogged from: Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

on May 13, 2012 at 02:00 PM

Ongoing construction

The building in the center of the picture has become the tallest in Manhattan. Any day now, I hear, the Bösendorfers will be hoisted up to the music critics' penthouse.

reBlogged from: Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

on May 13, 2012 at 01:00 AM

The next Curtis wave

I had the honor of speaking today at the commencement exercises for the Curtis Institute of Music, in Philadelphia. The graduating class was small — Curtis has a famously low acceptance rate of four percent — but I saw one...

reBlogged from: Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

on May 13, 2012 at 01:00 AM

May 12, 2012

MusicThinkTank.com Weekly Recap: Making A Living Is The New Success & More

Where

The Music Industry

Thinks Out Loud

 

• Simon Tam: How to Get Sponsored: Rethinking Sponsorships


• Bobby Owsinski: Making A Living Is The New Success


• James Aviaz: Q&A: Getting Music Placed in Advertising


• Simon Tam: 5 Non-traditional Ways to Promote Your Music

reBlogged from: Music Think Tank (primary) RSS

on May 12, 2012 at 12:00 PM

Roman Totenberg: A Musical Life Remembered

reBlogged from: NPR Blogs: Deceptive Cadence

on May 12, 2012 at 11:00 AM

Babbitt: "Concerto Piccolino"

	Babbitt: "Concerto Piccolino" Milton Babbitt: "Concerto Piccolino" (1999) - Lee Ferguson, marimba.	From: NewMusicXX Views: 12 1 ratings
	Time: 04:16	More in Music

reBlogged from: Uploads by NewMusicXX

on May 12, 2012 at 03:00 AM

Commissioning a New Work? What should I pay the Composer?

I get asked this a lot so I thought I should put my thoughts down for all to see

There are a variety of articles out there which talk about commissioning works, many even have prices

Randall Giles posts this page: A Brief Guide to Commissioning Music

Johansen-Werner posts his thoughts: Some Thoughts on How to Commission Music

Ken Davis adds his 2 cents: Commissioning New Music

Abbie Betnis has her ideas: How to Commission a New Work from Abbie Betinis
Even the American Composers Forum has suggestions: Commissioning by Individuals

Pretty much all of those guides are considering major performers for major works. Yes, they talk about individual or solo works. But the moment you suggest a range from hundreds to thousands of dollars you're eliminating most of the musicians on the planet. A struggling performer can't afford to pay $4-500 for a new, untried work for potentially a one-off performance.

So, here is my simple method for calculating what I might charge for a new work. Think of a commission this way:

What would you want to be paid for a performance?

If you had to bring someone in to fill the shoes for a performer, what would you expect to pay them?

    My thoughts on what to charge for commissions are rather like that.

A small "community" group might not pay their musicians, but might pay $50-100 for a single musician to come in a play on a piece if that instrument was important and there wasn't someone in the ensemble to fill the roll. A piece for community level ensemble to play in a concert, $50-100 might be very reasonable for a 4-6 min piece you are going to perform once.

A more competent ensemble, say instructors at the college or university level, might be paying the musicians more like $150 or even $250 to "fill in." Therefore, a more difficult piece, more demanding, more thoroughly composed piece might run $150-250 for 8-10 mins.

If you're hoping to feature the semi-professional/professional musician, a real star player -  20-25 min piece --a real show-piece, then $350-500 is reasonable.

If you are a semi-professional or professional ensemble then the pricing laid out in the links above are fairly consistent and reasonable pricing for commissioning a new work

.

mind, if you are a non-profit organization, any donor who commits money for a commission can deduct the money from their taxes. A great way to get money for composition is to specifically ask individual donors to fund a piece.

I should say, these thoughts are how I structure my prices, my fellow composers might have different thoughts. If you're looking to commission a new work, you really need to talk to the composer and negotiate the right price. The "reasonable" prices listed above are guidelines, not set in stone. My prices are also negotiable for friends, special occasions, payment-in-kind situations, or extenuating circumstances. Just remember, I have to make a living too. So far, I've not been able to convince my school loan creditors to accept new pieces of music in lieu of money.

Remember, even as a musician can waive fees for projects he or she really wants to play in, composers can do the same - but this should not be the default expectation. What do you think is fair?

reBlogged from: Interchanging Idioms
on May 12, 2012 at 02:00 AM

May 11, 2012

William Grant Still / Ulysses Kay-Split Release (Vox Turnabout) 1974

Today is the 117th birthday of William Grant Still.He died in December, 1978, aged 83.Notes excerpted From the back cover (enclosed):There are certain prominent figures who, over the years, acquire a label, and William Grant Still is such a man. The mere mention of his name brings the label after it almost the same breath- The Dean of Afro-American Composers.It is an

reBlogged from: A Closet of Curiosities

on May 11, 2012 at 09:00 PM

Around The Classical Internet: May 11, 2012

reBlogged from: NPR Blogs: Deceptive Cadence

on May 11, 2012 at 09:00 PM

Kronos Quartet with Rula Jebreal, Marjane Satrapi, and Tony Kushner @ the Metropolitan Museum

One would think that music and spoken word are two of the most complimentary art forms. They seem like they should be a perfect match; next to music, spoken word is the medium most reliant on pitch and rhythm, not to mention abstract concepts like cadence, consonance and dissonance. But the combination is a risky ...

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

on May 11, 2012 at 07:00 PM

Autumn Leaves

Sound Clip: Autumn Leaves by Martin Ranch

The artist writes, “I play bells that people put on young tree branches to keep deers from eating the skin of the tree. In this work, I used 14 bells, each having a particular tone due to design and material differences. Circling and closing in and out to the receptors of Olympus LS 10 recorder, this work resulted in a microtonal electric feel.”

More on this artist

martin.

reBlogged from: Sound is Art

on May 11, 2012 at 06:00 PM

Gags Ordered: The Cartoon Caption Contest Winners

reBlogged from: NPR Blogs: Deceptive Cadence

on May 11, 2012 at 06:00 PM

Tonight: Smooke has not One but Two Premieres

TWO PREMIERES BY DAVID SMOOKE

by Judah Adashi

Here in Baltimore, we take great pride in our vibrant music scene. Indeed, it’s so vibrant that my friend and colleague, David Smooke, has two local premieres in one night! (OK, one of them is in DC, but we mustn’t let such details stand in the way of rooting for the home team.)

Tonight at 8:00pm at the Atlas Performing Arts Center (1333 H Street NE), David will join Great Noise Ensemble as the featured soloist in the world premiere of his toy piano concerto, Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. The piece takes its title and inspiration from a series of eighteen death-scene dioramas by Frances Glessner Lee, currently housed in the Office of the Medical Examiner in Baltimore. Back in Charm City, also at 8:00pm, the Atlantic Guitar Quartet will premiere David’s Topographies at the Engineer’s Club (11 W. Mt. Vernon Place).

Like the composer himself, unless you manage to bend the space-time continuum, you’ll only be able to attend one of these events. But should you find yourself at either of the above-mentioned points along the I-95 corridor, I hope you’ll take the opportunity to hear the latest fruits of David’s vivid sonic imagination!

reBlogged from: Sequenza21/

on May 11, 2012 at 05:00 PM

Riccardo Chailly and Stefano Bollani return with “Sounds of the 30s”, available from Decca on May 22

A collection of works by Ravel, Stravinsky, Weill and de Sabata feature the jazz pianist with the Gewandhausorchester

Following the success of last year’s sparkling recording of Gershwin’s Piano Concerto and Rhapsody in Blue, conductor Riccardo Chailly and pianist Stefano Bollani return with an album of jazz-inspired classical works, including two world-premiere recordings. The album, which was recorded live at the Gewandhaus, Leipzig, will be released on May 22, 2012.



Last year Decca released an all-Gershwin recording featuring these artists and it was a surprise hit. Gramophone commented that “…the performance of the Concerto is the finest I have ever heard . . . Inhibitions are left backstage and, while all parties are alive to the smallest detail, there is an irreverence and spontaneity which capture the spirit of the work like no other . . . Bollani's exuberance and panache are infectious.” This unique combination of a revered maestro (who recently has received the highest praise for his Beethoven symphony cycle), an Italian jazz pianist and a storied German orchestra has created something special and the recording shimmers as a result.



