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November 30, 2005

More fall CDs

A little while back, I wrote up Marc Minkowski's Rameau disc, promising a series of capsule reviews of other outstanding releases. I lied. I'll try to zip through the rest in telegraphic style. Links are to Barnes & Noble, which, unlike some other online stores, does not give money to morally disgusting politicians. Gidon Kremer's set of the Bach Sonatas and Partitas belongs among the classic recordings this cycle has received. In the notes Kremer calls the Chaconne in D minor a "dance of life and death," and that is what he plays: earthy accents on the beat in the opening recitation of the theme, giving way to ever more ghostly, weightless, shivering sounds. The recording was made at the Pfarrkirche in Lockenhaus, home of Kremer's famous festival; you can almost smell the damp stone. (See Adam Baer for more.) Arvo Pärt's Lamentate, also on ECM, finds the master of serenity in a severe, even violent mood. I talked to Pärt around the time Lamentate was conceived, in 2002, and, if the drift of our conversation was any guide, his mind was on September 11th, which fell on his birthday. When I was at a Virgin Records last summer, this music came crashing over the loudspeakers on the pop floor, and everyone froze.

Andrew Manze, the Gidon Kremer of early music, has made a hugely vibrant recording of Mozart's 1781 violin sonatas, with Richard Egarr on fortepiano. The riot of contrasting timbres right at the start of K. 376, not only between violin and fortepiano but also between the fortepiano's upper and lower registers, had me thinking for a split second that Manze had done a crazy thing and transcribed the sonatas for chamber ensemble. A rival Mozart disc by the brilliant Hilary Hahn sounds drab by comparison. (Russell has more.) Boris Berezovsky delivers a barn-burning, chicken-devouring rendition of the Chopin-Godowsky Etudes; Chopin's originals and Godowsky's impossible transcriptions unfold side by side, in a sequence of parallax views. John Eliot Gardiner's cycle of Bach cantatas, recorded live in churches across England and Europe in the year 2000, goes from strength to strength. Volume 8 travels from the seductive melancholy of "Komm, du süße Todesstunde" (Mark Padmore singing "Mein Verlangen") to the muscular joy of "Jauchzet Gott."

Michael Finnissy, a composer formerly associated with the so-called New Complexity movement (q. v. the Holy Roman Empire), goes his own way in Maldon and companion choral pieces; in the title piece, riotous instrumental textures and extended vocal techniques (unsettling high glissando trombones at the beginning) mix with dark slabs of ancient Anglo-Saxon chant. Throughout the album, old sounds (folksongs, ballads, chorales, chant) intersect with modern ones, in fabulously eerie and transfixing ways. Hats off to the half-century-old Kyle Gann for brightening the planet with his Studies for Disklavier. I first encountered these pieces at the Sounds Like Now festival last year; some ("Texarkana," "Despotic Waltz") draw Chaplinesque comedy from the hyperkinetic action of the computerized piano, while others summon clouds of Ivesian mystery ("Unquiet Night") or simply make you happy ("Bud Ran Back Out"). Perhaps one day Berezovsky will try to play them live. Finally, Gimell's reissue of classic Tallis Scholars recordings of Iberian Requiems — works of Victoria, Lôbo, and Cardoso — has lately spent more time in my Denon than anything else. The Overgrown Path concurs, saying that if you buy one CD this year it should be this. I can't argue too strongly with that, although right now Gidon's Bach is at the top of my forthcoming best-of list.

Originally posted by Alex Ross from Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 30, 2005 at 07:44 PM | Comments (0)

Dreams and séances

I had an amusing e-mail exchange with Sarah Cahill, a superb pianist, whom I've known since I lived in Berkeley in 1990-91. She lived upstairs from me in a sort of enlightened boarding house on College Avenue. I would annoy the neighbors by blasting Nixon in China at all hours, not realizing that Sarah actually knew the great composer, or, as I now know, that he lived a mile away. In any case, we wrote to each other about musical dreams, which may reveal something about the disparate anxieties of performers and critics. Sarah wrote: "I just woke up from a great dream about you. You had given me the score to the Schubert Fantasy in F minor for four hands, and we performed it together for a large and enthusiastic audience at a good old piano. It was so much fun! Then I announced that I was going to play a Mozart sonata by myself, and suddenly a flood of people came up apologizing that they had to go, they had dinner plans, and the hall cleared out completely. Before they left, many of them came up to you and introduced themselves a little fawningly. You said not to feel bad because concerts were at an awkward time anyway. But our Schubert duo was so polished and perfect!" Those who have heard me play the piano — a thankfully small community — will burst out laughing at the notion of polish and perfection on my part. The "flood of people" would have commenced, I think, a little earlier.

I wrote back: "I should tell you that I’ve had a dream that goes like this. I have been invited to perform a large-scale Romantic concerto, something like the Brahms D Minor. I am sitting in the green room, trying to persuade the management that there has been some kind of gigantic misunderstanding, that I can’t actually play this piece, that I can barely play the piano to begin with. They say, 'Oh, the usual nerves. You’ll be wonderful! You’re a good music critic — you’re bound to be a wonderful pianist!' I go out on stage and stand before the audience, which is applauding in anticipation. I wake up in a cold sweat." A happier dream was of my meeting with Bartók. When I wrote about that, Alan Rich sent along the astounding information that at the premiere of Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra in 1944 he had gone backstage and shaken the composer's hand.

All this is a contorted prelude to a mention of Sarah Cahill's marathon musical séance in San Francisco on December 3rd. Presented by Other Minds, the day-long concert will feature spiritually, supernaturally, Theosophically, and hypnotically tinted music by Satie, Scriabin, Ornstein, Ives, Cowell, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Dane Rudhyar, Mr. Adams, Lou Harrison, Terry Riley, Alvin Curran, Kyle Gann (some of his Disklavier pieces), and many others. Anyone who has attended Sarah's past marathons will know to expect the unexpected. Let's hope Scriabin doesn't come back and start the apocalypse.

Originally posted by Alex Ross from Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 30, 2005 at 07:44 PM | Comments (0)

Lengthy Article by Newberry About Yours Truly

Stirling Newberry, composer, political writer and classical music commentator, has written a lengthy and (ahem) fascinating (if a bit dark) article about my music, my contributions to net culture and to the formation of an online classical music scene at...

Originally posted by jeff from The Music of Jeff Harrington, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 30, 2005 at 07:43 PM | Comments (0)

Marketing Our Music

I’ve been reading with interest the various threads, comments, and questions on bios, self-promotion and marketing, etc. While I am an active musician and composer, my day job is program production manager at WFIU public radio station, licensed to Indiana

Originally posted by Cary Boyce from Sequenza21/Composers Forum, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 30, 2005 at 07:43 PM | Comments (0)

BBC Pulls Back on Free Downloads

Caving to industry pressure and the threat of job loss, the BBC has decided to limit downloads in its upcoming Bach series. The controversy is that a public broadcasting network would in this manner forsake the educational agenda begun with the Beethoven download series. No doubt whatever downloads are allowed will be incomplete in some way. That a public broadcasting network, funded with tax payer dollars would favor the recording corporations (and it is multi-faceted for sure) over a public which doesn't really know what they're missing is disturbing. The fantastic part of the Beethoven giveaway was that its audio 'freeness' made a stuffy old dead guy cool. I'd like to see some real stats about the cost (percieved cost) to the industry. I would be willing to bet that if anything, there was a net gain, if not in sales, in attention, in interest, in a new fascination with one of the wonders of the universe, previously available only by chance (on the radio) or by spending money. The idea that you would give away such phenomenal beauty and then stop the process because of corporate pressure is frankly, shocking. Booo.......

Originally posted by jeff from beepSNORT, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 30, 2005 at 07:43 PM | Comments (0)

Fascinatin' Rhythm

This just in. The Young Eight, an African-American string octet, is holding an Emerging Composers Competition. In the spirit of equal opportunity, applicants may be of any race, sex or ethnicity but the compositions submitted must display "African, Carib

Originally posted by Jerry Bowles from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 30, 2005 at 07:43 PM | Comments (0)

In praise of Paul Dessau

I was in Berlin at the weekend, and a concert in the beautiful Konzerthaus gave an interesting glimpse of the values of the communist music czars. The Konzerthaus, which dates from 1821, was gutted by fire in 1945. It was sumptuously restored during the l

Originally posted by Pliable from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 30, 2005 at 07:43 PM | Comments (0)

Musicians' jobs before free downloads

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 30, 2005 at 01:42 PM | Comments (0)

Music downloading as a terrorist offence?

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 30, 2005 at 01:42 PM | Comments (0)

Unsilent Night in Tucson

On Sunday, December 18th at 7pm I am organizing a performance of downtown NY composer Phil Kline's ambient Christmas masterpiece, Unsilent Night in Tucson.

YOU ARE INVITED TO PARTICIPATE!!! (Well, that is if you live in Tucson.)

Unsilent Night is an outdoor ambient music piece for an INFINITE number of boom box tape/CD players. It's kind of like Christmas carolling, except that we won't sing, but rather carry boom boxes, each playing a separate tape/CD, which is part of the piece. In effect, we'll become a block-long stereo system!

WHAT YOU NEED: Yourself, a portable boom box tape/CD player, and a cheery holiday attitude (no grinches)!

We will meet at University Main Gate near Centennial Hall. Please arrive no later than 6:45pm so tapes/CDs can be distributed. From there, we will proceed down University Ave, turning left onto 4th Ave. We will continue down the east side of 4th until the underpass, where we'll turn around and come back up the west side of 4th. We will finish at the intersection of 4th and University, where the piece will end at around 8 o'clock.

Please RSVP by emailing me no later than December 16 so I know how many tapes/CDs to make. And let me know whether you'll have a tape or CD boom box so I know what format to make for you. If you don't have a boom box but just want to come and listen, that's cool too.

Be a part of this one-of-a-kind cult holiday tradition. Help us make a BIG and joyful noise!

See you there!

Originally posted by Brian Sacawa from Brian Sacawa: Sounds Like Now, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 30, 2005 at 01:40 PM | Comments (0)

Passacaglia

Though it may not seem it, Webern's Passacaglia is a model of economy. In 1908, it was top of the line. By the time he'd knock off for good, he'd have moved that top of the line to one of those rare, irreproachable heights where a mode of thought reaches its apotheosis, and thereafter, renders anything else in a similar vein a pallid retread, which, to come back to the piece at hand, some would say of his Passacaglia, calling it a final embrace of German romaticism, a portrayal which dovetails nicely with the similarly false artistic trajectory that has been created for Schoenberg.

All the best of Webern is here: The timbral counterpoint; the stunning, microscopic, symmetrical transformations; dynamic schemes; even his most iconic cell structure is present at the outset. It would be a ridiculous form of organicism to suggest the work is a germ for the thirty that would follow, the type of contortionist compliment that critics rely on all too often.

The rather more genuine compliment is that, though the work could be attributed to other hands, there is no mistaking Webern's voice. Ralph Fiennes' dissection of a forged Picasso in The Good Thief, wherein he goes so far as to cite the influence of beached Etruscan vases, comes to mind, and certainly one could exhaustively catalogue the influences in this short score, but the voice of Opus 31 is unmistakably that of Opus 1, which is compliment enough, and a truly rare feat of composition, especially given what a revolutionary voice it is.

Originally from ANABlog, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 30, 2005 at 01:40 PM | Comments (0)

Aeromusic be damned:

Give us an Aeropictorial Dinner!

aeropictorial dinner
in the cockpit

In the roomy cockpit of a large Autostabilizing DeBernardi, surrounded by Aeropaintings by the Futurists Marasco, Tato, Benedetta, Oriani and Munari which hang from the aeropeaks and clouds on the horizon they are flying over at 1000 metres, the diners free five lobsters intact from their shells and boil them electrically in sea water. They stuff them with a pulp of egg yolk, carrots, thyme, garlic, lemon rind, the eggs and liver of the lobsters, capers. They sprinkle them with curry powder and put them back in their shells, tinted blue here and there with methylene.

Bizarrely the five lobsters are then placed in seeming disorder and at some distance from each other on a huge Tullio d'Albisola aeroceramic, mattressed by twenty different kinds of salad: these being geometrically arranged in a pattern of squares.

And so the diners, holding in their fists little ceramic bell-towers full of Barolo mixed with Asti Spumante, eat villages, farms and fields speeding by.

Formula by the Futurist Aeropoet
MARINETTI
and the Futurist Aeropainter
FILLÌA

The Regenerator
by the Futurist engineer Barosi)

an egg yolk.
half a glass of Asti spumante.
3 toasted nuts.
3 teaspoons of sugar.

Beat the whole together for ten minutes. Serve in a glass with a peeled banana sticking out of it.

Originally from ANABlog, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 30, 2005 at 01:40 PM | Comments (0)

News good and bad

The good news is that Lorraine Hunt Lieberson has returned from her long absence looking healthy and sounding — well, I gave up trying to invent new superlatives for this supreme musician some time ago. Peter Lieberson's new cycle Neruda Songs is dizzyingly beautiful music, and not only because LHL sings it; I'll say more when I review the composer's big new Philharmonic piece in the spring. The bad news, for music criticism at least, is that Richard Dyer, a dean of the profession, is leaving the Boston Globe in May. Read his review of Neruda Songs for a sense of what will be missed; no critic writes with more authority or passion. Will the Globe find a worthy successor? Or will it use Dyer's retirement as an excuse to edge classical music off its pages? I hope the former. The possible future that's being glimpsed in other places is that there will no longer be classical critics, only arts reporters who cover classical events from time to time. This is all in response to the ongoing slide in newspaper subscriptions. Ironically, those who remain loyal subscribers are more likely to be interested in classical music. What I don't get about the current crisis, if there is one, is why newspapers persist in giving away all their content (or nearly all, in the case of the Times) on the Internet. I never took economics, but it seems to me that a company that gives away its product for free is committing suicide.

Originally posted by Alex Ross from Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 30, 2005 at 01:40 PM | Comments (0)

And now, Mr. Zappa speaks on the negative dialectic of Poodle Play

"I was always interested in art...I'd never seen music on paper. What I had seen had been orchestra parts they give you in high school, beginner stuff. Then I saw a score. It just looked so wonderful - the very idea that this graphic representation, when

Originally posted by Alan Theisen from Alan Theisen, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 30, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0)

Back to work.

Ideally, this is where I'd be sounding off about Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall last night... that is, before some fast-acting stomach bug put paid to that notion. Lieberson happily turned up; unhappily, I did not. A quick scan for feedback finds Alex Ross at a loss for new adjectives (and somewhat understandably distracted besides), but Sieglinde has more than a few lovely words to share. The Times covered a Boston performance; maybe a New York report will follow. And Richard Dyer -- whose impending departure from the Boston Globe so distracted Alex, and rightly so -- penned the loveliest tribute to the Boston performance that one might hope for. Tommasini's report made me somewhat sad to have missed the Monday night NYC reprise; Dyer's review made me positively heartsick.

Meanwhile, I was back in the saddle tonight at Stern Auditorium for Earl Wild's 90th birthday concert, and a more elegant evening of patrician pianism I could hardly wish for. After setting the tone with his stately transcription of the Adagio from Marcello's D-minor Oboe Concerto, Wild played Beethoven's Sonata No. 7. I could imagine a more transparent and precisely rendered reading, but not a more completely dramatized one: The room could scarcely breathe for the gravitas Wild found in the Largo, to the extent that the playful Menuetto came as a sigh of relief. The final Rondo was a giddy dash.

Wild opened Liszt's Les jeux d'eaux à la Villa d'Este with sun-dappled ripples, offering a vision so picturesque it verged on cinematic. A flexible, impulsive Chopin G-minor Ballade closed the first half. After the intermission, Wild offered more familiar Chopin: the Scherzo No. 2, Ballade No. 3 and Fantaisie-Impromptu No. 4, the last a furtive, fleeting dazzle that fairly sighed into song. Wild closed the program with his Jarabe Tapatio, a play of bluesy virtuosity spinning variations on the Mexican Hat Dance. A rousing ovation brought Ned Rorem scampering out to accompany the audience in a rendition of "Happy Birthday." The evening ended with a single encore, which sounded like a Rachmaninoff miniature (and which Jed Distler subsequently suggested to have been one of Wild's Rachmaninoff song transcriptions), a hushed patter of raindrops playing over a melancholy ballad.

Throughout the evening, I was struck again and again by Wild's still-generous virtuosity at 90, as well as the general rightness of his readings -- flexible, personal, but never ostentatious or trashy. It's pianism without mannerism, a strain increasingly hard to find. Jed had the best line of the evening: "Earl Wild makes me proud to be an American artist." And somehow, despite the cell phones, the apparent outbreak of emphysema and the woman in the back row who didn't seem to understand how the balcony overhang amplified her constant whispering to her neighbor, I still managed to lose myself in beauty for the most part.

Wow, feels good to stretch these muscles again! There was no live music consumption during my Houston sojourn, although I did catch several lengthy stretches of a Houston Grand Opera Roméo broadcast on NPR's World of Opera that put to shame the Met's opening night on any number of levels. As in New York, Ramón Vargas was a handsomely sung Roméo; in Houston, he was partnered with the Juliette of Ana María Martínez, whose praises were recently sung by vilaine fille. (Now, granted, I haven't heard Dessay and probably won't until March...)

Anyway, I'm belatedly filling my dance card for the next few weeks, to the extent that I'm very nearly exhausted just looking at my calendar: Janine Jansen and Neeme Järvi's NJSO doing the Britten Violin Concerto at NJPAC... An American Tragedy at the Met... Jennifer Higdon's Percussion Concerto at Carnegie Hall... Charles Curtis playing Alvin Lucier at Diapason...