For their new recording Chailly and Bollani have turned their attention to the 1930s and works by Ravel, Stravinsky, Weill and de Sabata. The influence of jazz on Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G is undeniable. Ravel wrote the work upon his return from America where he had met George Gershwin in New York and even travelled up to the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem to listen to jazz. The concerto is remarkable in that Ravel so fluently integrated the jazz idiom into the classical model of a concerto.



Ravel’s music is followed by Stravinsky’s Tango which is heard here in both its original 1940 solo piano version as well as Felix Guenther’s orchestration (a world-premiere recording). This is a tango as it could only be conceived by Stravinsky and it is certainly a sound-world away from Ravel. This is followed with works by Kurt Weill, a composer who, like Stravinsky, fled Europe in the 1930s. Unlike Stravinsky’s analytical re-imagining of the tango, Weill has written songs which masquerade as pop-tunes but are deceptively complex creations. The two selections included, from his shows Happy End and The Threepenny Opera, are examples of his wit and musical sophistication.

reBlogged from: Interchanging Idioms

on May 11, 2012 at 04:00 PM

The Universe comes together

The 2012 edition of Spring for Music is drawing to a close, with two performances remaining: the Milwaukee Symphony tonight, the Nashville Symphony tomorrow. I've been to three of four concerts so far: Edmonton, New Jersey, Alabama. Marc-André Hamelin's rendition...

reBlogged from: Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

on May 11, 2012 at 04:00 PM

In May and June, Cellist Matt Haimovitz Goes “Beyond Bach” in Boston, Plays Woolf’s Après moi, le déluge in New York, and Tours with Uccello

It has already been a red-letter season for cellist Matt Haimovitz, who recently made the news with a world premiere (Philip Glass’s Cello Concerto No. 2 “Naqoyqatsi”), a nationwide recital tour (with pianist Christopher O’Riley), a hit recording (his double album with O’Riley, Shuffle.Play.Listen), and more. Now May and June see the cellist offering a characteristically diverse and challenging lineup. He performs Saint-Saëns’s Cello Concerto No. 1 in Illinois (May 4–6); gives a “Beyond Bach” solo recital at Boston’s Gardner Museum (May 17); tours with his all-cello ensemble, Uccello, playing concerts in Toronto (June 6), Buffalo (June 7), Ithaca (June 8–9), and at New York’s Bargemusic (June 10); and makes a star turn as soloist with the Trinity Choir in Du Yun’s San, Laura Elise Schwendinger’s Six Choral Settings and Luna Pearl Woolf’s concerto for cello and a cappella choir, Après moi, le deluge, at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall (May 31). In an interview below, composer Luna Pearl Woolf discusses the return to New York of Après moi, le deluge, her virtuosic, poignant response to Hurricane Katrina.



Last August, Haimovitz participated in a performance of Philip Glass’s Naqoyqatsi with the Philip Glass Ensemble at the Edinburgh International Festival, accompanying the Godfrey Reggio film Naqoyqatsi (part of a trilogy that also includes Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi). A Scotsman review of the event described the cellist’s performance as “stunning.” In March, with the Cincinnati Symphony under Dennis Russell Davies, Haimovitz gave the world premiere of Glass’s Cello Concerto No. 2, which was largely inspired by the score of Naqoyqatsi. The response was glowing; as the Cincinnati Enquirer observed, “Haimovitz performed the expansive themes with emotion and a timbre ranging from gritty to deeply beautiful.” In August, Haimovitz travels to Australia with the Philip Glass Ensemble to perform the 90-minute film version of Naqoyqatsi in Melbourne.



Having ranged this year from the Glass concerto to arrangements of Stravinsky, Radiohead, and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, this month Haimovitz delves back into the standard repertoire. Joining the Elgin Symphony Orchestra under Victor Yampolsky (May 4–6), he performs Saint-Saëns’s First Cello Concerto in Illinois for the first time since recording it at age 16 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and James Levine for Deutsche Grammophon. Haimovitz’s programming is eclectic once again on May 17, when his “Beyond Bach” recital at Boston’s Gardner Museum encompasses Bach, living American composers, and a new arrangement of the Beatles’ song “Helter Skelter.” Uccello’s East Coast June tour presents jazz arrangements for two to eight cellos from Meeting of the Spirits, which won the ensemble a 2011 Grammy Award.

reBlogged from: Interchanging Idioms

on May 11, 2012 at 02:00 PM

If I Only Had a Brain: Livid Builder Brain v2 Could Be Heart of Your Next DIY Project

If you’re dreaming of creating your own controller from scratch, there are certain basic elements you’ll need – and a strong case for reusing, not reinventing, the wheel. There are a range of products out there that cater to you DIYers; Livid’s Builder line is certainly one of the most comprehensive. It’s a line of hardware accessories that help you piece together MIDI controllers with all the requisite knobs and buttons and sensors you might like, and its brain just got an upgrade.

The soul of any controller is the electronics and microcontroller that read all of those inputs and let them talk to a computer. And it’s that “brain” that Livid recently upgraded, with their Builder Brain v2. Messages from controls go in, messages to devices like lights go out, all via a connection to your computer that’s USB powered, class-compliant MIDI. (That means you won’t need any drivers – not on Mac, not on Windows, and not on Linux. You could even plug this into one of those Raspberry Pi devices, if you’re lucky enough to have one!) They also operate standalone with a 5V power supply.

The Brain v2 is for some seriously large and complex controllers, with support for up to 64 analog inputs, 128 Buttons, and 192 LEDs. (Fortunately, a companion board called the Omni, and connections via ribbon cables, mean that you won’t create complete spaghetti trying to do that.) In fact, it’s so powerful I’d recommend considering something simpler for less-ambitious projects, but if you’re planning a big controller, it’s tough to beat Livid’s offerings.

New in v2:

• A Bus Board for easier control connections


• LED support up from 48 to 192, extra circuitry for ultra-brights.


• Encoders now work with LED encoder ring support, so you can make a big circle of ultra-bright lights to go around your encoder.


• RGB LED support.


• 5V standalone power is new.

Add those features to cool extras from the original, like accelerometer and velocity-sensitive surface support and programmable MIDI settings.

CDM asks Livid’ Jay Smith to tell us what this is all about.

CDM: Who is this for?

Jay: That’s kind of a loaded question! It’s really for anyone wanting to create a class-complaint MIDI device of their own. An artist, a maker of commercial products, a musician, a visualist? With Brain version 1 we’ve seen a MIDI controlled electric mandolin, Moldover’s Mojo, and The Choppertone to name a few. We’ve also powered some other pretty sophisticated commercial devices for other companies with it, so it’s not just a DIY solution.

With v2 we’ve really expanded the functionality by adding almost any kind of control you’d want to hook up to it, and made the process of doing that much easier. If you are talking about standard MIDI controller type controls, our Omni board support thousands of configurations with just one circuit board. This isn’t just for building “controllers” in terms of software controllers either. We’ve added external power so you can use it to control analog gear and other MIDI controlled devices.

Apart from those examples, what can you build with Builder and the Brain?

Anything that has a button, LEDs, potentiometer, encoder, FSRs, accelerometers, sensors, and more. Single LEDs, RGB LEDs, and “groups” of LEDs of 6,12, or 24 can be created and controlled with one MIDI note or CC or locally controlled with an encoder or pot. As a result, inventive, designs with interesting lighting feedback are possible. VU meters driven by CCs, or a clever array of LEDS that make glyphs or patterns can be arranged with your controls to provide novel, custom feedback that would never make it on Guitar Center’s shelves, but mean something special to you. The omni board provides enough physical limitation that you can think about a “chunk” of a controller and isolates parts of your project into digestible parts, and allows you to sensibly expand and modify your control surface with only 1 brain.

Why would you choose this over another platform?

is no other platform for controller building that is this packed with features, well documented and supported, and easy to use. Since the release of Brain v1 three years ago we’ve spent a lot of time listening to our user’s requests, thinking about the features we’d like for our own use, and developing them into a platform for others to use. We didn’t spend much time looking at what else was out there, we looked for what wasn’t and tried to fill in those gaps. When it comes to building your own device, whether for creating music, controlling lights, or something else completely, there are really only other “solutions”, not platforms, which is what we intended to create.

Who is this not for?