Still, I plan to update the blogroll this weekend, so if you've linked to me and I've not repaid your kindness, please rattle my cage. I have definitely noticed some welcome links from blogs I dig, for which I'm genuinely grateful. I've also spotted one that puzzles me just a little bit, although I'm no less appreciative. It seems that my Marcello Giordani gush earned a spot on the blogroll at Viviane's Sex Carnival. (Only a few friends and colleagues know just how ironic that particular citing is.)

Playlist:

Anti-Social Music - Sings the Great American Songbook (Peacock)

Joseph Haydn - Trio in G; Ludwig van Beethoven - Variations on "Ich bin der Schneider Kakadu"; Franz Schubert - Piano Trio No. 1 in B-flat - Jacques Thibaud, Pablo Casals and Alfred Cortot (Naxos)

Originally posted by NightAfterNight from Night After Night, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 30, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0)

New on Innova

Innova has released a book about Harry Partch as well as a new CD from Mark Applebaum.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 30, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0)

R.I.P. CDs

An article covers the many alternatives available to owning CDs.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 30, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0)

New Mike Ladd Reviewed

Dusted reviews the latest from Mike Ladd.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 30, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0)

Site News

Just a few notes on some rather minor site enhancements.

We now have a custom URL / bookmark icon. You should see it right now in the URL bar on your browser. You can also re-bookmark this page to have it appear in your bookamrks list. Yeah, its just our yellow logo compressed to the point of unreadability, but its a start.

We’ve also enhanced the RSS feed so that it provides the entire article instead of just the beginning of the article. This will make it easier to read the site from an RSS client.

Finally, we are experiencing more traffic than ever and are getting a large number of submissions. Our turn-around time on these submissions can be days to weeks in length. This is not ideal and we’d like to expedite the process, but that is not always possible. In the mean time, keep the article links and information coming in and we’ll sort through it all as fast as we can.

Thanks again for your interest in AMN.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 30, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0)

Missed Opportunities

What happens when you actually take the time to stop to listen to something without worrying about whether or not it conforms to your expectations?

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 30, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0)

Pharoah's Dance (1969). Joe Zawinul

Bass clarinetist Bennie Maupin inadvertently squeaks three times in the first two minutes of this Miles Davis recording. He goes on to play the best solo in the piece so all is forgiven.

Originally posted by Robert Gable from aworks :: "new" american classical music, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 30, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0)

Send Lawyers, Guns and Money

The American Music Center is looking for a few good opinions. Ian Moss sent the following note, which I'm passing along, sans wiseass remark: The American Music Center is launching an initiative to investigate and identify the needs of contemporary comp

Originally posted by Jerry Bowles from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 30, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0)

BBC thinks again on free downloads

The BBC has decided to limit the scale of its free music file downloads during the upcoming Bach week (16th to 25th December) - 'Nothing will happen without consultation and, should it happen, it will be nothing on the scale of Beethoven,' a Radio 3 spok

Originally posted by Pliable from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 30, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0)

November 29, 2005

György Kurtág wins 2006 Grawemeyer

Originally from The Rambler, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 29, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0)

The radiance of a thousand suns

In August 1945 atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Around 120,000 people, of which 95% were civilians, were killed outright. It is estimated that a further quarter of a million died from the after effects of the explosions. Six days after the second bomb was dropped Japan surrendered unconditionally, removing the requirement for an invasion of the Japanese mainland by Allied forces , an engagement that would undoubtedly have resulted in dreadful casualties on both sides. Hopefully the music community, as well as the world, will remember 2005 as the sixtieth anniversary of these terrible events, as well as the year of the premiere of an opera by John Adams.

My attempts to understand the almost incomprehensible events of 1945 led me to the recently published 109 East Palace by Jennet Conant. This is the story of the extraordinary secret community of allied scientists at Los Alamos in New Mexico that, in a race against the clock, created the two bombs that were dropped on Japan. The Los Alamos scientists had also been racing to beat the threat of a German atomic weapon. Nazi scientists working in the Kiaser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin had discovered in 1938 that the splitting of a uranium atom set free enormous quantities of energy, opening up the possibility of a chain reaction creating an explosion of unheard-of power. Their 'uranium project' had the full backing of Nazi Minister of Arnaments Albert Speer, and one of the leading German physicists, Werner Heissenberg (who won the 1932 Nobel prize in physics) later said: 'Since September 1941 we saw a clear road towards the atom bomb.' Created initially to head off the German atomic threat the research centre at Los Alamos was led by the legendary J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Doctor Atomic of John Adam's opera.

The author of 109 East Palace is Jennet Conant, the granddaughter of former Harvard president and chief administrator of the Manhattan Project James B. Conant. She is unashamedly pro-Oppenheimer, and some will find this lack of objectivity a flaw, but despite this the new book makes a useful contribution to the Los Alamos literature. The title 109 East Palace comes from the nondescript office in Santa Fe that was the gatehouse for the secret compound created on the high mesa beyond the town. The book doesn't set out to be another academic study of Oppenheimer (right) and the development of the bombs. Instead it is a very human study of the people involved in the project, and the horrendous work pressures and ethical dilemnas that they faced. It tells how the young Oppenheimer failed to find a cure for his depression in medical treatment, and instead turned to Eastern mysticism, and in particular the Mahabharata, and other stories from the Hindu devotional poem the Bhagavad Gita. (Among others who turned to Hindu texts were T.S. Eliot in his Four Quartets, and somewhat surprisingly Beethoven, who in in his diary for 1816 wrote about the “Indian literature” he had been reading. After reading the Rig-Veda Beethoven wrote “God is immaterial and transcends every conception”.)

On the night before the first atomic test at the Trinity site Oppenheimer quoted this stanza from the Bhagavad Gita:

In battle, in forest, at the precipice in the mountain,
On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,
In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,
The good deeds a man has done before defend him

And after the first successful test explosion which confirmed the horrendous destructive power created by his team he quoted the lines where Vishnu tries to persuade the Prince to do his duty and take on his multi-armoured form:

If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky,
That would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...
I am become Death,
The shatterer of Worlds

Robert Oppenheimer was a brilliant scientist and intellectual. After the war he was appointed director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, where he was unofficial intellectual guru to an amazing roster of talent ranging from Nobel Prize winning physicists Niels Bohr and Paul Dirac, to the poet T. S. Eliot (neatly squaring the Sanskrit circle), and the historian Arnold Toynbee. Oppenheimer's mother was an artist, whose personal art collection included a Renoir, drawings by Picasso and Vuillard, a Rembrandt etching, and a Van Gogh. He was fond of the sonnets of John Donne, learnt Sanskrit to read the Hindu scriptures in the original, and read Marx's entire Das Kapital, in German, on a cross-country train trip. His musical tastes included Bach fugues and the late Beethoven Quartets, with the Op. 131 in C sharp Minor a particular favoutite.

Like every highly gifted person Oppenheimer was flawed. He was not averse to making highly damaging accusations against colleagues such Bernard Peters and Haakon Chevalier to throw the security services off his own scent as they investigated his left-wing sympathies. The political paths he continued to explore when working on the atomic bomb, and the doubts he later developed about the ethics of the develoment of the hydrogen bomb were used at the Gray Board hearings to categorise him as a security risk, and he lived out his final years as a marginalised figure.His treatment was a puzzling contrast to that handed out to scientists with proven Nazi connections. For instance the rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun joined the Nazi SS in 1939, and headed the Germans missile weapons project until 1945. As well as developing the V2 rocket which was used with considerable effect against Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands he was working on the A9/A10 rocket which was designed to reach as far as the USA. In 1945 von Braun, together with 500 employees, surrendered to US troops, and the key scientists and their prototype rockets were shipped to the US. In 1960 von Braun became director of the NASA George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, and in the 1970s he was made vice-director of NASA. Following his death in 1977 he was honoured with a statue, and the von Braun performance centre for the arts in Huntsville, Alabama.

Robert Oppenheimer fared less well, presumably because he was judged to have sympathised with the wrong enemy. The story of his security clearance and fall from grace is not covered in Doctor Atomic, which ends with the first test in 1945. I haven't seen the opera, but was impressed by the positive response it received. However from a distance ending it at the Trinity test seems a bit like ending the Ring with the Ride of the Valkyries. Interestingly 109 East Palace also tells us that John Adams was not the first to dramatise the Manhattan Project. In 1947 a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer blockbuster The Beginning or the End? hit the silver screens, with Hume Cronyn starring as Robert Oppenheimer, and Spencer Tracy as his military boss, General Leslie Groves. The film flopped at the box-office.

109 East Palace does not set out to be a biography of Robert Oppenheimer, or a detailed study of the Manhattan Project. The literature of the project is already very rich, with books such as Gregg Herken's extraordinarily well researched, detailed and virtually unreadable Brotherhood of the Bomb shortly to be joined by a new life of Oppenheimer from the late Abraham Pais. By contrast 109 East Palace is Oppenheimer-lite. Instead of placing him centre stage it uses an unpublished memoir by one of the first civilians recruited to the project, a young widow and Smith graduate Dorothy McKibbin, as the thread that binds the narrative together. McKibbin was close to Oppenheimer, and clearly besotted by him, which is another reason why the book lacks objectivity. 109 East Palace is useful book for anyone wanting to place the cold mechanics of weapons of mass destruction in a human context. But in the final analysis it is too superficial (much of the information in this article about the Manhattan Project comes from other sources) and subjective to provide anything more than a fascinating lightweight introduction to a subject that cries out for heavyweight coverage.

109 East Palace by Jennet Conant is published by Simon & Schuster ISBN 0-7432-5007-9
Los Alamos continues as a National Laboratory involved with nuclear weapons, and other activities. Interestingly, in view of the much publicised avian flu outbreaks, it is currently involved with researching influenza genetic codes. Visit the facility via this link
There are some excellent photos of Los Alamos and the test site, plus coverage of Doctor Atomic on New Yorker music critic, and fellow blogger, Alex Ross' web site.

International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) is a non-partisan international grouping of medical organisations dedicated to the abolition of nuclear weapons. They work with the long-term victims of nuclear explosions and accidents from Hiroshima to Chernobyl, and their work has been recognised with the 1984 UNESCO Peace Prize, and 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. For the last 21 years IPPNW-Concerts has been working from its Berlin office with top musicians world-wide to raise funds for their work. The organisation is run by medical practitioner Dr Peter Strauber and his wife, who I had the pleasure of meeting in Berlin last week.

As well as being a fantastic cause there is some music well worth exploring available on IPPNW-Concerts' own CD label, and in co-productions with Swedish label BIS. These are all live recordings of concerts promoted by IPPNW over the years. There are forty-nine CDs in the catalogue with composers ranging from Monteverdi to Elliot Carter. The nuggets worth mining include Furtwängler's Te Deum coupled with Brahms and Hindemith (CD40).

Of particular relevance to this article is Wort und Musik - 60 Jahre nach Hiroshima. This is a live recording made at the March 2005 'Nuclear Weapons Inheritance Project' which mixes readings in German from a range of authors including Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Albert Einstein and Sadako Kurihara with relevent music including the aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Shostakovich's String Quartet No 8 and Schubert’s Quartettsatz. On the lighter side there are also a number of jazz recordings worth exploring, including the Berlin Philharmonic Jazz Group playing live in 2004 in the Philharmonie in Berlin with the world-famous baritone Thomas Quasthoff.

IPPNW co-productions with BIS also contain some real gems. My own favourite is a live Missa Solemnis from the Philharmonie in Berlin with Antal Doráti conducting the European Symphony Orchestra, University of Maryland Chorus, and a distinguished group of soloists. Another BIS co-production recorded at the Philharmonie with the New Berlin Chamber Orchestra and members of the Czech Philharmonic and HdK-Chamber Choir conducted by Martin Fischer-Dieskau includes two of Doráti’s own compositions (his Pater Noster, Prayer for Mixed Choir and Jesus oder Barabbas? a melodrama after a story by Karinthy Frigyes for Speaker, Orchestra and Choir) alongside works from Bartok and Martinu. Finally among the BIS co-productions a live Mahler Symphony No 9 with Rudolf Barshai conducting the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra is a rarity well worth investigating. All proceeds from the sale of these CDs benefit those in dire need as a result of war, industrial and natural catastrophe. Need I say more?

Picture credits:
Nuclear explosion - UCL Astrophysics Group
Robert Oppenheimer - Gallery M
Book cover - Simon & Schuster
Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
If you enjoyed this post take An Overgrown Path to The year is '72 href="http://theovergrownpath.blogspot.com/2005/08/musicians-against-nuclear-weapons.html">Musicians against nuclear weapons

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 29, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0)

Peter Lieberson’s Neruda Songs

Originally from ionarts, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 29, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0)

Claudia Quintet European Tour

The Claudia Quintet is kicking off this tour tonight.

November 26-December 10 The Claudia Quintet European Tour

28.11 WIST Graz, AUSTRIA
29.11 Unterfahrt Munich, GERMANY
30.11 Object 5 Halle, GERMANY
01.12 A-Trane Berlin, GERMANY
02.12 Nuremberg, GERMANY
03.12 Vienna???
05.12 Eindhoven
06.12 Dortmund
08.12 Bimhuis Amsterdam, HOLLAND
09.12 Bielefeld, GERMANY
10.12 Offenbach, GERMANY

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 29, 2005 at 01:33 PM | Comments (0)

One Final Note Reviews

Review of the week from One Final Note:

21 November 2005
:. Charlie Haden Liberation Music Orchestra Not in Our Name (Verve) by John Eyles
:. Alberto Pinton Quintet Motionemotion (Moserobie) by Jay Collins
:. Malaby/Opsvik/Davis Tone Collector (Jazzaway) by Troy Collins
:. Gerald Wilson Orchestra In My Time (Mack Avenue) by David Dupont
:. Blairman/Schönborn/Simpson Like Back in the Days (Rodenstein) by Daniel Spicer

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 29, 2005 at 01:33 PM | Comments (0)

Nels Cline/ Wally Shoup / Chris Corsano CD Reviewed

The latest from these fine gentlemen has been reviewed.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 29, 2005 at 01:33 PM | Comments (0)

Downtime

AMN was down for a few hours this morning due to a DNS problem at our ISP that made our database unreachable. Apparently this issue has been resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 29, 2005 at 01:33 PM | Comments (0)

John Lindberg Performances

Bassist John Lindberg will be playin with Wadada Leo Smith, Kevin Norton and others over the next few months.

12/1
Wadada Leo Smith’s Golden Quartet
Merkin Hall
NYC

12/2
Wadada Leo Smith/John Lindberg Duo
An Die Musik
Baltimore, MD

12/3
Wadada Leo Smith’s Golden Quartet
Iron Gate Theatre
Philadelphia, PA

12/7
Kevin Norton’s S.O.S.
Roulette
NYC

2006

1/29
Kevin Norton Trio
Mahwah Public Library
Mahwah, NJ

Spring-Fall

John Lindberg/Kevin Norton Quartet
Northeast/Midwest Tour

Premiere: 2/24
William Paterson University
Wayne, New Jersey

7/27
William Paterson University
Wayne, New Jersey

Karl Berger/John Lindberg Duo
European Tour

March 18-28

5/5
String Trio of New York
Sussex County Community College

5/25 & 5/26
John Lindberg Quartet
Ars Nova Workshop
Philadelphia, PA

June/July
John Lindberg Winter Birds Quartet
European Tour

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 29, 2005 at 01:33 PM | Comments (0)

Bagatellen Reviews

A few new reviews from Bagatellen.

Agustí Fernández & Mats Gustafsson – Critical Mass - 28 Nov 05
Broken Hands/Lucky Rabbit - Lucky Hands - 27 Nov 05
Two with Nakatani - 25 Nov 05
Dave Fox - Dedication Suite - 23 Nov 05
Bob Bellerue/ halfnormal - Threat Level Charlie - 23 Nov 05

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 29, 2005 at 01:33 PM | Comments (0)

Philadelphia: Hoodia Listen To?

The eccentric, do-it-yourself presenting outfit Chamber Music Now opens its fourth season with the cello and percussion duo Odd Appetite.

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 29, 2005 at 01:33 PM | Comments (0)

Long Time Passing

Where have all the war protest songs gone? Blackdogred wants to know. Alex Ross has a piece called The Evangelist on David Robertson in this week's New Yorker...Kyle Gann writes about András Schiff's problems with Janacek's meter...Our own bloggers se

Originally posted by Jerry Bowles from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 29, 2005 at 01:33 PM | Comments (0)

Kurtág Wins Grawemeyer

While my faith in superlative statements is far from strong, I think he's the best alive we have. His music manifests the sort of unmediated expression that marks the truly liberated muse. György Kurtág is this year's Grawemeyer winner.

Originally posted by David Salvage from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 29, 2005 at 01:33 PM | Comments (0)

Doctor Atomic continued

'The story of the withdrawal of Oppenheimer's security clearance is not covered in Doctor Atomic, which ends with the first test in 1945. I haven't seen the opera, but was impressed by the positive response it received. However, from a distance, ending it

Originally posted by Pliable from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 29, 2005 at 01:33 PM | Comments (0)

November 28, 2005

Stop, thief!

Alex Ross steals one of my titles for his new article about David Robertson, the new music director of the St. Louis Symphony, in this week's New Yorker. Not to be confused with the "newmusic" director, of course.

Originally posted by Brian Sacawa from Brian Sacawa: Sounds Like Now, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 28, 2005 at 07:24 PM | Comments (0)

The sound of contemporary music

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 28, 2005 at 07:24 PM | Comments (0)

Annie Proulx chooses uptown music

Uptown music featured in the musical choices of Pulitzer Prize winner, and author The Shipping News, Annie Proulx (right) when she appeared on BBC Radio 3's Private Passions programmes. Her chosen music ranged from John Adams through bassist Charlie Hade

Originally posted by Pliable from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 28, 2005 at 06:54 PM | Comments (0)

November 27, 2005

Bernard Stollman: The ESP-Disk Story

An interview with Bernard Stollman, the founder of ESP-Disk, is available.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 27, 2005 at 06:19 PM | Comments (0)

Mike Pride’s Upcoming Gigs

Drummer Mike Pride is playing with te best from New York and beyond.

Tuesday, November 29 10pm
-theMP3-
Mary Halvorson- guitar
Ken Filiano- bass
Mike Pride- drums, compositions
With: Dom Minasi Trio @ 9pm.
$ donation only
(Freddy’s Bar & Grill, Brooklyn NY (Dean St. @ 6th Ave.))

Tuesday, November 29 11pm
-Mike Pride’s IXTLAN-
Chris Welcome- guitar
Shayna Dulberger- bass
Mike Pride- drums
My NEW trio! I am excited about playing with these unique musicians I recently met.
Part of a night of guitar trios with: Amanda Monaco Trio & The Inbetweens!
$5
(Bowery Poets Club, NYC)

Wednesday, November 30 9:45pm
-SNUGGLE/STENCIL-
Mike Pride- vocals, drums
Mike Gamble- guitar, mini keys
Jesse Krakow- bass
WITH: Emulsion (from japan), talibam & hi red center.
$5
(LIT LOUNGE, NYC (2nd Ave between 5th & 6th St.))

Saturday, December 3, 9pm
-SNUGGLE/STENCIL-
Mike Pride- vocals, drums
Mike Gamble- guitar, mini keys
Jesse Krakow- bass
WITH: Emulsion (from japan), Vic Thrill, Langhorne Slim, Infidels and more!
$8
(Asterisk, Bushwhick (258 Johnson Ave, Brooklyn NY)

Sunday, December 11 12:30-4pm
-Mike Pride Standddards Trio-
Charlie Looker- guitar
Mike Pride- snare drum
Byrne Klay- bass
Free jazz brunch.
(City Crab, NYC (park ave south & 19th st.)

Tuesday, Decmeber 13 8pm
-BLARVUSTER-
Matthew Welch- bagpipes, soprano sax, vocals
Karen Wlatuch- viola
Leah Paul- flutes
Mary Halvorson- guitar
Shanir Blumenkranz- bass
Mike Pride- drums, glockenspiel
Followed by Jason Cady and the Artificials!
(TONIC, NYC)

Wednesday, December 14
-VISITORS-
Chris Forsyth- guitar
Mike Pride- drums
(Glasshouse, Brooklyn NY)

Thursday, December 15 9pm
-Mike Pride SOLO-
MP- solo percussion
$5
(Elixir, NYC (95 W. Broadway @ Chambers St.))

Friday, December 16 (2 sets) 8 & 10pm
-Haino Keiji’s FUSHITSUSHA-
Haino Keijio- guitar, vocals
Trevor Dunn- electric bass
Mike Pride- drums
(STONE, NYC)

Saturday, December 17 10pm
-Shaikh/Pride GROUP-
Aaron Ali Shaikh- alto sax
Mike Pride- drums
and band.
(Cafe Grumpy, Greenpoint Brooklyn (Meserole & Diamond))

Sunday, December 18 8pm
-D’Angelo/Ilgenfritz/Pride-
Andrew D’Angelo- alto sax, bass clarinet
James Ilgenfritz- destructed electric bass
Mike Pride- suitcase percussion
$5
(Elixir, NYC (95 W. Broadway @ Chambers St.))

Wednesday, December 21st 10pm
-A Ned Muffleburger Christmas-
Performing the Santa’s Sac record in it’s entirety!
Ned Muffleburger- vocals, percussion, guitar
Fritz Welch- percussion
Jesse Krakow- bass
Scarecrowoven- digital media
& special guests!
$8 ($6 w/ flyer)
(PUSSYCAT LOUNGE, NYC (96 Greenwich St. @ Rector St.))

Thursday, December 29 10pm
-Otomo Yoshihide’s Portable Orchestra-
Otomo Yoshihide- conductor
Matt Welch, Mike Pride, Fritz Welch, Tim Keiper, Jeremiah Cymerman, James Ilgenfritz- toys
(STONE, NYC)

Saturday, December 31
-Wax Trio-
(NYC)

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 27, 2005 at 06:19 PM | Comments (0)

Ben (2005). Daniel Kellogg

Jacob Hale Russell writes in the Wall Street Journal about how orchestras are programming contemporary classical music in a bid to rebuild their audience:

Daniel Kellogg, 29 years old, got what he calls his "big break" with a Philadelphia Orchestra commission commemorating Benjamin Franklin's 300th birthday. The 21-minute piece, "Ben," premiered Nov. 18 with snippets of the founding father's favorite drinking songs and employing the glass armonica, a Franklin invention...

To ease audiences into contemporary works, orchestras often program them alongside pieces by the masters...

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra says the average age of subscribers to its six-year-old MusicNOW series -- devoted to work by living composers -- was five years younger than for its normal subscription series last season.

Aren't the second and third points contradictory?

The sidebar recommends some recordings; note the Joan Tower Naxos release doesn't appear to be available on Amazon.

Originally posted by Robert Gable from aworks :: "new" american classical music, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 27, 2005 at 06:19 PM | Comments (0)

In Praise of Harrington

Stirling Newberry, who has a popular political blog called Blogging of the President has written a terrific appreciation of Jeff Harrington's pioneering role in promoting the digital distribution of new music on the web. Jeff, who serves as our volunteer

Originally posted by Jerry Bowles from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 27, 2005 at 06:19 PM | Comments (0)

November 26, 2005

Jeff Harrington, The Unwritten Chapter

by Stirling Newberry

When the move of classical music to digital from analog worlds is written, there will be a chapter on Jeff Harrington, he is one of the most singularly important people in this transition, even if his music is not remembered. We label "the Mannhiem School" even if its members are not always named, we forget who, exactly, founded conservatories and other institutions, we gloss over figures such as Habeneck who helped create the modern orchestra. Without these individuals there would be no music of those eras, and the ripples are felt forward.

Jeff Harrington has been called an ugly personna seeking beauty, though I prefer to think of it as being someone who, like Liszt, adopts an almost demonic facade to indicate that he is reaching for the dark underside of an age, and presenting it in the form which is shocking on its surface. He is a refugee from the modern age, and one who has gone to the hills to fight a guerilla war against it, only to find that the hills are populated, and that there is a community to be created, one which he has been instrumental in creating...

Originally from BOPnews, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 26, 2005 at 05:27 PM | Comments (0)

Gunther Schuller: I Hear America (Part 2)

Originally from ionarts, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 26, 2005 at 02:53 PM | Comments (0)

Unmarchable

I have two small bon bons for you, since I'm sure you're hungry for sweets right now:  Message in a Bottle has a list of music that should never be arranged for marching band.  Barber's Adagio for Strings is just one example. Meanwhile, my unintended meme -- the Concise History of Western Music -- has been picked up by Lynn and M. Keiser and Robert Gable.

UPDATE: add AMK's Journal and Byzantium's Shores to the list.

Originally from Fredösphere, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 26, 2005 at 02:52 PM | Comments (0)

Prism Quartet

Prism Quartet is a sax quartet focused on new music. Their site includes a long group bio, discography and concert listings.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 26, 2005 at 02:45 PM | Comments (0)

The effect of P2P file-sharing depends on popularity

Yet another study (albiet academic) on how file sharing hurts some but helps others. What I would like to see at this point is a similar study conducted with respect to labels that put their music online with and without DRM. For example, I might not spend $17 on a new CD when it can be downloaded for free, although with some risk attached. However I might but the same album with (without) DRM for $7.

A fascinating paper from David Blackburn, a Harvard PhD student, on the economics of P2P file-sharing concludes that it does indeed depress music sales overall. But the effect is not felt evenly. The hits at the top of the charts lose sales, but the niche artists further down the popularity curve actually benefit from file-trading.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 26, 2005 at 02:45 PM | Comments (0)

The world according to Mike Ladd

Rapper, poet, avant-jazz artist Mike Ladd is interviewed.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 26, 2005 at 02:45 PM | Comments (0)

Kampec Dolores on Tour and in the Studio

Kampec Dolores, one of the more unique Eastern-European rock acts, has signed up for the following dates. 2005 3rd December Szentendre Hungary Barlang 2005 6th December Budapest Mucsarnok - Budapest Arts Festival Kampec Projection Project 9th December Tokyo SPC 10th December: Tokyo Rosa Poseidon Festival 11th December Osaka FBI Festival Japan’s most acknowledged improvisation festival 12th December: Osaka With Djamra (from Osaka) December 17th: Budbudas Budapest, Trafo Budbudas is Budapest’s largest imprivising band [...]

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 26, 2005 at 02:45 PM | Comments (0)

Cuneiform Scoop

Cuneiform is releasing its next batch in two parts. The following items are all being released by Cuneiform on January 24th: Ahleuchatistas “What You Will” Richard Leo Johnson “The Legend of Vernon McAlister” Zaar “Zaar” The following items are being released by Cuneiform on February 7th: Ray Russell “Goodbye Svengali” (with Simon Phillips, Gary Husband, Gil Evans) Univers Zero “Live”

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 26, 2005 at 02:45 PM | Comments (0)

Doctor Atomic (2005). John Adams /joshua kosman/

Re-reading Joshua Kosman's review of Doctor Atomic, I disagree about the gestures but his summation is interesting:

In one late scene, the chorus sings about Vishnu, the preserver of the universe, in music lifted unapologetically from Orff's "Carmina Burana," while Sellars assigns them a series of Simon Says gestures that look peculiarly out of place. And after three hours of waiting for the bomb to drop, the audience is surely entitled to a more emphatic rendering than a quiet rumble and a few desultory lighting cues. But these are quibbles. "Doctor Atomic," whatever its faults, stands as a major addition to the operatic repertory of this new century, the first to be inaugurated with the specter of instant death very much around us.

Originally posted by Robert Gable from aworks :: "new" american classical music, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 26, 2005 at 02:45 PM | Comments (0)

Pushing the envelope

Does a 21st century transcription of 14th and 15th century music played on a 17th and 18th century organ qualify for Sequenza21? Well this post is all about pushing the envelope, which is precisely what French organist Louis Thiry has done with his new pr

Originally posted by Pliable from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 26, 2005 at 02:45 PM | Comments (0)

Sir Norman's Bad Day

It's hard to believe a man who can design a bridge as beautiful as the one below could design a building as ugly as this one and put it on the corner of the block where I live. This is Foster and Partners' still-unfinished 50-story tower that has grown o

Originally posted by Jerry Bowles from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 26, 2005 at 02:45 PM | Comments (0)

November 25, 2005

Last Details

Originally from Renewable Music, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 25, 2005 at 04:56 PM | Comments (0)

Talking Turkey

Originally from Renewable Music, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 25, 2005 at 04:56 PM | Comments (0)

Stravinsky: Symphony in C

Originally from Renewable Music, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 25, 2005 at 04:56 PM | Comments (0)

Worst Sound

Originally from Renewable Music, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 25, 2005 at 04:56 PM | Comments (0)

Another opinion revised

Originally from Renewable Music, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 25, 2005 at 04:56 PM | Comments (0)

More lost and found

Originally from Renewable Music, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 25, 2005 at 04:56 PM | Comments (0)

Dronaement Live Gig at Leipzig on 26.11 // Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst

Marcus from dronaement is going to give a live performance on 26th of november. He is going to play in Leipzig at the Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst. Also performing at this event: Sinebag. The concert ist presented by Alula Ton Serien. The show is going to start at 21:00. ...

Originally from automatictext, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 25, 2005 at 04:55 PM | Comments (0)

Jazz in NYC this Weekend

A set of concert listings from the New York Times is available. Highlights include: ORNETTE COLEMAN QUARTET AND THE BAD PLUS The alto saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman, above, has updated the definitions of his music more than a few times since he first turned heads as the chief provocateur of 1960’s free jazz. His [...]

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 25, 2005 at 04:53 PM | Comments (0)

Masada Rock Reviewed

One of the latest entries into the Masada family is reviewed.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 25, 2005 at 04:53 PM | Comments (0)

Tin Hat No Longer a Trio

An article discusses how Tin Hat Trio is no longer a trio and some of the history and personnel surrounding the group.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 25, 2005 at 04:53 PM | Comments (0)

Helmut Lachenmann Honored

The Ensemble Modern will perform pieces by Lachenmann in celebration of his 70th birthday. Lots of biographical info is included in the article.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 25, 2005 at 04:53 PM | Comments (0)

DMG Newsletter

Put down those turkey sandwiches, it’s a new DMG Newsletter including info on a new Stone benefit CD featuring John Zorn, and DVDs of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and John Coltrane.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 25, 2005 at 04:53 PM | Comments (0)

******** (1958-60). ****** *****

Via Fred, M., and Lynn. Ok, classical music memes complete with simple html markup don't happen very often so I better jump on this one while I have the chance. Of course, this being aworks, the composer list is skewed -- after all, I don't even care what I think about Havergal Brian...

Stravinsky	yawn
Schoenberg	infuriating yawn
Tallis	cool
Glass	overly prolific but cool
Adams	great and/or yawn; love the orchestration
Reich	percussion great; vocals mostly annoying (apologies to TSR's cool Tehillim friend)
Copland	cliched but great
Roy Harris	one great, rest yawn
Bernstein	tuneful and unfocused [yawn on that assessment -editor]
Nancarrow	better performed by humans (apologies to that noted net music person who emailed me and who probably wouldn't think much of this meme)
Corey Dargel	not prolific enough (give this man a recording contract, please)
Ives	indescribably awesomely authentically complicated
Carter	complex but yawn (again, apologies)
Carl Stone	electronically cool
Virgil Thomson	writerly cool
Riley	unironically cool
Cage	zenfully cool
OSU composers	huh?
U of M composers	aiee! (apologies to my fellow native Michiganders; since I previously made an obscure slight of the composer I am thinking of, I've cloaked the name of this post)

Originally posted by Robert Gable from aworks :: "new" american classical music, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 25, 2005 at 04:53 PM | Comments (0)

Adagio for Strings (1936). Samuel Barber /marching band/

Message in a Bottle suggests music that should not be performed by marching band.

Originally posted by Robert Gable from aworks :: "new" american classical music, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 25, 2005 at 04:53 PM | Comments (0)

Imagine

Paradisi Gloria Frank Martin Marcello Viotti, Ulf Schirmer François Roux, Gilles Cachemaille, et al. Münchner Rundfunkorchester Profil - G Haenssler Frank Martin wrote In Terra Pax for Radio Geneva to broadcast on the day World War II ended. He envisi

Originally posted by Jerry Bowles from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 25, 2005 at 04:53 PM | Comments (0)

November 24, 2005

Baratz on Garland

Originally from Renewable Music, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 24, 2005 at 04:18 PM | Comments (0)

unjust malaise

Originally from david's waste of bandwidth..., ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 24, 2005 at 04:17 PM | Comments (0)

another string quartet

Originally from david's waste of bandwidth..., ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 24, 2005 at 04:16 PM | Comments (0)

Wadada Leo Smith Site

Wadada Leo Smith maintains his own site, with plenty of info, a bio, discography, samples, and more.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 24, 2005 at 04:04 PM | Comments (0)

Jacobs/ Zorn / Ikue DVD Reviewed

Ken Jacobs’ DVD, which features a soundtrack by John Zorn and Ikue Mori, is reviewed.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 24, 2005 at 04:04 PM | Comments (0)

Avant Jewish Women

A few words about Jewlia Eisenberg and Charming Hostess are found in this article.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 24, 2005 at 04:04 PM | Comments (0)

The Latest from Tzadik, and eMusic

Tzadik has released two more CDs, and has some big news…the entire Tzadik catalog is available for fast and inexpensive download from eMusic.com. Electric Masada : At The Mountains Of Madness Released Nov 2005 cd 1 time - 77:54 cd 2 time - 74:54 Electric Masada combines the raw power and manic speed of Naked City, the improvisational edge [...]

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 24, 2005 at 04:04 PM | Comments (0)

Bridge Releases The Music of Elliott Carter, Vol. 7

This latest releases in Bridge’s Carter series is now out.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 24, 2005 at 04:04 PM | Comments (0)

Upcoming in the Empty Bottle Jazz Series

Chicago’s Empty Bottle is featuring Jeff Parker and Ken Vandermark in a series of shows over the next few weeks. SUN. 12/11/05 (9:30pm, $7 buy) Nels Cline / Nate McBride / Jeff Parker Quartet TUE. 12/13/05 (9:30pm, $5 buy) Vandermark 5 TUE. 12/20/05 (9:30pm, $5 buy) Vandermark 5 WED. 12/21/05 (9:30pm, $6 buy) Nate McBride / Mike Reed / Jason Adasiewicz / Josh [...]

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 24, 2005 at 04:04 PM | Comments (0)

New Reissues on Blue Note Records

Blue Note Records has reissued a few albums of interest. Andrew Hill- Andrew! (Connoisseur Series) The work of this unique pianist and composer is marked invention. This 1964 quintet session features John Gilmore, Bobby Hutcherson, Richard Davis and Joe Chambers, all peers who grasp his concepts perfectly. Two alternate takes have been added to the original album. Don [...]