If you are looking for an all-in-one solution for your dream controller but don’t want to do any of the labor, this is definitely not for you. We’ve really set out to create the most comprehensive platform that has the smallest learning curve. There are some other great solutions out there, but some of them either have a big learning curve or require programming to achieve results. If you have a smaller project and don’t care about MIDI, the ability to edit, expand, and have a long terms solution, there are certainly cheaper solutions out there. We tried to make the process more streamlined, feature packed, and have taken a lot of the guesswork out of it with Brain v2. With the addition of the Bus Board we’ve added things like resistors, transistors, and chips that make the building process much easier.

Quick start video:

Find out more:

http://lividinstruments.com/hardware_builder.php

reBlogged from: Create Digital Music

on May 11, 2012 at 02:00 PM

Scottish Chamber Orchestra Summer Tours in Scotland 2012

Over the summer months, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra presents seven tours in Scotland, performing live orchestral music in towns and communities across the length and breadth of the country. During 2012 – the Year of Creative Scotland – the Orchestra continues its commitment to serve the whole of the nation with its 10th annual South of Scotland Tour, its 34th year of touring to the Highlands and Islands and the 6th Autumn Classics Tour visiting towns across central Scotland. Over and above these tours, the Orchestra is in demand at summer festivals – with appearances at the Aldeburgh, East Neuk, Lammermuir and Edinburgh International Festivals – and in the recording studio.



South of Scotland Tour

The SCO celebrates Scotland’s natural riches in music and song in concerts in Duns, Castle Douglas and Galashiels (24 – 26 May). The centrepiece of the programme is the premiere of Howard Moody’s Border Lines, a piece inspired by The National Trust for Scotland’s Nature Reserve at St Abb’s Head and local communities in the area. Over the past year, composer-conductor Moody has been working with pupils from Coldingham and Eyemouth Primary Schools and the Eyemouth Fishermen’s Choir and Mission Crew, getting to know the landscape and the people of the area and creating songs with them in celebration of their community. The Fisherman’s Choir and Mission Crew will join the Orchestra for the performance in Duns. The project is a partnership between the SCO, The National Trust for Scotland and Scottish Borders Council. Scottish soprano Lorna Anderson joins Moody and the Orchestra to sing Scottish traditional songs arranged for orchestra by Moody, including Robert Burns’ Jon Anderson my jo and Ye Banks and Braes. Mendelssohn’s dramatic Hebrides Overture, the best-known musical celebration of Scotland’s landscape, and Dvořák’s Czech Suite of orchestral dances complete the programme. Border Lines has been jointly commissioned by The National Trust for Scotland and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. The South of Scotland Tour is presented in partnership with Scottish Borders Council and Dumfries and Galloway Arts Festival.



SCO Summer Tours

In mid-June, the Orchestra and Associate Artist Alexander Janiczek give performances amid the splendid surroundings of Dunblane Cathedral (14 June), at Findhorn’s Universal Hall (15 June), where the Orchestra has built up a strong rapport with local audiences over recent years, and at Glenmoriston Millennium Hall in Invermoriston (16 June). A native of Salzburg, violinist Janiczek has the perfect credentials to direct a programme of music by his home-city’s most famous son, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He pairs Symphony No 21, written when Mozart was aged 16, with Symphony No 39, one of the composer’s great, last symphonies. The SCO’s Principal Horn Alec Frank-Gemmill is soloist in the Horn Concerto No 4 in E-flat. Frank-Gemmill recently received rave reviews for his performances of Ligeti’s Hamburg Concerto during the Orchestra’s 2011/12 Season.



From 19 – 21 July, the Orchestra is reunited with guest conductor Nicholas McGegan for concerts at Stirling Castle, Strathpeffer Pavilion and the Badenoch Centre, Kingussie. They perform Haydn’s Symphony No 88 in G and Mozart’s Symphony No 31 ‘Paris’, both written to impress the Parisian audiences of their times. The programme also features well-known favourites from the 18th century operatic repertoire, including overtures by Mozart and Cimarosa and arias by Haydn, performed by the South African baritone William Berger. Following these concerts, the SCO, McGegan and Berger head into the studio to record a disc of arias from operas including Mozart’s Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute and Haydn’s Armida and L’anima del filosofo.



Director/violinist Isabelle van Keulen has proved hugely popular with audiences on SCO Strings tours in 2010 and 2011. This summer she returns to direct the full orchestra in a concert of much-loved classics at Inverness Eden Court (16 August), Perth Concert Hall (17 August) and Dumfries Easterbrook Hall (18 August). The First Symphonies of Prokofiev (Symphony No 1 ‘Classical’) and Beethoven open and close the concert, while SCO Principal Clarinet Maximiliano Martín is the soloist in Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto.

reBlogged from: Interchanging Idioms

on May 11, 2012 at 07:00 AM

Elektra at the Philadelphia Orchestra

I just came from the Kimmel Center – good lord, to hear this orchestra play that piece, a piece that remains flabbergasting over a century after the premiere – there’s one more performance, this Saturday – you should go. Yes, the surtitles were a mess, and yes, one of the singers went sharp every time she crescendoed – but there were some jaw-dropping performances as well – don’t miss it.

When the curtain fell after two hours of demonic intensity the audience sat for some seconds in stupefied silence until the “Straussianer” recovered and began to applaud…

- Barbara Tuchman describing the Elektra premiere in her book The Proud Tower.

 

reBlogged from: Secret Geometry - James Primosch's blog

on May 11, 2012 at 06:00 AM

Trinity Wall Street at River To River Festival 2012: Sounds From Indonesia, Italy and NY’s Own Nico Muhly

This summer, Trinity Wall Street will once again participate in the River To River Festival®, lower Manhattan’s free annual summer arts festival, which this year takes place from June 17 – July 15. Trinity will present three events, bringing a breadth of programming – ranging from choral sounds from Indonesia and evocations of ancient Italy to the music of New York’s own rising downtown star Nico Muhly – that illustrates why both church and festival have grown close to New York’s heart.



The Trinity series, which forms part of the River To River Festival, begins on June 24 at Trinity’s St. Paul’s Chapel with a performance by the Manado State University Choir, which hails from the province of North Sulawesi in Indonesia. A mixed-voice chamber choir of about 24 singers, the group has been acclaimed for its beautiful sound, its ability to move audiences and its versatility, performing repertoire ranging from early to contemporary Western music, from traditional Indonesian music with choreography to popular music, jazz and Southeast Asian choral music. The choir performs under the direction of André de Quadros, who is a conductor, ethnomusicologist, human rights activist and Professor of Music at Boston University.



Trinity’s next two festival events both include partnerships with contemporary performing arts group Beth Morrison Projects, following their successful collaboration (New Music Now) at last year’s River To River festival.



On June 25, Trinity’s contemporary music orchestra, NOVUS NY, whose May 2011 debut concert was called “a most auspicious introduction” by the New York Times, lines up alongside the Washington Chorus and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus to give the New York premiere of the fully completed score of New York composer Paola Prestini’s “folk opera,” Oceanic Verses, produced by Beth Morrison Projects at the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University. This multimedia opera, with film by Ali Hossaini and libretto by Donna DiNovelli, uses archaic Italian dialects and field recordings to summon up the spirit of an Italy now long overgrown by the modern world. The piece explores the universal themes of migration – the choices people make when they decide to leave their homelands – and the world’s accumulated layers of civilizations, each in turn built upon the ruins of the last. Prestini’s music is published by Tzadik, John Zorn’s iconic record label, and her work has been hailed by leading composer Osvaldo Golijov, who declared: “Paola Prestini’s music is wrenching and tender and luminous and pure and exuberant: always vivid and always generous. Her compositional voice sings of today, but also of an ancient, primordial time, a time of revelations and prophecies.”



Trinity’s series at River To River Festival closes on July 1 with an atmospheric candlelight performance by the Trinity Choir and Trinity Youth Chorus at St. Paul’s Chapel that showcases the music of one of the world’s fastest-rising composers, New Yorker Nico Muhly. Muhly has been described by Gramophone as “one of the most talked-about musicians of his generation” and by the Washington Post as “the reigning It Boy of New York’s downtown music scene.” The event juxtaposes Muhly’s choral writing with music by the English Renaissance choral composers who have influenced him, such as John Taverner, John Sheppard and William Byrd. The centerpiece of the concert will be the world premiere of Muhly’s A Pentecost Anthem, commissioned by Trinity Wall Street, Beth Morrison Projects and River to River. The piece revisits Muhly’s fascination with complex English Renaissance choral music; it is an interest first seen in his 2004 piece, So To Speak, which was inspired by a Pentecost anthem by Thomas Tallis. Alex Ross of the New Yorker described that work as “achiev ing a cool balance between ancient and modern modes, between the life of the mind and the noise of the street.”