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 24, 2005 at 04:04 PM | Comments (0)

Newsbits

Mike Fazio and Thomas Hamlin have released a new album of experimental recordings. Musicians from The Red masque have set up free downloads of their work using an 18-tone scale. Michel Lambert’s Passant will be released soon, and features Ellery Eskelin among others. Sachimany Interventions has released three more dirt cheap improv CDs. And finally, as [...]

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 24, 2005 at 04:04 PM | Comments (0)

Tim Berne’s Paraphrase, Pre-emptive Denial Reviewed

The latest from Berne & Co. is reviewed.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 24, 2005 at 04:04 PM | Comments (0)

"Call It Anything" (1970). Miles Davis

I saw Electric Miles: A Different Kind of Blue on Sunday. In a word, cool. Why?

• It was at the Red Vic Theatre in the Haight in San Francisco; the Haight being ground zero for the 1967 Summer of Love, of course, as well as home of Amoeba Records #2. The Red Vic is a collectivist, anti-corporate repertory movie house, which means non-branded sodas served in environmentally-correct glasses as well as home-made brownies. More importantly, the audience was as racially mixed as any musical event I've been to. All in all, not the typical suburban multiplex experience.
• For me, Bitches Brew was a big deal. For a thin white kid from Indiana, hearing it was to step into a different world I suspected was always out there. These days, I can even forgive my college roommates for pouring beer on the album cover.  
• The film documents what led to the Miles Davis band playing at the Isle of Wight in front of 600,000 white English kids in 1970. The movie tries to make the point Davis' Bitches Brew album was really the apex in jazz popularity, at least for the traditional giants of the music, Kenny G. not withstanding.
• Much of the time is spent interviewing former band members. I hate to say it but when did Herbie Hancock and Joni Mitchell become old and Chick Corea become, er, heavy-set? Or am I just projecting? Next thing you're going to tell me is that Kyle Gann is 50. And in 1970, Dave Holland looked like a twenty-two year old bass player for Spooky Tooth or Foghat.
  
• The interviewees also played brief fragments of music. Drummer Jack DeJohnette was, as always, sublime. He's so smooth it feels like he plays his kit with his hands rather than with drum sticks. At the end, Airto does a solo percussion version of Miles Run the Voodoo Down Bitches Brew (?) as an entertaining tribute to Miles and Herbie Hancock plays a tribute on Fender Rhodes electric piano.
• In an interview, Miles talks how he likes broken rhythm and melody, which is as good a synoposis as any.
• Love or hate him, Stanley Crouch was interviewed about how Miles' foray into electronic music was a disaster. Percussionist James Mtume countered with how that was the equivalent of harpsichordists telling those new pianoforte players they were making a big mistake and they "needed to keep it real."
• The film really makes the point Davis was an artist and artists feed off the zeitgeist, in this case, the 1960s-70s consciousness revolution. And so, his journey beyond the straight-laced world of Kind of Blue into an electronic blue was inevitable, if not necessarily better.
• The second half of the film is 38 minutes of concert footage of the band playing at the festival. It was a little long but from Davis' second solo through his third, I was floating three feet above my seat. I think it was the groove, not the brownies.
• Davis is asked what he is going to play and he says to "call it anything" although apparently it's a continuous mish-mash of music from the album.
• Finally, Miles was his usual cool self in the concert footage. He's playing in front of an audience of hundreds of thousands, completely ignoring them, head down, and only acknowledging the other musicians while resting. As the set winds down, he walks away while the band is still playing and starts to pack up. But then in a great moment captured on film, from backstage, Miles makes a sweet little hand gesture to the crowd and you know he knows this was a big deal.

Originally posted by Robert Gable from aworks :: "new" american classical music, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 24, 2005 at 04:04 PM | Comments (0)

Less Famous than You (2006). Corey Dargel

Home today with lots to do so instead I'm blogging...

Night After Night hints of next year:

Corey Dargel - Less Famous Than You (as yet unreleased, but surely the contemporary-classical-smart-pop breakthrough hit of 2006, mark my words...)

In my household anyway, Dargel's Accutane was the summer hit of 2004. MP3 here. Mark Geelhoed on same.

Originally posted by Robert Gable from aworks :: "new" american classical music, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 24, 2005 at 04:04 PM | Comments (0)

Do you do organic?

For all you postmodernes out there who think organicism in music is dead, the Bournemouth Sinfonetta Choir cares to disagree. They're lookiing for a composer to create a "work [that] will celebrate the landscape nurtured by organic farming." Click here

Originally posted by David Salvage from Sequenza21/Composers Forum, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 24, 2005 at 04:04 PM | Comments (0)

November 23, 2005

About the Music Deathwatch

Originally from The Rambler, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 23, 2005 at 06:58 PM | Comments (0)

'Re-imagining' Shostakovich

Originally from The Rambler, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 23, 2005 at 06:58 PM | Comments (0)

Great Britten

"It is the quality which cannot be acquired by simply the exercise of a technique or a system - it is something to do with personality, with gift, with spirit. I quite simply call it magic, a quality which would appear to be by no means unacknowledged by scientists, and which I value more than any other part of music."
From Britten's acceptance speech when awarded the first Aspen Award.

Benjamin Britten was born on 22nd November 1913 in Lowestoft, Suffolk.

The anniversary of the birth of the most important British composer of the second half of the 20th century is shared with several other events. Happily today is also St Cecilia's Day, and she is of course the patron saint of musicians.

Less happily today is the anniversary of the assasination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963.

I know it is of several orders of magnitude less important than those events, but I also was born on 22nd November. I listened to my favourite travel writer, Patrick Leigh-Fermor, on my favourite radio programme, Private Passions, two weeks back. Leigh-Fermor (who celebrated his 90th birthday this year!) mentioned Robert Byron's classic book about Mount Athos, The Station, which I have never read. I checked the excellent online Norfolk Library database to find a single copy in the county, acquired in 1949 - the year of my birth. I ordered it, thinking that the chance of it being found was zero. Today the copy arived for me to collect - on my birthday. I wonder how many html files of music blogs will be traceable in the year 2061?

Picture credit - Britten-Pears Foundation
Report broken links, missing images, and other errors to - overgrownpath at blogspot dot co dot uk

If you enjoyed this post take an overgrown path to Easter at Aldeburgh, and Death of a library.

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 23, 2005 at 06:57 PM | Comments (0)

Peak melody

The blog Tampon Teabag (yes I know) posted the following very interesting (and long) piece back in September. I missed it first time round, so here it is (language and all) in case you did as well.

"Every society throughout history and throughout the world has made and enjoyed music! But we, now, here, in the west are unique… in our hunger for ever more, new music. Music surrounds us: in our houses, blasting out of radios, CD players, computers. It wakes us up, and it sends us to sleep. Outside we pump music into our ears through up-to-the-minute mobile phones and MP3-players...

"We cannot get enough of it! We hear it in our supermarkets, and we sing it in our churches and in our karaoke bars. Rock anthems in pubs, and recorder-concerts in schools. We chant it at our football matches, hum along to it in our cars, and dance to it in our nightclubs. We go to Sing-Along-Sound-of-Music evenings. There is no getting away from music. Our lives are musical lives, and our world is a musical world. Musical. Music."

So wrote the philosopher Jacob Applebloom in his suicide note.

Just as so often in his life (not least in his decision to end it) Applebloom was right: our western appetite for new music does indeed know no bounds. Music is now officially the fourth most important factor in our lives, after food, drink, and sex. Chillingly, it even comes above our own children, and going to the toilet.

And central to western music, is melody.

But melody is a finite resource: the number of distinct melodies of a certain length which can be composed from the few notes we have at our disposal, is limited, and experts agree that we are getting through the various possible combinations and permutations at an alarming rate.

So how much longer can we continue to plunder melody reserves like this? The plain fact is that we’re already running out: the production of genuinely new melody peaked in late 1996, and has already started to fall away, reciprocal-logarithmically speaking. Experts predict that if the rate at which the rate of increase of consumption of melody increases continues to increase at its current rate, then by 2027 every single repeatable tune lasting less than 30 seconds will have been recorded.

An overhaul of the copyright law is urgently needed if total economic prolapse is to be avoided. But that is only the first, and easiest step.

The serialist movement of the early 20th century led by Arnold Schoenberg was one of the first concerted attempts to locate new reserves of melody. Schoenberg searched for tunes in the atonal wilderness, but he met with only limited success. Experiments in microtonal technology (initiated by the likes of Carillo and Ives in the late 19th century) are ongoing, but so far they also show little prospect of producing anything approaching a memorable, repeatable tune. Others have searched further afield: Olivier Messiaen searched for melody in birdsong. But it seems that birds and humans have different ideas about what constitutes a good tune. John Cage in his infamous piece 4’33”, posed the paradoxical question “is silence actually the best melody?” But the world was not convinced, and the rate at which the rate of increase of consumption of new, audible, melody increases continued to increase unabated.

Greater success has been achieved by the world-music movement, and by the melody-conservationists of the minimalist movement. The likes of Steve Reich and Philip Glass have discovered techniques to make melody go further: Reich, for example, has composed single pieces of music of over an hour in length, which feature only one or two snippets of simple melody. Significantly, this approach has now crossed over into the mainstream (in for instance the music of Kylie Minogue, and in the dance-clubs of Ibiza).

All genres of music (excluding the extreme avant-garde) are struggling to come to terms with the impending melody-crisis. Hip-hop for instance has managed to dispense with melody almost completely, but unfortunate knock-on effects of this have been felt in the world’s dwindling stocks of rhythm and swear-words.

As the crisis deepens, mainstream pop-music will be the first to be hit hard, and record-producers have now adopted a policy of containment, and are trying to saturate the market with endless remixes, covers, and re-covers in a desperate attempt to maintain public interest whilst getting more mileage from fast-disappearing melody stocks. But consumers will not put up with this state of affairs indefinitely. Mohammed Propane from the music watchdog OFFPOP struck a threatening note in an interview last month: “At best these singles are indistinguishable from the originals, but more often they’re just inferior copies. Have you heard Britney Spears' version of "I love Rock and Roll"? It’s an insult to the taste and discernment of the general public, that’s what it is. And do you remember All Saints' cover of "Under the Bridge"? And then there’s the Crazy Frog. Fuck-a-duck that thing irritates me, and I’m not the only one. Studies show unprecedented levels of public anger with the music industry at the moment, and if record producers think they can fob off audiences with this sort of childish crap for much longer, then they’ve got another thing coming. I tell you this: if things don’t improve, we’ll begin by blockading CD-factories, and end by burning their fucking studios to the ground, in the name of Allah.”

It is beyond doubt that when future generations look back on the 20th and early 21st century, they will view it as a time of disgraceful musical profligacy. And the court of history will undoubtedly reserve the most serious charges of melody-wasting for jazz-musicians. In a single gig a competent jazz musician can utilise up to 100,000 notes of melody. It is estimated that Charlie Parker alone expended over 1% of the world’s melody supplies during the course of his 23 year career.

But it’s not all doom and gloom for the goatee-stroking foot-tappers: Jazz also takes pole position in the only realistic attempt to forestall the effects of the global melody-shortage. For although melody is an essential component of western music, it has been discovered that suitable alterations in the harmony, rhythm, timbre, volume, tempo, or lyrics can allow a single line of melody to be safely reused several times over.

“Melody-recycling” has become the buzzword, and the most successful examples of melody-recycling in action are so-called Trans-Genre Arrangements (TGAs). Jazz leads the way. As long ago as 1934, blind-in-one-eye piano virtuoso Art Tatum stunned the musical establishment with his sublime jazz-arrangements of compositions by Massenet and Debussy. This approach was continued by gauloise-smoking left-banker Jacques Loussier, most famously in his arrangement of Bach’s “Air on a G-String”. More recently Django Bates’ anarchic arrangement of “New York, New York” came to symbolise a new chapter of British jazz. These days TGAs are stock in trade for jazz musicians, with the likes Brad Meldau covering several Radiohead songs, and The Bad Plus tackling everything from Aphex Twin to Queen.

But TGAs are not the domain of jazz alone. Punk’s history of musical vandalism has given us a host of iconoclastic and humorous reworkings of classic songs, including the most notorious of all TGAs: The Sex Pistols’ version of “My Way”.

Electro-music too has taken on the melody-recycling mantle, and whilst the charts heave with lazy remixes, samples, and plagiarism, more imaginative experiments in “bootlegging” are beginning to turn out some worthwhile results. As often as not though, this melody-saving innovation finds itself on the wrong side of British copyright law, as in for instance The Evolution Control Committee’s song “Rocked by Rape” in which the voice of CBS newscaster Dan Rather is set to riffs by AC/DC.

Interestingly Paul Anka who wrote the lyrics to “My Way” is now in the vanguard of the TGA-movement. His recently issued disc "Rock Swings" features classic rock songs being played by a swing-band. His arrangement of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” has made a particularly strong impression on the public consciousness, and suggests that the future of the TGA may be bright, even in the mainstream.

Critics agree that to be successful, a TGA must fearlessly deconstruct and rebuild a well-known, and well-liked piece of music. The greatest TGAs of all time are widely considered to be Jimi Hendrix's version of "All Along The Watchtower" by Bob Dylan, and The Easystar Allstars’ “The Dub Side of the Moon”, in which the entirety of Pink Floyd’s seminal album “The Dark Side of the Moon” is reworked in the reggae genre. Many more bold efforts like this are needed if the world is to avoid total musical-meltdown in the near future.

But one man’s imaginative re-arrangement is another man’s sacrilege, and further down this road, danger certainly lies. Imagine a world where all the music sounds like William Shatner’s cover of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, or even more frighteningly, like Barbara Cartland’s nauseating rendition of “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square”. As the amount of available melody dwindles, the musical establishment is going to have to regulate itself with increasing sensitivity, whilst trying to keep the market afloat. Some are already calling for government intervention to prevent a glut of novelty records by the likes of Weird Al Yankovich or the Dangleberries’ bagpipe version of “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath.

But econo-musicologists such as Honey Jezebel warn that further tightening of music laws could spell disaster. “What we desparately need is more albums like "Maximum Rockgrass" by Hayseed Dixie [an album of classic rock songs performed in the blue-grass genre]. Sure, a few purists are not going to like it, but we’ve got to look at the bigger picture here. We’ve got major melody-problems here, people, major problems, and if we’re not careful it could be game over for music as we know it.”

Unless new reserves of melody can be found, by 2020 the face of music is going to look very different from now. A terrifying hint of what’s to come can be found in the music of London-based sound-artist Xper.Xr. Such is his dedication to melody-conservation, that he painstakingly transcribed the song “No Limit” by 90s dance act 2-Unlimited, before arranging it, and translating the result into traditional Chinese musical notation. Xper.Xr then hired traditional Chinese instrumentalists to perform the work. By 2020, such elaborate and extreme techniques may be the only option left to music-makers struggling to satisfy humanity’s never-ending thirst for new music. So at least thought Jacob Applebloom:

“We just cannot conceive of life without music. But music is not eternal. Music, like humanity, needs to evolve to survive. But what will happen when the wells of melody, harmony, and rhythm run dry as they must? Our delicate world of songs and symphonies will die, and a nightmarish dystopia of industrial machinery and radiation-burns will be born in its place: an apocalyptic place where gun-runners whistle Stockhausen, and whores hum techno. This is a world I cannot bear to witness.

“So I shall bid farewell to this planet with its musical richness and diversity still in tact, and as I swing from the strings of my grand piano, I shall smile, and feel glad ever to have lived, and listened, in the land of Elgar.”

Reblogged from Tampon Teabag

Picture credits:
Steve Reich - Glass pages
John Cage - Kunstradio
Paul Anka - Encore4
Bob Dylan - Blind Pig Music
Report broken links, missing images, and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

If you enjoyed this post take An Overgrown Path to Is classical music too cheap?

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 23, 2005 at 06:57 PM | Comments (0)

1910-1919

Those ten years are the most heavily visited in the programming of top US orchestras. Here's how the rest of the decades stack up:


(Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco)

Originally from ANABlog, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 23, 2005 at 06:57 PM | Comments (0)

Statement Against The Continuation Of The War - July 1917

I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.

I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow-soldiers entered upon this War should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible for them to be changed without our knowledge, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.

I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolonging those sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.

I am not protesting against the military conduct of the War, but against the political errors and insincerities for which fighting men are being sacrificed.

On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced on them. Also I believe that it may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize. --(July 1917) from Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer

Sassoon's statement of protest was read into a session of the British Parliament in 1917. Seems to me it should be read and re-read again.

It also forms the first part of a very powerful piece, My Dear Siegfried by David Behrman based on correspondence between Behrman's father, Sam, and Siegfried Sassoon, whom he met in the 1920's as a NY Times reporter. Their letters, recently discoverd by David Behrman, continued into the 1950's.

Behrman's piece is done as theater with voices, acoustic instruments, live electronics, and special effects. Whatever visual effects are obviously not apparent on this CD, but the sound and verbal part is powerful on its own. The letters excerpted deal with the coming of the next war, WW II, and other mundane things. Sassoon was a great poet and writer in a difficult time.

The release includes a second CD, this time of some of Behrman's earlier music, some of it going back to a 1972 performance. It includes QSRL from 1998 that features Jon Gibson. Both CDs make a excellent package.

Originally from All I Know, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 23, 2005 at 06:56 PM | Comments (0)

Terminal condition.

While I did threaten to freeze this blog and auction off screen shots if Rick Moody were to drop by, once it happened I decided against that course of action. However, this will in fact be my last post for a while, since I'm meeting up with my significant other in the Atlanta airport tomorrow afternoon, then heading down to Houston for Thanksgiving with my family. I don't get down there as often as I should -- and it's keenly important at this point, since I haven't seen my sister and nephew since the kid was a month old. He's now two-and-a-half, and I'm seriously verging on Bad Uncledom.

Still, it's not like I'd leave town without providing some way in which friends, colleagues and total strangers might mull over my personal obsessions. So here are two suggestions.

First, like Cafe Aman's Anastasia Tsioulcas, I review new CDs monthly for Weekend America, a smart, lively magazine-format radio program produced and distributed by Minnesota Public Radio. This weekend, I'll be talking about two recent CDs of contemporary music that I really dug. One is a new Ondine disc of Magnus Lindberg's Clarinet Concerto, Gran Duo and Chorale, performed by Kari Kriiku and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Sakari Oramo. (An excellent review of that disc by Andrew Clements of London's Guardian can be found here.) The other is Deviations, the long-awaited solo debut of guitarist Dominic Frasca on Bang on a Can house label Cantaloupe, which includes original pieces, works by Marc Mellits and a jaw-dropping version of Philip Glass's Two Pages. In most of the country, I believe the show airs on Saturday afternoons; for those in benighted burgs that don't receive the program (such as, ahem, New York City), there's a podcast available on the show's website, and you can also stream archived shows.

The second attraction springs from the pop-music section of this week's TONY, where I gave an "MP3 of the Week" shout-out to a young Mexican rock band whose music has been one of my fondest discoveries this year. Sadly, I can't remember the name of the alternaLatino music news site on which I first read about Album some months ago, but here's what I wrote:

If Cafe Tacuba's influential 1994 release, Re, is the Sgt. Pepper's of Mexican alt-rock (and the band's 1999 Reves/Yo Soy the "White Album"), then Eureka Sön, the 2003 debut full-length by Monterrey-based quartet Album, might well be the scene's Paul's Boutique or OK Computer -- maybe both. Currently out of print, you can find the entire release (and a whole lot more) available for free download from the band's website. Album's sophomore full-length, Microbricolages, is due sometime next year on a label to be determined; "Es Facil," the initial single, is just under two minutes' worth of manic synth-bop pinned to a warbling bass line and a stuttering beat.

Now admittedly, I do understand exactly how hyperbolic those claims are. Still, I can definitely tell the difference between a new band whose music catches my interest for a minute or two and one that I'll spend time anxiously waiting to hear from. Album falls into the latter category. So while I'm gone, please take a moment to stop by the website and test-drive a track or two. I'd love to hear what you think. Here, let me help you:

Album - "Es Facil" (MP3, 2.47 meg.)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Playlist:

Einojuhani Rautavaara - Garden of Spaces; Clarinet Concerto*; Cantus Arcticus - Richard Stoltzman*, Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra/Leif Segerstam (Ondine)

Mary Halvorson/Jessica Pavone - Prairies (Lucky Kitchen)

Taylor Ho Bynum and SpiderMonkey Strings - Other Stories (Three Suites) (482 Music)

Anthrax - Alive 2 (2005) (Sanctuary)

Album - Eureka Sön

Rush - R30 (Zöe/Rounder)

Bohuslav Martinů - Memorial to Lidice; Gideon Klein - Partita for Strings; Bela Bartók - Concerto for Orchestra - Philadelphia Orchestra/Christoph Eschenbach (Ondine)

Eleanor Sandresky - A Sleeper's Notebook (One Soul)

Originally posted by NightAfterNight from Night After Night, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 23, 2005 at 06:50 PM | Comments (0)

Latest Round of Composer Assistance Program Grants Announced

Thirty-three composers receive grant awards totaling $36,000.

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 23, 2005 at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)

Don't Stop

There have been calls for abolishing the piano, recordings, and analysis on these pages recently; now Frank suggests eliminating intermissions.

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 23, 2005 at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)

Boston: Insecure in Cambridge

A politically themed concert portrays outrage over the sorry state of American democracy, but is it somehow inappropriate to admire that emotionless, unpolitical thing called "technique" (structure, counterpoint, tonality) at an event such as this?

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 23, 2005 at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)

New York: A Tale of One New Music Concert

A promising approach to presenting new music stumbles. As it turned out, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times of...er, concerts.

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 23, 2005 at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)

Recording Session 101: Working with a Record Producer

Say you're a composer with an opportunity to have a professional recording made of your music. You've been told you'll be working with a record producer, but what does a producer do, anyway?

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 23, 2005 at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)

Rumble (1958). Link Wray

Link Wray (1929-2005).

From today's obituary:

The power chord — a thundering sound created by playing fifths (two notes five notes apart, often with the lower note doubled an octave above) — became a favorite among rock players. Wray claimed because he was too slow to be a whiz on the guitar, he had to invent sounds.

Rumble is both simple and powerful.  cultura.fr wma clip. threadless.com mp3.

Originally posted by Robert Gable from aworks :: "new" american classical music, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 23, 2005 at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)

"Call It Anything" (1970). Miles Davs

I saw Electric Miles: A Different Kind of Blue on Sunday. In a word, cool. Why?

• It was at the Red Vic Theatre in the Haight in San Francisco; the Haight being ground zero for the 1967 Summer of Love, of course, as well as home of Amoeba Records #2. The Red Vic is a collectivist, anti-corporate repertory movie house, which means non-branded sodas served in environmentally-correct glasses as well as home-made brownies. More importantly, the audience was as racially mixed as any musical event I've been to. All in all, not the typical suburban multiplex experience.
• For me, Bitches Brew was a big deal. For a thin white kid from Indiana, hearing it was to step into a different world I suspected was always out there. These days, I can even forgive my college roommates for pouring beer on the album cover.  
• The film documents what led to the Miles Davis band playing at the Isle of Wight in front of 600,000 white English kids in 1970. The movie tries to make the point Davis' Bitches Brew album was really the apex in jazz popularity, at least for the traditional giants of the music, Kenny G. not withstanding.
• Much of the time is spent interviewing former band members. I hate to say it but when did Herbie Hancock and Joni Mitchell become old and Chick Corea become, er, heavy-set? Or am I just projecting? Next thing you're going to tell me is that Kyle Gann is 50. And in 1970, Dave Holland looked like a twenty-two year old bass player for Spooky Tooth or Foghat.
  
• The interviewees also played brief fragments of music. Drummer Jack DeJohnette was, as always, sublime. He's so smooth it feels like he plays his kit with his hands rather than with drum sticks. At the end, Airto does a solo percussion version of Miles Run the Voodoo Down (?) as an entertaining tribute to Miles and Hancock plays a tribute on Fender Rhodes electric piano.
• In an interview, Miles talks how he likes broken rhythm and melody, which is as good a synoposis as any.
• Love or hate him, Stanley Crouch was interviewed about how Miles' foray into electronic music was a disaster. Percussionist James Mtume countered with how that was the equivalent of harpsichordists telling those new pianoforte players they were making a big mistake and they "needed to keep it real."
• The film really makes the point Davis was an artist and artists feed off the zeitgeist, in this case, the 1960s-70s consciousness revolution. And so, his journey beyond the straight-laced world of Kind of Blue into an electronic blue was inevitable, if not necessarily better.
• The second half of the film is 38 minutes of concert footage of the band playing at the festival. It was a little long but from Davis' second solo through his third, I was floating three feet above my seat. I think it was the groove, not the brownies.
• Davis is asked what he is going to play and he says to "call it anything" although apparently it's a continuous mish-mash of music from the album.
• Finally, Miles was his usual cool self in the concert footage. He's playing in front of an audience of hundreds of thousands, completely ignoring them, head down, and only acknowledging the other musicians while resting. As the set winds down, he walks away while the band is still playing and starts to pack up. But then in a great moment captured on film, from backstage, Miles makes a sweet little hand gesture to the crowd and you know he knows this was a big deal.

Originally posted by Robert Gable from aworks :: "new" american classical music, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 23, 2005 at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)

Peak melody

'The serialist movement of the early 20th century led by Arnold Schoenberg was one of the first concerted attempts to locate new reserves of melody. Schoenberg searched for tunes in the atonal wilderness, but he met with only limited success. Experiments

Originally posted by Pliable from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 23, 2005 at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)

harmonic rhythm

A comment on the cover about Bernard Rands reminded me of something he said to me a few years ago. I’m paraphrasing, but he spoke of the period of high modernism – 1950s to 1970s – as a time when many composers lost sight of the power of harmonic rhythm

Originally posted by Lawrence Dillon from Sequenza21/Composers Forum, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 23, 2005 at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)

How I Love You, My Dear Old Mammy

There's bad news for those of us who think there's never been anything more ridiculous or unintentionally funny on stage than white singers or actors with painted black faces, big grotesque red tongues and bulging white eyes. Olivier's Othello was an acc

Originally posted by Jerry Bowles from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 23, 2005 at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)

In Terra Pax

The new Naxos CD of George Rochberg orchestral work has created a lot of buzz. Mark Berry has a roundup...Lawrence Dillon has some terrific pictures of the Open Dream Ensemble spreading the gospel of music and theater to kids...Blackdogred ponders some l

Originally posted by Jerry Bowles from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 23, 2005 at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)

November 22, 2005

Fumio Yasuda's erotic improvisations

Fumio Yasuda's album 'Flower Songs' is a fusion of the visual and performing arts. It is one of the fruits (or should that be flowers?) of a long term collabaration between composer and pianist Yasuda and leading Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, and was originally composed as a soundtrack for Araki's film 'Kakyoku', which translates as 'Flower Songs.'

Improvisation is a staple ingredient of Fumio Yasuda's music-making. He was born in Tokyo in 1953, and studied composition at Kunitachi College of Music. Yasuda's music occupies that increasingly important grey area between contemporary classical and jazz compositions. He plays keyboards himself, uses sampling, and has worked with several leading improvisers in Japan. Although experimental his work retains roots in the post-Romantic musical tradition, and pays homage to impressionists such as Debussy. Piano and keyboards are his main interests, but his compositions range from an Accordion Concerto (1994), through several choral works including his Epitaph 1939 composed in 2003, to his improvised cabaret opera 'Der Kastanieball' which was first performed at the Munich Opera Festival in 2004.

Fumio Yasuda has enjoyed a long association with innovatory German record label Winter & Winter. Kakyoku - Flower Songs which was released in 2000 is a good starting point to explore his music. The CD packaging uses stunning images from his collabarator, the photographer Nobuyoshi Araki . Araki is a high profile and very controversial figure in the Japanese visual arts. He has published more than 350 books and is best known for his pornographic photographs. He has been widely attacked by feminist groups, and has been arrested several times for breaking Japanese pornography laws, but has never been prosecuted. Before readers rush over to Amazon to order Kakyoku for its pornographic graphics they should note that the brilliant images on the packaging are all close-ups of flowers. However like good improvisation they can be interpreted many ways depending on the perspective of the viewer - as can the two photos by Araki accompanying this article.

'Kakyoku - Flower Songs' features Yasuda on piano, melodica and sampler and Ernst Reijseger on cello, with the European Art Orchestra which is an off-shoot of the Stuttgater Kammerorchester dedicated to exploring the boundaries between contemporary, jazz and world music. Kakyoku is an accessible post-romantic score with a debt to John Adams, but it certainly doesn't push the envelope as far as Nobuyoshi Araki's photographs - which is probably a good thing.

Here are three samples of Yasuda's erotic improvisations:
Death Sentiment IV -
Tari -
Tango for November -

An exhibition of Araki's photographs is at the Barbican Art Gallery, London until 22nd January 2006
Kakyoku is released on Winter & Winter 910051 - 2
Picture credits:
Header and Japanese script - Fumioyasuda.com
Footer - Sensual Flower by Nobuyoshi Araki from Studium.iar
Nobuyoshi Araki's own web site comes with a mild health warning because of some of the content, which is guaranteed to generate some hits I guess.
Audio clips - Amazon.de
Report broken links, missing images, and other errors to overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
If you enjoyed this post take an overgrown path to Improvisation

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 22, 2005 at 01:54 PM | Comments (0)

A Kékszakállú Herceg Vára

Relaxing, pleasant, comfortable: I hate it when classical music is said to be (just) these things, because it is of course so much more. Running the entire emotional gamut from heavenly delight to horror and despair. That is not to say that a piece of classical music cannot or should not be relaxing, pleasant, comfortable… and Ravel’s suite from Ma mère l’Oye (Mother Goose) was exactly that when the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra performed it this Saturday at Strathmore under Kwamé Ryan’s baton in his return to the BSO.

The natural simplicity and gentle beauty of the five episodes that Ravel orchestrated from his piano-for-four-children’s-hands original trumped all other moods presented in it – but that victory of form over content was actually very welcome. The BSO played well – very well in some passages – and even concertmaster Jonathan Carney seemed soothed by the music; his solo was executed with great skill.

The real thrill of the program was of a different emotional nature, giving me just the gloom and despondency that I so like to hold against those who think about classical music in the “Mozart for Meditation” and “Debussy for Daydreaming” vein. It was Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle that was responsible for the shift to darker hues and the BSO’s presentation – not the least thanks to Mr. Ryan – did this gem a great service with a terrific performance. Glittering and gleaming, Romantic and modern, threatening and stabbing, this is great stuff that benefits much from the live experience. A one-act opera about Mr. Bluebeard, his new hematophobic wife, her need to see all the seven doors in his castle opened and their therefore thwarted love contains miraculously beautiful music. Touches of Wagner before the 7th door is opened, glorious and sweeping sounds with plenty of brass when the fifth door is opened; music so descriptive and gripping that it puts any film score to shame.

Other Reviews: Tim Smith, A suspenseful 'Bluebeard' (Baltimore Sun, November 20) Daniel Ginsberg, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (Washington Post, November 21)

Sung in Hungarian, the soloists Anita Krause and Peter Fried were outstanding – singing well and enlivening the story with their effective minimal and evocative acting through their faces and small gestures. Maestro Ryan, a Peter Eötvös student (and conductor of the premieres of Eötvös’s operas) should know how to do this score proud, and he did indeed bring the orchestra, the opera’s main character, to life in ways nothing short of magnificent. Because the tale is heavily laden with symbolism, some in the audience may have found it and its grisly end amusing in its projected English translation of the Balázs libretto (based, like Mother Goose, on a Charles Perrault tale). They were forgiven to mistake some dialogue (“‘tis my torture chamber, Judith” –- “Fearsome is thy torture chamber, Bluebeard…”) for a special council Fitzgerald extracted transcript of a conversation between a former New York Times journalist and a certain Vice President – but it was assuredly all part of Bartók’s work.

Originally from ionarts, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 22, 2005 at 01:54 PM | Comments (0)

Audiences Walk out on Tippett in Chicago, Too

In my brief look at the Covent Garden production of Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage last week, I suspected that critical reaction would not be overwhelmingly positive for the new production of the opera at Lyric Opera of Chicago. Well, reviews are coming in, and here's what critics have to say. Wynne Delacoma, in her article (Lyric's 'Marriage' lovely but so confusing, November 21) for the Chicago Sun-Times, admired the music and the performance but lamented one thing in particular:

However, there is one compelling reason to think twice before heading off to "The Midsummer Marriage." Tippett's libretto, which he wrote himself, is one of the silliest, most bafflingly overloaded pieces of philosophical babbling in all of opera. And that is saying something for an art with a high tolerance for the ridiculous in its written texts. [...] Opera lovers are more than willing to [put aside all demands of logic], but too often in "The Midsummer Marriage," we simply had no idea what Tippett is talking about. We knew some kind of quest was going on, but for what and why, the composer gives us very few clues.

John von Rhein's review ('Midsummer' muddle, November 21) for the Chicago Tribune is no less critical, and the audience apparently abandoned the hall early, just as they did in London:

Peel away the layers of Jungian psychology, opaque symbolism and artful dodgery in Michael Tippett's "The Midsummer Marriage" and you find yourself wondering where the opera is hiding. Despite an excellent cast and splendid new production, the numbers of people who left early at Lyric Opera's opening performance Saturday at the Civic Opera House were not an encouraging omen. [...] Now, a superior composer like Benjamin Britten could breathe stage-life into so high-falutin' a conceit. But Tippett, for all his musical craft, was a miserable dramatist. The opera cloaks itself in florid self-importance, yet the storyline is nonsensical and the characters thin.

By my count, that is both critics of the major Chicago newspapers advising readers not to purchase tickets. A swing and a miss! This does not mean that I would pass up the chance to see and hear the mish-mash myself (especially in what certainly appears to be a visually diverting production), but it appears I had better do it right now in Chicago if I want to at all. The production will run through December 16.

Originally from ionarts, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 22, 2005 at 01:54 PM | Comments (0)

Music Carnival No. 22

The Battle of Carnival and Lent by Pieter Brueghel. Winter and spring. Feasting and fasting. Jollity and charity. Tavern and church as the soul's repository. A bunch of noise breaking the silence of solitude. And speaking of noise, there's news that five thousand early Edison cylinder recordings are available for live-streaming, podcast, or downloadable delivery, via one of the internet's finest noise-makers.

Wait a second. What's going on here? What is this? Why, it's the 22nd edition of the Carnival of Music, a post-tacular event highlighting what's going on out in music-blogville this fine Monday. Getting back to this dichotomy driven post, how about this one: critics and performers (maybe not the best dichotomy, but is it fair to say that performers have a "love/hate" relationship with the critics sometimes? Maybe not if you always get great reviews!)

It's nice to know that critics don't just criticize--they read too! Steven Hicken, whose blog is called "listen.", gives us a list of his 30 favorite books on concert music. But listen to this. Critic/composer (or does he prefer Composer/critic?) Kyle Gann gives us a taste of his Opus 1. And speaking of numbers, TT gives us one, SFJ shows us four in mirror image retrograde inversion, and DMcM recounts the number of his internet exploits to date. And here are some critics in their natural habitat: Lisa Hirsch reviews La Forza by the SFO, Jessica Duchen considers an article in the BBC Music Magazine, and Steve Smith doesn't let on too much about the Chicago Lyric.