Earlier in the summer, before participating in River To River, Trinity Choir performs contemporary works in a May 31 concert at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall. The concert will feature Israeli-American cellist Matt Haimovitz and the music of Laura Elise Schwendinger, Du Yun and Luna Pearl Woolf, including Woolf’s highly regarded Après Moi, le Déluge. The work, recorded by Haimovitz on disc, has been called “the first major work of classical music to commemorate the flooding of New Orleans” (Arts Journal), and the New York Times praised it as “an unsentimental but moving tribute.”

reBlogged from: Interchanging Idioms

on May 11, 2012 at 04:00 AM

Shai Wosner: Debut of Michael Hersch’s Piano Concerto (A Preview)

On May 15th, pianist Shai Wosner will be performing a brand new Piano Concerto by Michael Hersch. Titled along the ravines, the piece will be making its first ever concert appearance with the Seattle Symphony at Benaroya Hall, Tuesday May 15th at 7:30 PM.

Shai explains how he came upon his interest for the new work. “When I was looking to commission a new work, thanks to the Borletti-Buitoni Trust of London, I was listening to all kinds of music from composers from different generations and I came across a couple of CDs with piano and chamber works by Michael Hersch. It was clear that he was pursuing his own path with a very strong, personal voice. Those pieces seemed to contain an explosive mix of wildness and melancholy”.

Wosner is another performer that likes to mix the classics with newer, contemporary works. “Programming is really one of the fun parts of being a musician, in my opinion. It’s always nice to fantasize about potential programming ideas, even if, like with any new idea, you may find yourself rejecting it wholeheartedly the next morning. When it comes to recital programs, I try to somehow look for a common thread among the pieces, which sometimes is obvious and sometimes is not. The goal is not so much to include pieces that are similar to each other, but rather a collection of works that are on one hand very different, but that may also resonate, shed light on each other and interact in the context of the program”.

I asked Shai if he would be bringing the new piece into the studio, and he had this to offer: “We hope to be able to record the concerto in the next couple of years. There are also plans for another solo CD and potentially a concerto CD as well that are being discussed. As far as programming is concerned, I am trying to find ‘organic’ ways to fit free improvisation into recital programs. There is nothing new in the concept, of course, and it used to be in fact part of tradition. But I am currently looking for a way to combine it with other repertoire in a meaningful way.”.

Click here for tickets to Shai’s concert with the Seattle Symphony at Benoroya Hall.

Shai Wosner.com

reBlogged from: Sequenza21/

on May 11, 2012 at 01:00 AM

May 10, 2012

PBS to Broadcast Goat Rodeo Sessions Live Special on May 25

A Primetime Special Featuring Virtuosos Yo-Yo Ma, Chris Thile, Stuart Duncan, and Edgar Meyer

PBS invites viewers to experience a groundbreaking collaboration when it airs The Goat Rodeo Sessions' first live performance on Friday, May 25, 2012 at 9:00PM (check local listings). The Goat Rodeo Sessions combines the talents of four different solo artists, cello virtuoso Yo-Yo Ma, mandolin master Chris Thile, bluegrass fiddler Stuart Duncan, bassist Edgar Meyer, each a Grammy Award winning star in their own right, to create a unique, genre-breaking sound that's part composed, part improvised and uniquely American.

Released in October 2011, The Goat Rodeo Sessions album debuted #1 on the Classical, Classical Crossover, and Bluegrass Billboard charts. Additionally at #18, it was Yo-Yo Ma's highest position on the Billboard Top 200 chart to date. With the combination of intricate arrangements, intense improvisation, and superior skill by all players, The Goat Rodeo Sessions ensemble is a perfect storm of musical ingenuity. In fact, the music is so difficult to pull off, the group likened it to a Goat Rodeo - an aviation term that describes a situation in which 100 things need to go right to avoid disaster.

"What stays in my mind about The Goat Rodeo Sessions is how many things have to happen in order for us to create some really beautiful music," says cellist Yo-Yo Ma. "We each contributed something unique to it and what came out was truly amazing."

Aspart of the PBS Arts initiative, this one hour primetime concert special was taped over two sold out concerts at the House of Blues in Boston, Massachusetts and features the group performing tracks from their studio album, such as "Quarter Chicken Dark," and "Attaboy," as well as Johann Sebastian Bach's "Gamba Sonata Number 1 Movement 4," and "Fiddle Medley." The evening's performance is highlighted by a special guest appearance by vocalist and Newton native Aoife O'Donovan on "Here and Heaven", "No One But You", and a special encore rendition of "All Through the Night."

"This rare and unique ensemble of musicians produce an eclectic performance that really goes beyond the boundaries of any one particular genre," says WGBH Executive Producer Laurie Donnelly. "We are thrilled that by showcasing their collaboration on PBS, we will allow viewers all across the country towitness this extraordinary musical event."

Funding for The Goat Rodeo Sessions Live was provided by the WGBH Fund for Music and through viewer contributions to PBS member stations. The Goat Rodeo Sessions Live is a co-production of Sony Classical and WGBH Educational Foundation. ©2012 Sony Music Entertainment and WGBH Educational Foundation. All rights reserved.

Visit pbs.org/goatrodeo for more information.

reBlogged from: Interchanging Idioms

on May 10, 2012 at 10:00 PM

LA Children's Chorus Gives World Premiere at Spring Concert 5/13 &14

LOS ANGELES CHILDREN’S CHORUS’ SPRING CONCERT

FEATURES CHORAL WORKS SPANNING 14 CENTURIES



Program Includes Earliest Known Example of Polyphony Dating from 1260

to World Premiere by Nicholas Nicassio



Saturday, May 12, 2012, 4 PM

Sunday, May 13, 7 PM

at Pasadena Presbyterian Church

The Los Angeles Children’s Chorus (LACC) illuminates the transcendent spirit of humanity with a dynamic program spanning 14 centuries of musical expression at its 26th Annual Spring Concert on Saturday, May 12, 4 PM, and Sunday, May 13, 7 PM, at Pasadena Presbyterian Church. Singing about joy, love, laughter and hope in six languages, the choristers offer a mix of classical, folk and contemporary works. Among numerous highlights are Sumer is icumen in, a medieval song dating from 1260 believed to be the oldest existing example of polyphony, and the world premiere by LACC’s Young Men’s Ensemble of Los Angeles-based composer Nicholas Nicassio’s Sleep Now, O Sleep Now based on text by James Joyce.

Other works include Purcell’s Music for a while, written in 1692 as incidental music for John Dryden’s play Oedipus; Schumann’s Schoen Bluemelein, based on the poetry of Robert Renick; Canadian composer Eleanor Daley’s serene A Red, Red Rose composed in 2003 as part of the Rose Trilogy and based on the beloved poem of Robert Burns; and Poulenc’s lushly harmonic Ave Maria with Latin text taken from a 6th century prayer and La Petite Fille Sage, which he wrote for children.

Also featured are My Girls, a lively ode to the bonds of sisterhood by Vermont-based composer Gwyneth Walker; Canadian composer Ruth Watson’s Psalm 100; Ubi caritas, a richly harmonic piece written in the form of Gregorian Chant in 2001 by Norwegian composer Ola Gjeilo; Seligkeit, a lively waltz written by Schubert when he was only 19 years old; Leonard Bernstein’s beloved “America” from the musical West Side Story; and Britten's setting of Fancie from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. The program concludes with Amavolovolo, an uplifting South African traditional spiritual and a prelude to LACC’s upcoming South African tour.

LACC Artistic Director Anne Tomlinson conducts the Concert Choir and Chamber Singers. Associate Artistic Director Mandy Brigham leads the Intermediate Choir, Dr. Steven Kronauer conducts the Young Men’s Ensemble and Larissa Donnelly conducts the Apprentice Choir. The choirs will perform separately and combined.