And what of the performers? Three of them are channeling others: Patti the nice oboe girl speaks Verdi, harpist Helen gives us some Stockhausen, and the Blog, Well-Tempered is offering David Lanz musing about the piano. Wait, did I just hear "muse" and "piano"? Do you know where I'm going with this? Sure you do. Heather gives us her wish-list just in time for after-Thanksgiving shopping. While Heather's thinking short term, NWS bassist Matt Heller is thinking a little bit longer term, hoping to make it to Chicago in February to catch a stage adaptation of Murakami Haruki's after the quake. See how well-rounded performers are!

Enough of this "us and them." Let's come together, shall we? And let's talk turkey. You know, there are so many blogs to check out, but only so much time to do so. And as the cliché goes, all good things must come to an end, including this carnival. Hope you understand.

p.s. Be on the lookout for a streetwalking cheetah.

Originally posted by Brian Sacawa from Brian Sacawa: Sounds Like Now, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 22, 2005 at 01:54 PM | Comments (0)

Fugue on Fire?

Reece Dano can help.

He's one of our composers and is currently hunkered down on a new opera project, which isn't the same as his old opera project: Quinault

Quinault was written and first performed at the Peabody Conservatory in 2000. At this point in time, the end of the 90's boom, I felt my perception of the world was boiling in money and hyper-edited telecommunications commercials. It made me feel a bit dizzy, giddy and disturbed -- all at the same time. So I set out to write an opera about these feelings. In this track from Quinault, Jackson, our hero, is fleeing to the thicket of an archetypal forest to quiet his mind. He expresses quintessential Expressionist feelings of angst and guilt.

At the scene's conclusion he vows to gather up the fragments of his disturbed identity and . . . just . . . just . . . "I just . . . I just want . . .

-- Reece Dano, 2005

Originally from ANABlog, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 22, 2005 at 01:53 PM | Comments (0)

Goodbye Twentieth Century

Originally from ANABlog, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 22, 2005 at 01:53 PM | Comments (0)

Tuning Up with Edgard

Silly that he actually wrote this, but hey, at least he had a silly side.

Edgard Varese - "Tuning Up"

Originally from ANABlog, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 22, 2005 at 01:52 PM | Comments (0)

Upcoming Show ...

Originally from ANABlog, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 22, 2005 at 01:52 PM | Comments (0)

Traversing the landscape

from a concert of music for solo instruments and field recordings (11.12.2005, CalArts)

Johnny Chang -118.51181 / 34.07505 (3) for acoustic guitar & tape 2005

Mark So 8 IX 2003/7:58pm; No. 4 for violin, piano & tape 2005

Originally from ANABlog, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 22, 2005 at 01:52 PM | Comments (0)

Aeromusic

One of ANALOG's strongest benefactors flew in to ARTSaha! this year on a private plane, and when I asked if we could incorporate the pilot and the plane into this year's festival, I must admit I was a bit surprised at how alien the idea seemed to her. Surely, everyone knows that aerial music is a standard genre now, a decade after Stockhausen's Helikopter String Quartet.



It's downright commonplace to put musicians into aeromobiles for remote performances these days! Why just the other day, the entire New York Philharmonic squeezed into a hot air balloon to perform Bruckner 7. We're aiming for a rocket or space shuttle, but if we have to start with our sponsor's Cessna, that'll be ok. You can start helping ARTSaha! 2006 by clicking through our Google ads, but if you happen to know anyone who owns a Class III rocket (or four), shoot us an e-mail.

Just one quick note on the Stockhausen: I love the guy, warts and all. And in this case, it's that same-old issue of his inflexibility of vision. He started his own publishing company because he simply couldn't tolerate scores that didn't appear exactly as he pictured them, and here too, his concept for the piece moves quickly into the realm of masochism when he instructs that the staging include an initial introduction of the performers by a moderator who then must describe "the technical aspects of the forthcoming performance".

Putting performers into helicopters is gag enough, dude. The audience is gonna have plenty to chew on without a spec sheet.

Originally from ANABlog, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 22, 2005 at 01:52 PM | Comments (0)

Google, Grokster & Guangzhou

Edward Rothstein's article about Google Print in yesterday's New York Times neatly summarizes the concerns over the brave new world of intellectual property rights, concerns which strike me as medieval and superstitious as the ones about cloning (or aeromusic for that matter), or to put it in agrarian terms, copywrite Chicken Littles are essentially leaving a Post-It note on the barn door asking the cows to please not leave the barn again (should they ever bother to return).

Suing individual downloaders? Shutting down Grokster?

It's a waste of time and precious money, a nearly criminal abuse of resources given the mountains of money these concerns could be making if they went with the tide rather than fighting it. In its first week, iTunes sold one million songs. At that point, mp3 technology had been in mainstream use for a decade. By the fall of 2003, online song sales were twice that of CD single sales. In a few months, Apple managed to resurrect a form of the record industry that had been eulogized for decades.

500 million songs later, Apple has topped itself with a service that Steve Jobs thought absurd. Even the guru at the helm of a visionary company is out of step with a trend that's as obvious as the nose on his face or, as Chris Anderson wrote in WIRED over a year ago, the Long Tail of a hydra. Anderson points out that the normal rules of retail are turned on their ear when you've cheap and virtually unlimited inventory space.

The normal rules would hold that no one would pay to watch an old Michael Jackson video or an episode of a network TV show on a screen that's 2.5" square, but we're way past your Grandma's retail.

In a world where Rawles can e-mail me an mp3 version of Jerry Goldsmith's gorgeous score from Patch of Blue, the vital issue for the entertainment industry can't be chasing after lost cents but creating platforms for hyper-personalization. It already tacitly sanctions the thousands of spaces like this one that disseminate music in a way that compliments their interests, but they seem to barely grasp the concept, keeping their distance as if they're unsure what type of dog we are, sussing out whether to pet us or put us down.

There's a reason that our inbox is filled up everyday with e-mails from artists and indie labels that point us to extraordinary songs like the kiwi gem "Pirouette" by the Tall Dwarfs. Hopefully, the major labels will get wise and follow suit. In a few years, when DVD releases are simultaneous with theatrical ones, the industry will have arrived at a model they should have been and could have been using for half a decade now. Pirated DVD's are a gold mine, and again, it strikes me as thunderously obtuse that the industry would see all those fistfuls of dollars being made and simply stand by and bemoan the fate of their trade. Just as people will pay to see Eva Longoria on their iPod, they will pay for a high-quality copy of a movie that they can watch at home on opening night, instead of jockeying for a seat in a crowded theater.

And copywrite will contiue to limp on. Writers will still get paid. Performers will still see their checks, and rest assured that corporations will continue to keep most of the money for themselves, provided, of course, that they come to understand that P2P networks and the Chinese bootleg market aren't the biggest threat to the health of their bottom line: They are.

Originally from ANABlog, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 22, 2005 at 01:52 PM | Comments (0)

A New Music Séance

SIC SÉANCE

OTHER MINDS in collaboration with Swedenborgian Church and Piedmont Piano Company presents three concerts -- Saturday, December 3, 2005, at 2pm, 5:30pm, and 8pm

Hypnotic, spiritual music to be performed on Piano, Violin, and Disklavier in candlelight concerts at San Francisco's Swedenborgian Church

WHAT: Other Minds presents a New Music Séance, in three mesmerizing candlelight concerts

WHO: Pianist Sarah Cahill, and the violin-piano duo of Kate Stenberg and Eva-Maria Zimmermann

WHERE: Swedenborgian Church, 2107 Lyon Street, San Francisco

WHEN: Saturday, December 3, 2005, at 2pm, 5:30pm, and 8pm

2pm, Concert No. 1, Walk in Beauty - works by Henry Cowell, Daniel David Feinsmith, Peter Garland, Janice Giteck, Bunita Marcus, Leo Ornstein, Dane Rudhyar, Eric Satie, Charles Ives

5:30pm, Concert No. 2, Nude Rolling Down an Escalator - works by Ruth Crawford, Alvin Curran, Kyle Gann, Andrea Morricone, Terry Riley, Henning Christiansen

8pm, Concert No. 3, Toward the Flame - works by John Adams, Johanna Beyer, William Bolcom, John Cage, Henry Cowell, Daniel David Feinsmith, Mamoru Fujeida, Lou Harrison, Gary Noland, Alexander Scriabin, Ronald Bruce Smith

HOW MUCH: Each concert $20-$50, sliding scale; Series tickets$50-$150, sliding scale

TICKETS: (415) 934-8134, www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2301

INFO: (415) 934-8134, www.otherminds.org

MORE: The intimate candlelit surroundings of Bernard Maybeck's Swedenborgian Church, built in 1895, will be the scene of America's first-ever New Music Séance, presented by Other Minds. Pianist Sarah Cahill and the violin-piano duo of Kate Stenberg and Eva-Maria Zimmermann will perform hypnotic, spiritual and rarely-heard contemporary music in a meditative mode. The music spans the period from Erik Satie's Gnossienne No. 5 (1889), to Charles Ives' Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano (1907), and through the 20th century to the present, including Self (2005) by Bay Area composer Daniel David Feinsmith.

Produced by Other Minds Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian, the three concerts in the New Music Séance feature five hours of solopiano music performed by Sarah Cahill, with additional performances by Kate Stenberg, violin, and Swiss pianist Eva-Maria Zimmermann. Audiences will be treated to performances of Alexander Scriabin's Vers la flamme (Toward the Flame, 1914) and the world premiere of Three Fantasy Pieces, from the early 1960s, by Russian-born American composer Leo Ornstein. Further highlights will be the American premieres of Andrea Morricone's Studio I and of Danish artist-composer Henning Christiansen's Den Arkadiske for violin and piano (1966), a Fluxus gloss on folk fiddling. Humanly unplayable music by Kyle Gann, Daniel David Feinsmith, and Gary Noland will be self-performed on a Yamaha Disklavier grand piano, including the world premiere of Feinsmith's Amalek.

For more information contact Other Minds at (415) 934-8134, www.otherminds.org

Originally from All I Know, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 22, 2005 at 01:51 PM | Comments (0)

A few short notes from the end run.

While JSU got there first, I will duly report -- having been among those who repeated La Cieca's initial scoop -- that apparently, the "flying bed" in the Met's current Roméo set sail once again last night, with Natalie Dessay aboard. Nor was the bed the only thing floating -- the Associated Press reviewer was, too, to judge by this.

We already know that John von Rhein was immune to the charms of The Midsummer Marriage, while Wynne Delacoma did her level best to appreciate it. Heidi Waleson is yet to be heard from, and my official review will presumably hit the subscriber-only Musical America site Tuesday morning, after which I'll feel free to summarize the highlights. Meanwhile, you can see a few choice images from the premiere at Playbill Arts, such as this shot of former gymnast Paul Christiano as Strephon during the first of the Ritual Dances. Whatever you made of the piece (or more specifically, the libretto), ain't no denying this was a bitchin' show.

In more sober news, here's wishing a speedy recovery to Cheryl Studer, who suffered what was reported to be a minor heart attack prior to a Madrid recital on Friday. ("Minor heart attack" strikes me as an oxymoron right up there with "jumbo shrimp" and "working vacation.")

Playlist:

Benjamin Britten - Violin Concerto - Daniel Hope, BBC Symphony Orchestra/Paul Watkins (Warner Classics)

Corey Dargel - Less Famous Than You (as yet unreleased, but surely the contemporary-classical-smart-pop breakthrough hit of 2006, mark my words...)

Franz Schubert - The Complete Songs, Vols. 28, 33 & 34 - Graham Johnson a.o., including Ian Bostridge in Die Schöne Müllerin, Matthias Goerne in Winterreise and the likes of Gerald Finley, Juliane Banse and Thomas Hampson elsewhere (Hyperion)

Klapa Sinj - Mediterranean Sounds/Croatia's Mystic Voices (Nenad Beach Music)

Slow Six - Private Times in Public Places (If.Then.Else)

Originally posted by NightAfterNight from Night After Night, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 22, 2005 at 01:48 PM | Comments (0)

New on Intakt

Intakt has released a new effort from Fred Frith, Carla Kihlstedt, and Stevie Wishart. The CD The Compass, Log and Lead is a feast of string instruments: Fred Frith paints wonderful colors on his acoustic guitar, Carla Kihlstedt (USA) plays violin and the nyckelharpa, a Swedish folk instrument, and Steve Wishart (Australia) has turned the hurdy-gurdy [...]

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 22, 2005 at 01:48 PM | Comments (0)

Digital Rights Mismanagement

An article discusses how DRM is allowing the digital music providers to lock in customers to proprietary formats, or much worse.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 22, 2005 at 01:48 PM | Comments (0)

Fumio Yasuda's sensual 'Flower Songs'

Improvisation is a staple term ingredient in Fumio Yasuda's music-making. He was born in Tokyo in 1953, and studied composition at Kunitachi College of Music. Yasuda's music occupies that increasingly important gray area between contemporary classical and

Originally posted by Pliable from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 22, 2005 at 01:47 PM | Comments (0)

November 21, 2005

Is classical music too fast? - 2

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 21, 2005 at 06:13 PM | Comments (0)

Peter Garland: Americas

Originally from Form/Content, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 21, 2005 at 06:13 PM | Comments (0)

Long Lost Cage Interview FOUND!

Originally from All I Know, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 21, 2005 at 06:12 PM | Comments (0)

Hear Some Xenakis

Here's a truly incredible recording of Xenakis' music for strings. It spans almost 40 years, going back to 1959 with the powerful Syrmos for 18 strings. The performances by Ensemble Resonanz on this Mode CD are extraordinary. And this week you can hear it on last Friday's MUSIC FROM OTHER MINDS program thru this mp3 stream. Many of these pieces are from Xenakis' stochastic period, described in the blog item below. Hear for yourself.

Originally from All I Know, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 21, 2005 at 06:12 PM | Comments (0)

Chew toy abyss

Tears of a Clownsilly once again cracks me up: "You can't hate Francis Poulenc's music unless you are, well, let's say Pierre Boulez or Theodor Adorno. But Boulez and Adorno are the kind of people that hate small animals and children too. 'They are not powerful enough' Boulez might say. Adorno might criticize their lack of progressive aesthetic values... 'DORA THE EXPLORER!? Das ist NICHTEN KUNST! NICHTEN KUNST!' or  'Liebe DAS CHEW TOY nachter AUSCHWITZ!???'**...." The asterisk leads to a free admission of the diarist's inability to speak German. In other hilarity, The Fredösphere has discovered that he is the proud father of "the most uncompromising artistic visionary in the history of the world." The word "uncompromising" is one of the most wearisome clichés of new-music criticism, but in this case it is richly, opulently deserved.

Originally posted by Alex Ross from Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 21, 2005 at 06:12 PM | Comments (0)

Chicago, overheard.

"My one claim to fame is that I once almost killed Michael Tippett..." - Man standing on the stairs after Act One of Lyric Opera's The Midsummer Marriage on Saturday night. *

"The opera is totally awful. [pause] Yeah, it's a modern opera; I should have known it would be awful, like how any time you go to the symphony and it's a modern symphony, it's always awful." -- Man on a cell phone in the bathroom queue, moments after the above.

Since I'm being paid for a detailed opinion that has yet to appear, I'll say only this: The new production of The Midsummer Marriage at Lyric Opera of Chicago is a glorious evening of singing, dancing and playing. Also, stage construction and lighting. Really, it's a brilliant show. Whether it actually manages to overcome Tippett's idiosyncrasies to reveal the work as a masterpiece is subject to debate, but this production does make the strongest possible case -- and Sir Peter Hall even provides a visual cue attempting to explain the story's trippiness.

Already, John von Rhein's Tribune review is here. Although I was a lot more enthusiastic in  summation, most of my conclusions weren't all that far afield. I'll be interested to find out what Heidi Waleson, the only other New York critic I spotted, has to say. [Update: Wynne Delacoma's review is here.]

In my absence, my humble blog has continued to provide a nexus for ongoing revelations of connectivity between Marc Geelhoed, Amy Dissanayake, David Rakowski and Daniel Felsenfeld -- now also including Rick Moody. (If he turns up and posts here, I swear I'm going to freeze the entire site and sell screen shots on eBay.)

[* Yes, I know, I should have lingered to catch a little more of that exchange. But, unaware of how much more generous than Met are Lyric intermissions -- or maybe it just takes longer getting up the aisle in the Met -- I was in too great a hurry to get from Overheard the First to Overheard the Second.]

Originally posted by NightAfterNight from Night After Night, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 21, 2005 at 05:47 PM | Comments (0)

Accelerated Ghost Trance Music of Anthony Braxton

Bagatellen has a long, detailed review of Braxton’s recent sextet performance in Philly.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 21, 2005 at 05:47 PM | Comments (0)

Sun Ra Arkestra: Jazz that’s out of this World

A review of a recent set of Arkestra performances has been posted.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 21, 2005 at 05:47 PM | Comments (0)

Fred Frith Tours UK with the Katia Labèque Band

A few rare dates to see Frith Live. The Katia Labèque Band With special guest Fred Frith Dates - Sat 19 Nov LEEDS The Venue 0113 222 3434 - Sun 20 Nov BATH Michael Tippett Centre 01225 463 362 - Mon 21 Nov BRIGHTON Dome (Corn Exchange) 01273 709 709 - Tue 22 Nov BELGIUM Vooruit Arts Centre - Wed 23 Nov MANCHESTER Royal Northern College of Music 0161 907 5555 - Thu 24 Nov N YORKSHIRE The Shed 01653 668494 - Fri [...]

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 21, 2005 at 05:47 PM | Comments (0)

Just out on Utech Records

The latest from Utech. STEN OVE TOFT “Sinners’ Virtue” [021] Sten Ove Toft (Ryfylke, Waffelpung) initiates a repeating bit of static for several minutes before laying down the harsh noise Norwegian style. Inside the remainder of this single track is a texturally rich landscape that allows for an occasional break in the chaos to seek atonement. Recorded at Landmark, Bergen, Norway. [...]

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 21, 2005 at 05:47 PM | Comments (0)

New York Guitar Festival

The Jazz News: New York Guitar Festival runs Jan 14th through Feb 8th and features Bill Frisell and Gary Lucas amongst others.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 21, 2005 at 05:47 PM | Comments (0)

Lutoslawski: Hearing the Gloom Dispel in the Course of a Composer’s Life

A review covers a set of recent Lutoslawski performances.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 21, 2005 at 05:47 PM | Comments (0)

Music from Other Minds Shows Available

While their full archive is offline due to copyright issues, MfOM hastheir playlists and the previous week’s show available. Right now? Xenakis!

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 21, 2005 at 05:47 PM | Comments (0)

Coming Together (1972). Frederic Rzewski

Via The Standing Room links, a classic article by Michael Hiltzik in the LA Times mentions two of my favorite things -- Amoeba Records and Frederic Rzewski's Coming Together! The article talks about Amoeba's success in their new LA location; I don't know why but the record collecting community is more extensive down south. The writer also asks an Amoeba buyer about the Hungaraton recording of Rzewski's work:

Indeed, armed with a list of hard-to-find CDs from several genres, I was able to stump the Berkeley floor staff on only one, an obscure Hungarian recording of the ensemble piece "Coming Together/Attica" by composer Frederic Rzewski that I've been trying to replace for years.

Can't have my copy, sorry. And earlier this month, I too was at the Berkeley Amoeba and picked up a CD by Talujon Percussion, including an interesting rendition of Coming Together. It's an accented female voice:

I think the combination of age and a greater coming together is responsible for the speed of the passing time...

but the fast-driving piano line is instead performed on something that sounds like synthesized bass although the liner notes indicate all acoustic percussion except for "amplified cardboard tube." Since the text is repeated ad infinitum, the textual interpretation and style is important else monotony results. Birgit Staudt's recitation may not be definitive; still, the underlying accompaniment is clear, precise, and the diversity of percussion compelling.

And just this week in the NY Times, Allan Kozinn reviews the eighth blackbird recording of Rzewski's music, including Coming Together:

They have, for one thing, quickly identified the thread that runs through Mr. Rzewski's work: an almost organic current of narrative tension that makes this music pure drama.

I don't take my Amoeba trips for granted but if all goes well, I'll be in the Haight tomorrow for the Bitches Brew movie and in SoCal next year for that minimalism jukebox festival. 

Sam Melville again:

There are doubtless subtle surprises ahead, but I feel secure and ready...

tags amoeba enthusiasm Frederic Rzewski ny fusion times synchronicity

Originally posted by Robert Gable from aworks :: "new" american classical music, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 21, 2005 at 05:46 PM | Comments (0)

Technobile

'In our cold modern world it seems that everything has to be measured - and now computers are doing it to music. As anyone with an iPod or other digital music player knows, as a song is played, a little black dot moves along the line between "start" and

Originally posted by Pliable from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 21, 2005 at 05:46 PM | Comments (0)

Huh?

Can someone explain to me why Amazon's offering a special deal if you purchase Elliott Carter's harmony book together with John Steinbeck's "Once There was a War"? Thanks.

Originally posted by David Salvage from Sequenza21/Composers Forum, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 21, 2005 at 05:46 PM | Comments (0)

To the Ramparts

Congratulations to our fellow blogger and frequent special contributor Pliable whose On an Overgrown Path has been selected as one of the top five UK blogs on all subjects and featured in 2005 Blogged, an anthology of the best of British blogging. Good sh

Originally posted by Jerry Bowles from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 21, 2005 at 05:46 PM | Comments (0)

November 20, 2005

New Jazz Books Reviewed

The Nation reviews a spate of new books on jazz, where it is and where its going.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 20, 2005 at 12:53 AM | Comments (0)

Upcoming Shows at An die Musik Live

An Die Musik Live is a venue in the Washington DC area. Coming next month are performances by Wadada Leo Smith and Scorch Trio.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 20, 2005 at 12:53 AM | Comments (0)

New on Atavistic

The latest releases from Atavistic. JARBOE: The Men Album 2CD (ALP 167CD) “Six years in the making, Jarboe’s The Men Album project is finally revealed via a twenty track double-CD, showcasing the impressive range of her interests & artistry. The Men Album brings together an eclectic global roster of artists from diverse musical backgrounds whose only commonality, [...]

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 20, 2005 at 12:53 AM | Comments (0)

64 Orchestras Commission a Piece

An article disucsess how a large number of small orchestras pooled their resources to commission a new work from Joan Tower. The question is, can this be done on a similar (or even smaller) scale for music a bit left of center?

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 20, 2005 at 12:53 AM | Comments (0)

New on Sub Rosa

The latest releases from Sub Rosa. The book of scenes DAVID SHEA scories dj OLIVE vs jp DESSY DADA ANTIDADA MERZ ARP / HAUSMANN / SCHWITTERS Aerial (volume 2) Tod Dockstader music for fragments from the inside HAROLD BUDD + ERALDO BERNOCCHI

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 20, 2005 at 12:53 AM | Comments (0)

One Final Note Reviews

New reviews from One Final Note. 14 November 2005 :. Assif Tsahar & the New York Underground Orchestra Fragments (Hopscotch) by David Dupont :. Greg Burk Trio Nothing, Knowing (482 Music) by Jay Collins :. Michael Blake Trio Right Before Your Very Ears (Clean Feed) by Troy Collins :. Earl Howard 5 Saxophone Solos (Mutable) by John Eyles :. Marc Johnson [...]

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 20, 2005 at 12:53 AM | Comments (0)

Light Is Calling (2004). Michael Gordon

Dexter Gordon is in the news, or more specifically, his Manhattan Symphonie CD. It's on the list of DRM-ed recordings being recalled. My copy has no license agreement or install software but unfortunately, I don't have a working turntable so I haven't heard it in awhile. Speaking of Gordon, here's today's "Gordons" playlist:

• Tinge from Light Is Calling. Michael Gordon
• Just an Ordinary Guy. Ricky Ian Gordon. Kristin Chenoweth
• The Low Quartet. Michael Gordon. Brian Sacawa
• Lullaby in Rhythm. Dexter Gordon
• Horning In. Dexter Gordon
• Sundown. Gordon Lightfoot
• Carefree Highway. Gordon Lightfoot
• Pendulum Music. Steve Reich. Sonic Youth (including Kim Gordon)
• The Duel. Dexter Gordon and Wardell Edwards
• As Time Goes By. Dexter Gordon

Gordons Getty, Mumma, and Harker (he sang in Peter Pan) didn't make the cut.

Pitchfork reviews Light Is Calling:

...an accessible work that remains uncompromising in its subtle complexity and is a truly coherent meeting of styles.  While the album isn't completely consistent, it achieves at its best moments a totally strange and unheard beauty.

tags: dexter gordon dexters gordons lightfoot on wls radio in the 1970s LP nostalgia

Originally posted by Robert Gable from aworks :: "new" american classical music, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 20, 2005 at 12:53 AM | Comments (0)

Philadelphia Sounds: Radiance and Reflection

The title of Orchestra 2001's November 12 concert at Trinity Center--Radiance and Reflection--refers to the two main pieces on the program, Nymphea Reflection (2001) by Kaija Saariaho in its Philadelphia premiere, and Lament and Prayer (1995) by Aaron Jay

Originally posted by Deborah Kravetz from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 20, 2005 at 12:53 AM | Comments (0)

Music From Other Minds

Our cyber-buddy Richard Friedman is now making each week's Music From Other Minds radio program available for streaming from his website for one week after broadcast. "We haven't been able to even approach the copyright/royalty issues that would arise by

Originally posted by Jerry Bowles from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 20, 2005 at 12:53 AM | Comments (0)

November 19, 2005

Next Week's Music From Other Minds Program on KALW FM 11pm (PT) Friday

#75 - July 21, 2006 - Excerpts from FOLIO by Barry Guy, and HAGOROMO by Jo Kondo
KALW FM 91.7 San Francisco - Friday nights at 11pm

Originally from MUSIC FROM OTHER MINDS - KALW 91.7 San Francisco, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 19, 2005 at 09:49 PM | Comments (0)

Owning ideas

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 19, 2005 at 01:55 PM | Comments (0)

Goin' to Chicago.

Hardly two weeks into rehearsals, tenor Hugh Smith either jumped or was bought eased out of Sir Michael Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage at Lyric Opera of Chicago. A week later, director Sir Peter Hall -- whose work in Houston Grand Opera's world-premiere run of New Year, Tippett's deeply weird yet utterly magical fifth and final opera, initially bit me with this bug I have yet to shake -- also pulled out, due to failing health. This, I'm assured, is completely legit. To finish his work, Hall deputized choreographer Wayne McGregor. But from all reports, this remains a Hall production.

That this show should already seem star-crossed -- there's that term again! -- feels curiously expected, given the continuing inability of Tippett's works to gain a solid toehold among American audiences. Still, the show must go on, and thus I'm headed to Chicago for opening night, which I'm reviewing for Musical America. I'm especially eager to see the visuals of Alison Chitty, whose New Year design was a genuine miracle of stagecraft, and to hear Sir Andrew Davis's command of this luxurious score by a composer whose works he has so ardently championed over the years. And, given Vilaine Fille's privately shared hosannas, I'm also looking forward to encountering this particular opera house for the first time.

I don't expect to be connected while I'm away, so this is probably the last you'll hear from me until Sunday night, at least. But before I go, I want to lament aloud the apparent passing of the beautiful star-hung marital bed in Act Four of the Met's current Roméo -- the one thing that JSU, Wellsungs Alex and Jonathan, and I all pretty much agreed to be a success in the new production. Thing is, I actually remember wondering just what would happen if a cable snapped. During Natalie Dessay's first performance on Thursday night, that's exactly what occured just before the curtain rose, according to La Cieca, who reports that the bed will remain grounded for the remainder of the run. Grim news, and disappointing given that this was the premiere's one real ahhhh moment. I'm eager to hear of Dessay's performance, but more concerned that she's simply okay.

Playlist:

Felix Mendelssohn - A Midsummer Night's Dream - Overture; Lobgesang - Gewandhaus Orchestra Leipzig/Riccardo Chailly (Decca)

Robert Fripp - Love Cannot Bear (DGM)

Dark Funeral - Attera Totus Sanctus (Candlelight)

Various Artists - Tommy Boy Hip-Hop Essentials, Vols. 1 & 2 (Tommy Boy)

Originally posted by NightAfterNight from Night After Night, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 19, 2005 at 01:53 PM | Comments (0)

Joe McPhee joins the Thing for a night outside the mainstream

An interview with Joe McPhee is the highlight of an article previewing his tour with The Thing.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 19, 2005 at 01:53 PM | Comments (0)

Upcoming at the Roulette

December is a good month for live music at New York’s Roulette. Monday December 5: Dan Senn Tuesday December 6: Mary Halvorson (guitar) and Jessica Pavone (viola) / Taylor Ho Bynum Ensemble Wednesday December 7: Gustavo Matamoros / Okkyung Lee Thursday December 8: Marty Ehrlich - MARTY EHRLICH’S DARK WOODS FIVE Friday December 9: 12/9 & 11/2005 - The [...]

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 19, 2005 at 01:53 PM | Comments (0)

DMG Newsletter

This week’s DMG Newsletter will overwhelm you with reviews of new releases.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 19, 2005 at 01:53 PM | Comments (0)

Review of Edom by Eyal Maoz

Yet another minor gem on Tzadik is reviewed.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 19, 2005 at 01:53 PM | Comments (0)

Austin: Glass Menagerie

Philip Glass's Orion gets rock-star treatment.

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 19, 2005 at 01:53 PM | Comments (0)

The Friday Informer: Because Nothings Says the Holidays Have Arrived Like High-Tech Gadgetry

Bloggers and iPods and Laptops, oh...yeah, yeah. We may have been able to function just fine before email, but seriously, who can remember?

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 19, 2005 at 01:53 PM | Comments (0)

Six for New Time (1999). Pauline Oliveros

On the Analog Arts Ensemble blog, some reticence to describe the Sonic Youth Goodbye Twentieth Century CD although it did inspire this thought:

I could instead shudder to imagine a half-hearted effort in 2005 from some string quartet or symphony orchestra in projecting a contemporary music program, confusing that for the experimental.

Six for New Time, a plodding and dark track with simple Thurston Moore recitation, is recommended. The Yoko Ono scream Voice Piece for Soprano, mercifully short, is not. Why the former is musical and not the latter?  Hard to say; maybe because William Winant plays percussion on Six. Note also that Sparky, who tolerates a wide range of music, does bark at Voice Piece.

tags: noisy ny fusion poseur

Originally posted by Robert Gable from aworks :: "new" american classical music, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 19, 2005 at 01:53 PM | Comments (0)

Babies and All That Jazz

So you want to learn to play jazz? Check out a first lesson with Jack Reilly and see if you've got what it takes? New dad Everett Minchew is reading Steven Stuckey's Lutoslowski and His Music when he isn't falling asleep at midday...Can music department

Originally posted by Jerry Bowles from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 19, 2005 at 01:53 PM | Comments (0)

November 18, 2005

New music on a shoestring: November

Originally from The Rambler, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 18, 2005 at 01:49 PM | Comments (0)

'Tis the gift to be free

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 18, 2005 at 01:49 PM | Comments (0)

Adorno gallery

If you want a cheap laugh, search Google Images for Adorno. My contribution was made possible by ex-Chicagoan Sam Baker.

Originally posted by Alex Ross from Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 18, 2005 at 01:48 PM | Comments (0)

Milhaud in Harlem

I've received some good leads on the question of what female blues singer Milhaud might have seen in January or February of 1922, despite the fact that I got the venue wrong: it wasn't the Capitol Theatre but the Capitol Palace, the after-hours place where Duke Ellington first heard Willie the Lion. According to Bill Egan, Mamie Smith is a possibility; so too is Lucille Hegamin. To my ears, Smith is a better fit for Milhaud's description than the more mellifluous Hegamin. Both women can be heard at the amazing Red Hot Jazz site. Bill Egan has a wonderful site devoted to Florence Mills, whom I recently mentioned in connection with William Grant Still's Levee Land.

Update: It's been pointed out to me that the date in Milhaud's memoir is wrong, and that he was actually here in January and February of 1923. Oh, this slippery Milhaud!

Yet more: According to passenger-liner announcements in the New York Times, M. arrived on the Rochambeau on January 3 and departed on the same vessel on Feb. 15. Mamie Smith was still in town as of Jan. 9, recording "You've Got To See Mama Every Night (Or You Can't See Mama At All)." As Bill Egan informs me, she went to San Francisco later that month.

Originally posted by Alex Ross from Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 18, 2005 at 01:48 PM | Comments (0)

It's a small, small world.

Marc Geelhoed (of Deceptively Simple, and my Time Out Chicago counterpart), in reponse to a blog entry by Daniel Felsenfeld (of Felsenmusick) wondering just who Marc is, took a moment today to answer Danny's question. In the process, Marc gives a shout out to his partner, piano phenom Amy Dissanayake.

Felsenfeld, meanwhile, posted with great vigor and enthusiasm this afternoon regarding the music of prodigious composer David Rakowski.

Why is this a scintillating pas de deux? Because Dissanayake, it so happens, is one of Rakowski's most ardent supporters and gifted interpreters. Danny even reviewed one of her two marvelous recordings of Rakowski's etudes in TONY, almost exactly one year ago to the day. (I couldn't retrieve that review on the flashy new TONY website tonight, but you can find it at the halfway point of this page on Rakowski's site.)

Danny, meet Marc. Marc, Danny. Meanwhile, I'm just trying to decide whether this construes one degree of separation, or two?

Playlist:

Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky - Danse russe from Swan Lake; Aram Khachaturian - Nocturne from Masquerade; Camille Saint-Saëns - Havanaise and Introduction et Rondo capriccioso; Dmitri Shostakovich - Romance from The Gadfly; John Williams - Main Theme from Schindler's List; Ralph Vaughan Williams - The Lark Ascending; Maurice Ravel - Tzigane - Janine Jansen, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Barry Wordsworth (Decca)

Marcus Schmickler/John Tilbury - Variety (A-Musik)

Daniel Kelly Quartet - Duets with Ghosts (as-yet unreleased)

Mary Halvorson/Jessica Pavone - Prairies (Lucky Kitchen)

Johann Sebastian Bach - Goldberg Variations - Simone Dinnerstein (as-yet unreleased)

Originally posted by NightAfterNight from Night After Night, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 18, 2005 at 01:45 PM | Comments (0)

Set Aside The Audible Math, And Start Writing Some Music

Is a century-long fixation on numbers stifling our music?