Tickets are $26, $38 and $44; children 17 and under are half price. For tickets and information, please call (626) 793-4231 or visit www.lachildrenschorus.org. Pasadena Presbyterian Church is located at 535 East Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91105.

reBlogged from: Interchanging Idioms

on May 10, 2012 at 10:00 PM

Angela Meade – 2012 Beverly Sills Artist – Makes Debuts at Deutsche Oper Berlin and Three Major U.S. Music Festivals

When the Metropolitan Opera’s 2012 Beverly Sills Artist Angela Meade starred in the company’s recent production of Ernani, she gave “a true star-making Met performance” (WQXR) that “showed what this uncommonly gifted rising artist is capable of” (Anthony Tommasini, New York Times). In May the soprano tackles another Verdi heroine, making her Deutsche Oper Berlin debut as Lucrezia in two concert performances of I due Foscari. More high-profile “firsts” follow in August when Meade makes a trio of major U.S. music festival debuts, headlining “A Night at the Opera” with the Cleveland Orchestra at the Blossom Music Festival; “Italian Opera Night” with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin at Saratoga, and Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand” with Robert Spano in Aspen. In June – as a preview of next season’s debut with Washington National Opera – she portrays the title role of Bellini’s Norma in concert at Oregon’s Astoria Music Festival, and in July she sings Leonora in Verdi’s Il trovatore at the Festival Castell de Peralada in Spain. As the New York Daily News recently remarked, this gifted young soprano is truly “on the fast track to stardom.”



For her debut with Berlin’s historic Deutsche Oper, Meade sings her first Lucrezia Contarini, the female lead in Verdi’s I due Foscari, opposite baritone and noted Verdi specialist Leo Nucci and tenor Ramón Vargas, as father and son. Vargas, whose numerous honors include Echo Klassik’s Singer of the Year, was one of the many luminaries of opera who performed alongside Meade at last season’s Richard Tucker Music Foundation Gala, at which she received the prestigious 2011 Richard Tucker Award. With La Scala regular Maestro Roberto Rizzi Brignoli on the podium, the two Deutsche Oper concert performances mark the company’s premiere presentation of Verdi’s opera (May 9 & 11).



It is a measure of Meade’s burgeoning success that she makes not one but three major festival debuts in a single month this summer. The first, on August 5, is with the Cleveland Orchestra and guest conductor Johannes Debus, music director of the Canadian Opera Company, at the Blossom Music Festival. There, for “A Night at the Opera” – a program featuring favorite arias by Verdi, Puccini, and Donizetti – Meade joins tenor Michael Fabiano. Both singers were Grand Prize winners at the 2007 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, as chronicled in the documentary film The Audition, and they subsequently co-starred in Lucia di Lammermoor at their alma mater, the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia.



On August 9, for her debut at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center Meade reunites with another AVA alumnus, tenor and Gerda Lissner Foundation Competition-winner Bryan Hymel. With the Philadelphia Orchestra under music director designate Yannick Nézet-Séguin, they will perform an “Italian Opera Night” of arias and duets by Rossini, Donizetti, Puccini, Verdi, Mascagni, and Cilea, crowned by the final duet from Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta.



On August 19, Meade makes her third festival debut of the month, as a soloist in Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 (“Symphony of a Thousand”) at the Aspen Music Festival. Six-time Grammy Award-winner Robert Spano, in his inaugural season as the festival’s music director, conducts the Aspen Festival Orchestra and Colorado Symphony Orchestra Chorus. Meade leads a stellar lineup of vocal soloists that includes mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, with whom she performed Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony at the Seattle Symphony last season. The two were singled out by the Seattle Times, which commented on their “warmly expressive” voices.

reBlogged from: Interchanging Idioms

on May 10, 2012 at 10:00 PM

St. Louis Symphony Announces 2013 California Tour

Itinerary includes UC-Davis residency and performances, March 15-20, 2013

The St. Louis Symphony will return to California during its 2012-2013 season, touring the state March 15-20, 2013. The Symphony, led by Music Director David Robertson, will take part in an intensive 3-day residency program at the University of California-Davis, which will include community concerts, coachings with elementary, secondary and high school students, a side-by-side rehearsal with the UC-Davis Symphony Orchestra and a performance at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts. Violinist James Ehnes will be joining the St. Louis Symphony to perform Berg’s Violin Concerto at the Mondavi Center. The orchestra will also perform at venues in Costa Mesa, Palm Desert and Santa Barbara. St. Louis Symphony Principal Flute, Mark Sparks, will perform the Rouse Flute Concerto at the other venues.

It is the second tour of the season for the St. Louis Symphony; in September 2012, the orchestra performs in Europe for the first time since 1998.

“The St. Louis Symphony is pleased to return to California for this tour, built around this unique residency celebrating the 10th Anniversary of the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts,” said Fred Bronstein, President/CEO of the St. Louis Symphony. “The Symphony, with its robust array of community partnerships and educational initiatives, looks forward to an expanded level of engagement with the University of California-Davis and Sacramento communities that the residency affords. This tour, and the European Festivals tour scheduled for September 2012, as well as hosting the League of American Orchestras conference in June 2013, provide multiple opportunities to share the excellence of the St. Louis Symphony with a national and international audience, and promote St. Louis as the dynamic, culturally-strong center that it is.”

Programs for the 2013 California tour are as follows:

Sunday, March 17, 2013 —UC-Davis (Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts)

BRAHMS: Variations on a Theme of Haydn

BERG: Violin Concerto

BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 2



David Robertson, conductor

James Ehnes, violin



Monday, March 18, 2013 —Costa Mesa (Renée & Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall)

Tuesday, March 19, 2013 —Palm Desert (McCallum Theatre)

Wednesday, March 20, 2013 —Santa Barbara (Granada Theatre)



R. STRAUSS: Don Juan

ROUSE: Flute Concerto

HINDEMITH: Mathis der Maler Symphony

R. STRAUSS: Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks



David Robertson, conductor

Mark Sparks, Principal Flute, St. Louis Symphony

reBlogged from: Interchanging Idioms

on May 10, 2012 at 10:00 PM

Why Teaching Artists Will Lead the Charge in Audience Engagement

by Kelly Dylla

As a self-proclaimed enthusiast in audience engagement, I felt compelled to respond to Michael Kaiser’s Engaging Audiences article in the Huffington Post last month. Rather than debate point-by-point Kaiser’s position that audience engagement is possibly new window dressing for an old issue or that arts organizations are using this jargon to target selected audiences, I’d like to put forth my own perspective of audience engagement, supported by others in the field, and declare that teaching artists should be leading this charge. I believe if we can utilize the expertise of teaching artists in strategic decisions and core programming within arts organizations, we will make serious inroads to connecting more authentically with our communities and audiences.

Alan Brown and Rebecca Ratzkin in a recent report, Making Sense of Audience Engagement define audience engagement as:

A guiding philosophy in the creation and delivery of arts experiences in which the paramount concern is maximizing impact on the participant.  Others refer to this vein of work as “enrichment program­ming” or “adult education.”

In their view, an audience engagement philosophy:

• Encourages each audience member to be a co-creator of meaning


• Respects the many pathways that people take through the art form


• Appreciates that not everyone relates to art on an intellectual basis


• Integrates ‘engagement thinking’ into artistic planning


• Values audience feedback as a means of engagement

As Richard Evans notes in his response to Michael Kaiser’s blog, many who are truly entrenched and committed to audience engagement do not even use the term. They “describe the pursuit of broader reciprocal relationships with community members – expressive relationships created through, and embodied in, art.”

This notion is reflected in Nina Simon’s book The Participatory Museum, which is all about audience engagement, yet doesn’t regularly use the term (if at all):

I define a participatory cultural institution as a place where visitors can create, share, and connect with each other around content. Create means that visitors contribute their own ideas, objects, and creative expression to the institution and to each other. Share means that people discuss, take home, remix, and redistribute both what they see and what they make during their visit. Connect means that visitors socialize with other people—staff and visitors—who share their particular interests.

So if audience engagement is about utilizing the work of art to facilitate authentic, personally-relevant connections with others and the work of art itself, it seems we have an army of individuals waiting in the wings to be asked to the party. Teaching artists, still frighteningly in the margins of our quest to reinvent arts institutions, are experts in audience engagement. They do the following things exceedingly well:

• Teach cognitive skills needed to think artistically and creatively


• Teach aesthetic education, or the ability to make sense of art, not skills-based art-making


• Understand how to create questions and activities that are relevant to diverse ages and levels of arts education


• Work across the community, from performing and presenting works for discerning adult audiences as well as in schools in rural and low-income neighborhoods


• Understand that what they do is spiritual in nature, and help create a link to individuals’ higher selves.

This is a distinct discipline from learning one’s art form to produce finished works of art. A teaching artist is not just an artist or an art teacher; they study and are inherently interested in how others experience art. They are able to craft lesson plans, events, and performances that help facilitate deeper intrinsically-motivated experiences for all types of audiences.

Historically, teaching artists have been relegated to education departments across the nation. In Eric Booth’s The History of Teaching Artistry, the “first national marker of (a) teaching artist commitment was the 1970 launch of a modest Artists-in-Schools Program at the recently established National Endowment for the Arts.” Since then, educational departments and professional development for artists working in public schools have grown tremendously. There is now a generation or two of experienced, highly-professionalized teaching artists who are clawing their way into artistic conversations at large institutions and creating their own non-profits to work with adult audiences.

Programs such as Carnegie Hall’s songwriting program for homeless shelters, led by master teaching artist and composer Tom Cabaniss, are rich with experiences for participants that deepen their relationship with music and each other. (It’s not surprising that Sarah Johnson, director of the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall, began her career as a teaching artist.) Classical Jam, a young ensemble led by NY Philharmonic teaching artist Wendy Law, performs orchestral works with the audience as performer – in this video the connection between the school audience and performers during the performance is palpable.

The point here is not that teaching artist work exists – it certainly does and has been around for at least a couple of decades. The point is that teaching artists can offer the kind of thinking needed for core artistic decisions and even market strategy to help develop truly innovative programming. Designing the experience with a work of art is now as important as the work of art itself, and we need new kinds of talent making key decisions if arts organizations are to survive.

In August, the Seanse Art Center in Oslo, Norway will hold The World’s First International Teaching Artist Conference. With teaching artists from all over the world convening to discuss this still-emerging discipline, I am eager to see how they view teaching artists’ role in the equally adolescent field of audience engagement.

="a2a_dd a2a_target addtoany_share_save" href="http://www.addtoany.com/share_save#url=http%3A%2F%2Fcreatequity.com%2F2012%2F05%2Fwhy-teaching-artists-will-lead-the-charge-in-audience-engagement.html&title=Why%20Teaching%20Artists%20Will%20Lead%20the%20Charge%20in%20Audience%20Engagement" id="wpa2a_2">
Related posts:

• It Don’t Mean a Thing (If There’s No Audience to Swing): Jazz Audience Development in 2011


• Help WolfBrown with a White Paper on Active Participation


• Dispatch from the Bay Area, Part II: Beyond Dynamic Adaptability

reBlogged from: Createquity.

on May 10, 2012 at 10:00 PM

Hanspeter Kyburz : Voynich Cipher Manuscript

	Hanspeter Kyburz : Voynich Cipher Manuscript Diaporama son/image de la répétition du 10.05.2012 (Cité de la musique) de "The Voynich Cipher Manuscript" de Hanspeter KYBURZ, pour 24 voix et ensemble BBC Singers Ensemble intercontemporain Susanna Mälkki, direction (bande son du diaporama : enregistrement du 30.11.2005 à la Cité de la musique avec la Cappella Amsterdam sous la direction de Jonathan Nott)	From: ensembleinter Views: 1 0 ratings
	Time: 02:54	More in Music

reBlogged from: Uploads by ensembleinter

on May 10, 2012 at 10:00 PM

"?Corporel" Vinko Globokar

	"?Corporel" Vinko Globokar " ?Corporel " pour un percussioniste sur son corps de Vinko GLOBOKAR Enregistré le 11 février à la Cité de la musique Interprétation Éric-Maria Couturier / EIC Editeur Universal édition Coproduction Ensemble intercontemporain Cité de la musique Réalisation vidéo et montage Anne Delrieu Opérateurs image Fabien Leca, Céline Metzger Producteur délégué Benjamin Bibas / Radiofonies Europe Coordination éditoriale Luc Hossepied / EIC Production exécutive Ensemble intercontemporain Remerciements à Laurent Bayle, Directeur général de la Cité de la musique et à ses équipes, à Christian de Portzamparc, architecte. Remerciements spéciaux à Éric-Maria Couturier	From: ensembleinter Views: 0 0 ratings
	Time: 10:17	More in Music

reBlogged from: Uploads by ensembleinter

on May 10, 2012 at 10:00 PM

"Le jardin d'en face", Jean-Pierre DROUET(extrait)

	"Le jardin d'en face", Jean-Pierre DROUET(extrait) Jean-Pierre DROUET " Le jardin d'en face " pour harpe et percussion Interprétation : Frédérique Cambreling (harpe), Samuel Favre (percussion) Inédit Enregistré le samedi 11 février 2012 à la Cité de la musique Coproduction Ensemble intercontemporain, Cité de la musique	From: ensembleinter Views: 1 0 ratings
	Time: 01:40	More in Music

reBlogged from: Uploads by ensembleinter

on May 10, 2012 at 10:00 PM

Van-tiques Roadshow: Compete For Cliburn's Collection At Christie's

reBlogged from: NPR Blogs: Deceptive Cadence

on May 10, 2012 at 09:00 PM

Alabama Symphony at Spring for Music

Tonight, the Alabama Symphony, conducted by Justin Brown, appears at Carnegie Hall as part of Spring for Music, a week long celebration of out-of-town orchestras with adventurous programming aesthetics. Many of them are making their Carnegie Hall debuts; all of them are bringing programs of interest and demonstrating that, despite the oft-reported economic vicissitudes in the world of classical music, there remains a tremendous vitality of orchestral music making throughout North America.

In addition to a repertory standby, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the ASO presents two New York premieres of pieces they commissioned: Avner Dorman’s Astrolatry and Paul Lansky’s Shapeshifters. The latter work is a double piano concerto for the duo Quattro Mani.

The same forces recently recorded it, as well as two other pieces by Lansky, for Bridge . The disc, titled Imaginary Islands, shows off Lansky’s music at its most colorful, filled with virtuosic passages for the soloists and formidably propulsive post-minimal writing for the orchestra. The composer’s take on minimal figuration is a fascinating marriage of an “enhanced” harmonic palette, one evocative of Messiaen as often as it is of Adams, with crackling ostinati and pileups of syncopation.

The recording demonstrates how far the ASO has come in a relatively short period of time: less than twenty years ago (in 1993), the orchestra had declared bankruptcy and its future was very much in doubt. The musicians and Brown, who soon departs from his position as their music director, should be proud of the successes the ASO has enjoyed in recent years. The standard of playing has risen, the orchestra’s programming has included a number of new works including several commissions, and they have been featured on several recording projects. This week’s visit to Carnegie Hall: a well-deserved victory lap!

reBlogged from: Sequenza21/

on May 10, 2012 at 08:00 PM

CD of the Week: Staier's Diabelli Variations

Variations 20 through 23 of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations; Andreas Staier, fortepiano (Harmonia Mundi 902091). If you're wondering what on earth is going on, see Ivan Hewett's review for more information.

reBlogged from: Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

on May 10, 2012 at 08:00 PM

Art From Trash, as ReFunct Media Makes a Symphony from Obsolete Gear [Videos]

Obsolescence: it seems inescapable, as generations of old gear are replaced with shiny, new ones. But one person’s discarded electronic trash can be an artist’s electronic treasure.

ReFunct Media is a collaborative to make something out of all that used junk. In parades of strange, twitching machines and orchestras of electronic noise, gear goes from landfill fodder to art stars. The collective effort has made its way from Ireland (Imoca, RuaRed) to France (Gaité Lyrique) to, most recently, Berlin and the LEAP gallery, where we catch up with it in the form of some raucous video documentation. The artists themselves are known experimental creators and musicians and hackers – known, at least, in these parts: Benjamin Gaulon (IE/FR), Niklas Roy (DE), Karl Klomp (NL), Tom Verbruggen (NL) and Gijs Gieskes (NL).

You can see the whole lineup at top, and in the video below – a procession of glitchy gear. The installation was joined in Berlin recently by a series of performances from these artists.

Here’s another view of the ReFunct Media installation.

These works can become performative. TokTek, aka Dutch visual and musical artist Tom Verbruggen, makes twitchy, spastic music, constructing collisions of sound and rhythm from rapid-fire gestures on repurposed joysticks. (I’ve also gotten to enjoy his work at STEIM. Somehow, in this video, it loses something – it’s a crowd-pleasure in person, something about sharing a room with all this nervous sonic energy.)

Tom’s art installation works take on a distinct, but related, character. The whimsical, engaging “Crackle Canvas” is described as part painting, part instrument. It seems something out of Willy Wonka’s studio, an interconnected sound toy that whistles and clicks and sucks up recorded sound, chattering and conversing with itself.

A crackle-canvas is a painting that produces sound. It contains a circuitboad, speaker, knobs, switches, wood and canvas. Each one makes sounds by itself but can be connected through cables (patchedd) with other crackle-canvasses. This way the paintings start to reach to each other.

The artists’ description:

“ReFunct Media” is a multimedia installation that (re)uses numerous “obsolete” electronic devices (digital and analogue media players and receivers). These devices are hacked, misused and combined into a large and complex chain of elements. To use an ecological analogy they “interact” in different symbiotic relationships such as mutualism, parasitism and commensalism.

Voluntarily complex and unstable, “ReFunct Media” isn’t proposing answers to the questions raised by e-waste, planned obsolescence and sustainable design strategies. Rather, as an installation it experiments and explores

unchallenged possibilities of ‘obsolete’ electronic and digital media technologies and our relationship with technologies and consumption.

ReFunct Catalog PDF

Well, it certainly keeps the toxic e-waste out of the landfill — good — though I suppose you can’t call it quite green. LEAP tells me that when they switched on this giant assemblage of gear, it did suck up a lot of electricity. But while the artists claim they aren’t making a direct statement about e-waste, the revelation that things can be used and don’t have to be tossed is a profound one. “Awareness” is an overused words and doesn’t always solve problems, but it could transform this one.

Here’s another view of the installation and gallery opening:

And in another instance of repurposing gear, performances by “The Society for Nontrivial Pursuits” engaged in their own form of up-cycled musicality, a bit like the adventures of various Handmade Music evenings around the world – and many of the other artists we’ve written up here on CDM.

LEAP presents a performance evening from The Society for Nontrivial Pursuits (Alberto de Campo, Hannes Hoelzl, and students, alumni and associates of the class Generative Art / Computational Art at UdK Berlin, and others) explore the possibility of spaces of complex systems for experimental performance. They freely combine repurposed elements like analog synthesizers, game controllers, sensors and software with self-built/designed/written hard and soft components.

More from the artists – many with extensive galleries and showcases of work in which you could easily lose yourself…

http://karlklomp.nl/

http://www.toktek.org/

http://gieskes.nl/

http://www.niklasroy.com/

http://www.recyclism.com/ (Benjamin Gaulon)

reBlogged from: Create Digital Music

on May 10, 2012 at 08:00 PM

How It's Made

          I
painted my nails 2 days ago.

          WHOAAAA,
you guys. Don’t get too excited.

Béla, looking molto bella(o).

wonderful, wonderful diagram from Erno Lendvai's essay entitled "Symmetries of Music: An Introduction to the Semantics of Music," published 1993 by  the Kodaly Institute in Kecskemet.

tyle="text-indent: .5in;">













tyle="text-align: center;">
Don't tell me you've never seen this... 


reBlogged from: Neo Antennae

on May 10, 2012 at 06:00 PM

Guitar and Tone (MP3)

At 1:39, suspicions are verified. In the expansive world of experimental music, it’s pleasant to listen to each new individual track as a standalone entity, to take it as a self-contained whole, let its internal coherence be the ear’s sole guide — but there’s always some bit of metadata to help shape the imagination in advance. It may be a title giving white noise a conceptual framework, or it might be a brief annotation, alloying the sonic abstractions with facts about performance technique. Or it may, simply, be the musician’s name.

Hey Exit is Brendan Landis, whose experiments in music and sound generally employ some manner of string-based instrumentation (guitar, koto), a dose of noise-based sonic perception, and sometimes digital processing. So, when “It’s Just an Ugly Thing to Say,” a track he recently uploaded to his soundcloud.com/hey-exit account, begins with a slowly played acoustic guitar, the ears do two things: first, they wait for the noise, and second, they listen for the potential processing. They wonder, when the acoustic guitar’s notes begin to double, if that is two fingers, or if there is a digital tool being enabled as a subtle level. The sequence is slow, distantly folk-like.

And then, at 1:39, a note kicks in that is far beyond the guitar’s fundamental range. It is a single held note: a round, sour bit of sine-wave emersion that sways a little here and there. It blankets the guitar but doesn’t mute it. It confirms that this is, indeed, Hey Exit, and that a throwback John Fahey fan hasn’t hijacked his SoundCloud account. And it plays with the foregrounded guitar part, as the ear seeks out harmonic alignments and metric significance. It lasts for just over a minute, this tone, and then disappears. But like a bright light impressed upon the retina, it leaves an after image.

More on Landis, who is based in Brooklyn, New York, at heyexit.com.

reBlogged from: Disquiet

on May 10, 2012 at 05:00 PM

Miscellany: Waiting for Louise, etc.

Alan Rusbridger, one of the world's most influential newspaper editors, devotes his time to an extensive interview with the composer George Benjamin.... The beloved blog Proper Discord has returned, now identifying itself as the work of a Mr. Doe.... The...

reBlogged from: Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

on May 10, 2012 at 03:00 PM

SoundCloud Provides First Look at a New Interface [Gallery]

For all you hear about the primacy of visual culture, you might not expect a Web service exclusively focused on sound to be a big hit. SoundCloud, however, has seen meteoric growth, hitting 10 million users in January. Its interface, however, hasn’t quite grown and matured at the same pace. We’ve seen a lovely-looking new HTML5-based player embed, but the main site hasn’t gotten the same refresh – until now.

Yesterday evening, SoundCloud provided press and some members of the public with a first view of the new site. The facelift is organized around even greater focus on SoundCloud’s signature waveform view, with a greater emphasis on sharing and real-time updating, as well as more easily managing profiles.

In short, everything is a lot cleaner – a whole lot cleaner – and more focused on actually listening to and sharing music.

What’s new:

• The Waveform is bigger and more prominent – and stripped of hated comment clutter – with a new navigational interface.


• Profiles are redesigned for easier navigation.


• “Reposts” now add to sharing mechanisms for tracks and sets.


• Real-time updates show activity right away. (This seems to me a bit reminiscent of the direction taken by listening services like Spotify.)


• Continuous playback. I’ve long used Chrome (and now Firefox) extension ex.fm for this feature, which even allows you to move between sites; it’s nice to see SoundCloud allow you to keep sounds playing in the background as you navigate, though.


• Sets put collections of sounds into a single Waveform, in place of a playlist. This could be a solution for creating legal mixes for DJs and curators – or mixes of your own music – without running afoul of copyright restrictions by posting conventional DJ mixes. (That said, of course, you don’t get to actually mix and cross-fade. Now that’d be interesting.)


• Streamlined navigation, with keyboard shortcuts, master volume control, and other features.


• Improved search algorithm (a frequent source of complaints from readers to whom I’ve spoken), plus auto-complete/search suggestion.

So, when will you get all of this? SoundCloud says the roll-out will take “months,” though they haven’t given a solid timeframe. Initially, “tens of thousands” of beta invites will be available; you can request one now via a dedicated minisite for the redesign. That’s a tiny fraction of the total user base, so we’ll see how easy it is to get into the queue; I’ll work on getting CDM in so we can at least report back. A public beta will come later this year, with a “full switchover” for everyone expected by the end of the year.

I’ve gotten feedback from CDM readers about what they want out of SoundCloud, and initially, it doesn’t appear the redesign addresses all those concerns. It certainly looks prettier and more usable, and for public sharing, SoundCloud has been terrific. But readers have also requested easier ways to sell their music than are currently available. I’ve also heard from users – and found in my own experience – that private sharing and collaboration is relatively limited. (Chris Randall notes via Facebook that he prefers Dropbox for this purpose, particularly since they’ve added a player that works with private tracks.) We’ll see if any of these functional areas is addressed as SoundCloud rolls out new functionality, or if it becomes available via their API.

SoundCloud, for their part, does promise “new features,” and says that you’ll continue to have access to “existing features in the current version, such as upload and record.” I think it’s safe to say this brief preview doesn’t cover everything SoundCloud is developing in 2012.

My guess is, with so many cloud tools evolving, users will use a combination of tools to get their work done, collaborate, and share their music. Naturally, we’ll follow that closely to see if we can provide some useful information about how to get the most out of these tools.

What do you think of this first look at the new SoundCloud? And how do you use it? Let us know in comments.

More info / beta signup:

next.soundcloud.com

reBlogged from: Create Digital Music

on May 10, 2012 at 01:00 PM

5 Non-traditional Ways to Promote Your Music

Artists tend to be creative people. We write music, create dazzling visions of art, and express sentiments in the most unique ways. However, when it comes to promoting our art, something else happens. For one reason or the other, most artists fail to express any creativity in their business endeavors.

Here are five easy (non-internet) ways that you could promote your band. I hope that more than anything else, they get your brain going and inspire you to create ideas that work specifically for your art.

1. Teaming Up with Local Food: Do you frequent a local restaurant or know someone in the restaurant business? Offer to come up with a new recipe. On the menu, write “created by ______” (or however you want it phrased). In return, you’ll help promote the restaurant by encouraging fans to order the dish: through social media, on the back of your business cards, maybe a flyer or coupon. What restaurant wouldn’t want a local band promoting their food for free all over town?  You could do the same thing with a bar as well (designing a signature drink).


2. Coast with the Local Watering Hole: Speaking of bars, many of them also need coasters (they’re often supplied for free by beer or spirits distributors). Why not design some coasters and drop them off at your favorite place? You could design a cool logo, offer a free download, and link with a QR code to your music right there. Coasters are only a few cents to custom imprint, why not? Maybe your fans would want some, too.


3. At the Car Wash: I drive by an intersection that has car washes nearly every weekend. I’ve seen sports teams, church groups, and rehab centers, but I’ve never seen a band out there raising money for an album or tour van. Why not? Car washes are actually a great way to make money fairly easily. You could get friends and fans to help out, have a performance or sell CD’s, etc. In fact, you could even offer a free CD with a $10 donation or more for the car wash. You’d probably make more money in one afternoon than your typical dive bar gig.


4. Consignment: Consider selling your music or merchandise via consignment at places outside the normal record store. For instance, my band (The Slants) has a strong connection with the anime/comic book world so I set up displays and sell music at comic book stores around the country. We often offer to come in and do a performance, help promote the store, and only ask for a percentage of each sale in exchange for having the store feature our music. Music can be bought/sold anywhere, just look at Starbucks creating their own record label. What kinds of stores do you have a connection to?


5. Charity Fundraisers: There are many fundraisers that are looking for live entertainment. You might have even played some yourself. But have you also participated as a fundraising team for a cause that is important to you? Most fundraisers use a website system called Convio where participants can set up a personalized fundraising page and the top fundraisers are featured.  If you also participate as an active fundraiser, you’ll have much greater support (and recognition) from the organization, its staff, and volunteers. You can also give away free music in exchange for donations (makes a great tax write off) as well.

These are just some initial thoughts. I hope that they inspire you to think outside the box with all areas of your music career and how you can inject your own creativity into the process. What are some interesting things that you have done?

 

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

reBlogged from: Music Think Tank (primary) RSS

on May 10, 2012 at 12:00 PM

The Opera Librettos of Maurice Sendak

Click here to view the embedded video.

There has been plenty of eulogizing and assessment of Maurice Sendak’s remarkable career, most of it focused (rightly so) on his wonderful books. While Sendak’s work in opera and ballet has been praised, I don’t feel that enough attention has been paid to the two operas he worked on with Oliver Knussen. The first, Where the Wild Things Are, is the best children’s opera of our time; the second, Higglety Pigglety Pop!, is one of the best late 20th-century operas of any type. Higglety Pigglety Pop! is a fairy tale with great appeal to children, yet the surreal story of a selfish dog’s quest for happiness is laden with potent symbolism that speaks deeply to adults.

The efficiency of Sendak’s librettos to both works, and the ways he created new dialogue for Where the Wild Things Are, and distilled the text for Higglety Pigglety Pop!, reveal the handiwork of a shrewd man with a gift for the stage. Knussen’s music–impressionistic in Wild Things, parodic and post-modern in Higglety Pigglety Pop! is colorful and contemporary, yet highly accessible. I hope that more companies consider mounting a production of one or both operas.

I’ve posted my review of the 1990 LA Opera production of both works on my blog, and I hope it will give you a sense of the magic that Sendak and Knussen conjured for an audience full of children and adults. You can read the review here.

reBlogged from: Sequenza21/

on May 10, 2012 at 11:00 AM

Technology meets tradition

Paths converge in this photo which was taken yesterday afternoon. In the background is Mont Ventoux, celebrated by Petrarch and Liszt. In the middle distance is the Abbaye Notre Dame de l'Annonciation, whose nuns recorded the CD of Gregorian chant which sparked 'A musicians is also a person'. And in the foreground is composer and technology maven Jeff Harrington who featured in 'Is classical music obsessed by existential angst?' and a linked podcast. My thanks go to Father Edmond of L'Abbaye Sainte-Madeleine at Le Barroux who so generously welcomed us yesterday. By chance Igor Kirkwood was recording a second CD of chant by the monks at Le Barroux for Jade while we were visiting. I have praised their first disc here several several times; a sample can be heard in the podcast linked from 'Talking of Lady Gaga', which also includes music by Jonathan Harvey and Lady G herself.

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

reBlogged from: On An Overgrown Path

on May 10, 2012 at 11:00 AM

SongFusion and “States of Mind”

It was a program plotted with exceptional care. The singers and pianists of SongFusion put together a group of 20 songs (all but one in English) by 13 composers (all American, depending on how you count Kurt Weill), and gathered into three thematic groups: Love and Hate; Joy and Sorrow; Wonder and Desire, all under the rubric “States of Mind”. As if it wasn’t hard enough to make these groupings, while keeping an eye on creating a varied succession of expressive and vocal types,  SongFusion threw another element into the mix, with Kevork Mourad, a visual artist, sketching on the spot while the singers performed. He wasn’t sketching the singers, but making drawings inspired by the mood of the songs. The drawings were projected – mostly on a screen at the back of the stage, but also, imaginatively, on the clothing of the performers. My friend Mary Mackenzie took the next logical step, with abstract efflorescences appearing directly on her body in a projected image on the screen – you can see the body art in this picture:

(No, he didn’t draw on her while she sang! This was prepared beforehand.)

The program drew on the work of several composers best known for their songs as well as those whose catalog ranges more widely (see the full listing here). There were strong pieces and performances throughout the evening. Speaking of the pieces I know best: I do love Barber’s “Solitary Hotel” for the irregular but perfectly timed way he embeds Joyce’s fragments into the underlying tango, as well as for the mysterious mood and cryptic ending. Among Harbison’s songs, his Mirabai set is best known, but last night we heard excerpts from the less widely performed cycle Simple Daylight. These pieces are rather tough for the performers, with densely worked piano parts and vocal lines that are demanding both technically and emotionally (the set was originally composed for Dawn Upshaw and, I believe, James Levine, though I don’t know if he ever played it – it’s Gil Kalish accompanying on the fine Nonesuch recording.) Mary pulled off the perfect little black hole of hate that is “Somewhere A Seed” powerfully, in part by holding back and smiling cheerfully during the first part of the piece, reserving the acid scorn of the song’s narrator for later in the game when it could sting all the more intensely. I am very grateful for Mary’s performance of “Every Day is a God”, from my cycle Holy the Firm, another piece written for Upshaw. Mary and her pianist Kathleen Tagg conveyed the sensuous and spiritual ecstasies of Annie Dillard’s gorgeous text with a contagious joy.

The concert took place at the DiMenna Center in Manhattan – this is the home of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s – although theoretically a rehearsal space, I thought the room worked well for a performance.

SongFusion members are Victoria Browers and Mary Mackenzie, sopranos; Michael Kelly, baritone; Liza Stepanova and Kathleen Tagg, piano. Guest artists last night included Henrik Heide, flute; Edward Klorman, viola (they joined the group for Tom Cipullo’s touching “The Husbands”) and Tyler Learned, lighting designer. I very much look forward to their next performance.

reBlogged from: Secret Geometry - James Primosch's blog

on May 10, 2012 at 06:00 AM