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 18, 2005 at 01:45 PM | Comments (0)

obscurity "festivette", Toronto

Originally from NetNewMusic Contemporary Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 18, 2005 at 01:45 PM | Comments (0)

Like Wow

I was listening to some old Andre Previn jazz recordings last night and was struck again--as I always am--by what an extraordinary musician this guy is. Most human beings would be thrilled with any one of his many world-class musical talents. And to top

Originally posted by Jerry Bowles from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 18, 2005 at 01:45 PM | Comments (0)

Copland and Eisler

In 1953 Aaron Copland came under close scrutiny by Senator Joseph McCarthy because of his links with exiled German composer Hanns Eisler (right). Copland was one of the few to come out on top of a tussle with McCarthy, but Eisler had already been forced t

Originally posted by Pliable from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 18, 2005 at 01:45 PM | Comments (0)

November 17, 2005

Revenge of the Brass

Originally from Musical Perceptions, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 17, 2005 at 01:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Gunther Schuller: I Hear America

Part One: “All musics are created equal.”
On November 22nd, in a year that commemorates several notable birthdays and anniversaries (including Mozart’s 250th and Tallis’s 500th), Gunther Schuller - American composer and champion of jazz, as well as icon in the realms of education, administration, conducting, and publishing – turns 80. This event is being celebrated by the city of Boston and two of its musical pillars: the New England Conservatory of Music (NEC) and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. A tribute coming from these institutions is fitting, as Schuller led NEC as its president, from 1967 to 1977, and was the head of the composition department at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood (the BSO’s “summer home”) from 1963 until 1984. In addition to discussions at NEC and Harvard, the festival includes several sweeping performances (what the NEC website calls a “crash course” in Schuller’s music) and two BSO concerts.

The central tenet of Schuller’s aesthetic, and indeed, the driving force of the whole festival, is that qualitatively, the best and truest musical expression should not be differentiated on a sliding scale of value; that, in the composer’s words, “…all musics are created equal.” All musics – crossing borders both cultural and aesthetic, which also includes “popular music,” although this term obviously meant something different to Schuller than it means now. For him it meant “jazz.” Schuller forged his “third stream,” a concept in composition based upon the unaltered intermingling of different music, from his pure, distinct experiences both as a be-bop player and as a classical composer and performer.

In the opening performance of the festival, the clearest expression of Schuller’s ideal was presented in the third-stream piece Conversations, written for traditional string quartet and modern jazz quartet (piano, bass, drums, and vibes). It can best be described by what it was not. It was not “jazz with strings,” as exists in countless horrible recordings that permeated post-bop commercialism, nor was it reminiscent of Gershwin, Bernstein, Milhaud, Copland, or Stravinsky in their attempts to incorporate “jazz” idioms, stylistic or otherwise, into their compositions. Neither was it jazz trying to be more than it is – trying to prove its acceptability to the artistic elite. Neither quartet pandered to the other; it was exactly what the title expressed. Idiomatic statements led to conversation, which led to communion, and the birth of a consort greater than the sum of its parts, the purpose and the effect being totally understandable.

Egalitarianism in music -- indeed, in anything -- is a prickly concept that is not easily acceptable. In fact, the whole profession of music criticism is based on the perceived inequality of different music. A perverse version of the leveled musical playing field has crept into the collective subconscious, however: technology has turned the “song” into a yard stick of memory, and everyone can now illegally download 50 Cent or Palestrina (though, I know for a fact that finding downloadable Palestrina is not as easy as I would like it to be). But this, I think, is not the point Schuller tries to make. His views and his writings reflect a belief that the musics of the world could mutually educate each other while maintaining their integrity.

(Go to Part Two.)

Originally from ionarts, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 17, 2005 at 01:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A Literary Echo

Originally from Form/Content, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 17, 2005 at 01:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Bay Area Music Calendar

In the San Francisco area? Find some time for these upcoming shows. Thu 11/17 8:00 PM Mills College Concert Hall [5000 MacArthur Blvd Oakland] New Musics from Mills: a concert featuring new works by: Jon Brenner; Liz Meredith; Nicole Reisnour; Aram Shelton; Eli Sheridan; Damon Waitkus Performed by various musicians from Mills and beyond… Fri 11/18 9:30 PM Starry [...]

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 17, 2005 at 01:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Milhaud in Harlem

I've received some good leads on the question of what female blues singer Milhaud might have seen in January or February of 1922, despite the fact that I got the venue wrong: it wasn't the Capitol Theatre but the Capitol Palace, the after-hours place where Duke Ellington first heard Willie the Lion. According to Bill Egan, Mamie Smith is a possibility; so too is Lucille Hegamin. To my ears, Smith is a better fit for Milhaud's description than the more mellifluous Hegamin. Both women can be heard at the amazing Red Hot Jazz site. Bill Egan has a wonderful site devoted to Florence Mills, whom I recently mentioned in connection with William Grant Still's Levee Land.

Update: It's been pointed out to me that the date in Milhaud's memoir is wrong, and he was actually here in January and February of 1923. Oh, this slippery Milhaud!

Originally posted by Alex Ross from Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 17, 2005 at 01:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Scelsi morning after

Some addenda to my column on Giacinto Scelsi, out in the New Yorker this week. First, a couple of people have asked for a pronunciation guide. It's ja-CHEEN-to SHELLsi (almost like the hotel, or the boys). Second, Tony Tommasini reminds me that the personnel of the Flux Quartet has been in flux since they performed Morton Feldman's epic String Quartet (II) in 1999. Tom Chiu remains first violinist; the others in 1999 were violinist Cornelius Dufallo, violist-composer Kenji Bunch, and cellist Darrett Adkins. Profuse apologies, gentlemen. Dufallo and Bunch, by the way, will be performing George Crumb's Black Angels this Saturday at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, next to the great Gowanus canal. Finally, I wish to lament the fact that some of the best Scelsi recordings have dropped out of circulation. Mode's five superb Scelsi discs are readily available, including the orchestral volume with Konx-Om-Pax. You can also get a Kairos disc with Anahit. But Jürg Wyttenbach's pioneering Accord recordings are out of print, as is the Arditti Quartet cycle of the quartets (most recently on Naïve). I hope these return to the catalogue soon.

Scelsi was an original but not solitary figure. Many composers of the late twentieth century have made slow-moving soundscapes their milieu, perhaps in reaction to the sheer fidgetiness of so much early and mid-twentieth-century composition. Some composers have been directly affected by the Count's example (idea for a mashup: Count Basie plus Count Scelsi); others have simply worked along similar lines. Minimalism is one obvious analogue, having its origins in La Monte Young's "long tones." The question of whether Ligeti influenced Scelsi isn't quite resolved; obviously, the great Transylvanian's Atmosphères and Lontano inhabit a not dissimilar world. The Paris spectralists — Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, Hughes Dufour — had exchanges with Scelsi. The late, great Claude Vivier was a kindred spirit; so is Pascal Dusapin, who's turned into one of the most significant European opera composers (his neo-Futurist opera Perelà, on Naïve, is a fabulously strange voyage). Julian Anderson knows his Scelsi; Alvin Curran worked closely with the Count in his later years. (I've been meaning for a while to sing the praises of Curran's monumental piano cycle Inner Cities. Daan Vandewalle's staggering performance on a Long Distance recording is now available in the US.) The list goes on: Joshua Penman is one young composer with Scelsic tendencies.

Go to NewMusicBox for an interview with Curran that contains some lovely anecdotes: "Scelsi ... came to all my concerts in Rome even right up to the very last one I gave just a few days before he died.... This was in the summer time, and he was such a nut about being outdoors. He was there in a fur coat and a fur hat. It was an outdoor concert. He waved from a distance, beautiful sparking eyes and smile that he always had, and that's the last time I saw him."

Originally posted by Alex Ross from Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 17, 2005 at 01:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Blog and roll.

More voices have been added to the discussion of last night's Roméo. Sieglinde (to whom, happy anniversary) had the harshest words initially, but softened somewhat overnight. JSU draws attention to the general nervousness of the evening, and hopes for improvement with Dessay's arrival. Wellsungs Alex and Jonathan also had pointedly critical comments well worth reading. (A&J also helpfully provide links to Associated Press and New York Times reviews online, so do pay a call.)

Meanwhile, due to a combination of unlikely, unpredictable and unfortunate production issues -- and yes, let's face it, human error -- I was gently informed today that two-thirds of my feature on conductor David Robertson did not actually make it to the printed page in the new issue of TONY. (By afternoon, the error was being referred to in the office as "the perfect storm.") Everyone was duly apologetic; everyone tiptoed around me for most of the day. I'm positive I strained a few muscles exercising diplomatic skills well above and beyond the norm.

Now, truly -- in what I personally came to refer to as the "sulphur lining" of this sorry tale -- I'm genuinely glad that this happened to a piece I wrote myself, as opposed to a contribution from a freelancer. That would be an unbearable phone call to make. But the really sad part, on the other hand, is that this was a piece I actually cared quite a lot about; David Robertson is an artist I admire rather intensely, all the more so after spending a morning speaking with him about music, art, and what is genuinely good about the St. Louis Symphony, and in American society.

As a way of making amends, TONY is going to put the entire article on the new, improved company website tomorrow -- a big deal, actually, since the whole site is actually being relaunched tomorrow with a big splash. Before now, as followers of Vilaine Fille have surely sussed, most features don't reach the site until they're buried in the archives six to eight weeks after publication. I'll update with a direct link when the time comes. [Update: The time has come, and the piece is here, free of charge and no registration necessary.]

On the bright side, my other article in the new issue -- an interview with Ville Valo, charismatic and funny singer for the Finnish glam-goth "love metal" band H.I.M. that appears in the pop section -- made it to the printed page with no difficulties. And in the classical section, Marion Lignana Rosenberg's review of the new Naxos CD by Ana María Martínez is well worth reading. [Update: One feature of the new TONY website is that articles like these two will be available online immediately -- but you'll have to register in order to get them. The H.I.M. feature is here, and Marion's CD review is here.]

I don't usually spend this much time boosting what's in the mag, but I'm still cheering myself up, okay?

Playlist:

Johann Sebastian Bach - Goldberg Variations - Simone Dinnerstein (as-yet unreleased demo)

Eleanor Sandresky - A Sleeper's Notebook (One Soul)

The Ramones - Weird Tales of the Ramones (Sire/Rhino)

Originally posted by NightAfterNight from Night After Night, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 17, 2005 at 01:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Video illed the radio star.

A wearying day climaxed in a loud, lights-cameras-action! media party in the office space to launch the newest TONY affair, an on-demand NYC cable TV channel devoted to translating our staff editors' picks and pans to sound and vision on your tube -- if you're in NYC or NJ, anyway. Some predicted results: Theater critic Adam Feldman is headed for stardom, while yours truly -- whose tubular debut is still at least a few weeks away -- should be headed to the gym for some serious treadmill time. Uggh.

The most unexpected thing I learned tonight, I have to admit, is that Ereka Vetrini, the host with whom I taped my yet-to-be-aired initial segments, was a contestant on the first season of the NBC-TV series The Apprentice. I hadn't known this -- and feel like a dork for not knowing, even if I genuinely dislike reality TV. For the record, Ereka's intensely sweet and a real pleasure to work with -- not to mention much more beautiful in person than in any photo I could find through trawling the net. (Including those FHM shots, so don't bother sending them to me.)

Once the shindig was over, I labored for a few more hours, with Harnoncourt's new Messiah blazing in my ears for the first time. Not entirely sure what I think of this intrepretation on the whole, and one of the soloists truly pained me, another less so. But Gerald Finley, who so rocked my boat in Doctor Atomic and a new CD of Ives songs on Hyperion, proves once again that his is a voice to be reckoned with. "The trumpet will sound" is something to be savored.

Later, I spent more time with pianist Simone Dinnerstein's newly recorded, as-yet-unreleased take on Bach's Goldberg Variations, which I'm increasingly thinking will be a major story when it finds its public. (While there's more to say, you'll find my initial thoughts in the comments field of the post that appears below this one, in reponse to JSU's query. Google also turned up an interesting article on Dinnerstein and the Goldbergs by David Patrick Stearns, which you can find here.) She'll be playing this piece on November 28 at Weill Recital Hall, and I'm thinking I might should be there.

Since I've little else to add, I'll point your direction elsewhere: While it may be breaking some unwritten pact of writer/editor decorum to say so, it's things like this that makes me state without reservation that The Artist Known As Vilaine Fille is unquestionably one of the finest, most lucid scribes currently wrapping prose around the art of singing. This kind of writing begs to be read, and re-read. And while she might well smack me for so confessing, the ability my job affords me to occasionally facilitate some of this writing is among the prime joys of the gig.

Originally posted by NightAfterNight from Night After Night, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 17, 2005 at 01:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Ban The Piano! A 21st-Century Composition Manifesto

As a Chinese-American composer who writes from the margins, I know that I must abolish the central love of my youth--the piano--and find other tools to survive in a new music world where noise and silence excite me as much as melody and rhythm.

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 17, 2005 at 01:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

today is paul hindemith's birthday

According to my computer's "Day in History" dashboard widget, today is Hindemith's birthday. I don't hear a whole lot about Hindemith these days; it's almost as if he faded into obscurity. Yes, the concept of Gebrauchsmusik may have fallen into disreput

Originally posted by David Toub from Sequenza21/Composers Forum, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 17, 2005 at 01:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

David Hockney's 'Private Passions'

David Hockney's creative genius embraces the performing, as well as the visual, arts. His work for the stage includes designs for Glyndebourne, the Metropolitan Opera, and the Los Angeles Music Centre. Given such a brilliant involvement with the performi

Originally posted by Pliable from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 17, 2005 at 01:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

How Strange is the Change from Major to Minor

Jack Reilly's name kept popping up so much around here that I decided to build him a blog. Check out his debut post right here...Tom Myron thinks the notion of a muse is a myth...New reviewer Carol Minor writes about Joan Tower's new collection of smaller

Originally posted by Jerry Bowles from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 17, 2005 at 01:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 16, 2005

Terry Riley's 'In C' at the Johnson Museum

Terry Riley's minimalist classic 'In C' was given a recent performance in the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University by members of the Cornell Symphony Orchestra.

For the full story of a wonderful piece being played in a wonderful setting (right) follow this link to the Cornell Orchestra Life blog.

And if you are in their neck of the woods look out for the Cornell Symphony's December 11th concert at Ford Hall, Ithaca College, which includes a performance of Chris Gendall's 'So It Goes'. This exciting young composer is currently studying at Cornell, and his jazz and funk influenced compositions have been widely performed in his native New Zealand.

Picture credit - Cornell Orchestra Life
Report broken links, missing images, and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
If you enjoyed this post take An Overgrown Path to Terry Riley's 'Requiem for Adam'.

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 16, 2005 at 01:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Tippett's Midsummer Marriage

As you know, it's a Sir Michael Tippett year. The Royal Opera House at Covent Garden revived a 1996 production of Tippett's opera The Midsummer Marriage, which premiered on October 31 and ends on November 18. The first review I found was by Edward Seckerson (No winners in the mating game, November 2) for The Independent:

Fifty years is a long time in the life of some operas. In the case of The Midsummer Marriage, it's an eternity. Since its premiere at the Royal Opera half a century ago, the perception of what an opera is or should be has shifted. In the past decade, it's been a seismic shift. So we really have to ask ourselves why, in the centenary year of Tippett's birth, his most celebrated opera should be far from full on its opening night and - more significantly - even less full at the start of its final act. Far from embracing it, people are walking away from it. Why? Because, as opera, The Midsummer Marriage has insurmountable problems. It might even be unstageable. It's hard - no, impossible - to reconcile Tippett's verdant, effusive and often ravishing score to the proto-new age tosh of his libretto. It really is a stinker: dense, obtuse, unsingable nonsense. There's even a line saying: "Now is this nonsense at its noon." Too right.

Second, there is Andrew Clark (The Midsummer Marriage, Royal Opera House, November 3), who was not as negative for the London Financial Times:

Never has the meaning of The Midsummer Marriage, so woefully misunderstood at its premiere 50 years ago, been more obvious. Here is Tippett’s Jungian inspiration writ large. We all have to discover and confront our shadow side before we can make the true marriage of innocence and experience that leads to spiritual maturity. The production’s symbolic clarity pays further dividends in Paul Brown’s set, in which a giant scroll enclosing the “marvellous” side of life is pierced by the “everyday”. It underlines the inspiration Tippett drew from Greek drama, religion and theatre, pointing up Wagnerian parallels and the orgiastic fervour of his music.

Anthony Holden added to the chorus of nays (A marriage hits the rocks, November 6) for The Observer:

For its revival, to mark the centenary of Tippett's birth, Covent Garden has brought back Graham Vick to revise and develop his 1996 staging, alongside designer Paul Brown and choreographer Ron Howell. It is the latter who makes the most memorable contribution, with The Ritual Dances that constitute most of the second act suiting the manic mood of Tippett's scoring to, well, yes, to a fortissimo. The rest is as much of a muddle as the work itself. A chorus of superannuated hippies keeps pouring on and off the stage, eventually indulging in a cringe-making, middle-aged orgy, while the central characters go through a series of trials all too clearly echoing Mozart's Magic Flute. Mix Eliot and Auden, Yeats and Fry, Shaw and Shakespeare into Frazer's Golden Bough, leaven with a dash of Verdi and Wagner, and allow four hours to stew without ever coming to the boil.

Didn't anyone like it? The answer is no, at least not Anna Picard (Post-war marriage. It went like this?, November 6), who piled on in The Independent:

But for some radiant writing in the Ritual Dances, during which the male dancers hang themselves by their ties, this fitful filibustering continues for four hours. Few of Monday night's sparse audience remained to see the sphere that dominates Paul Brown's designs unfold into a lotus flower. But short of bolting the doors, I don't see how they could have been made to stay. Diluted Magritte sits ill with imagery commonly seen on packets of incense sticks. And despite some highly disciplined playing from the orchestra under Richard Hickox, The Midsummer Marriage is not musically successful enough to distract from its theatrical incoherence.

Lyric Opera of Chicago will premiere its new production of Tippett's nutty opera this weekend, as previewed by Wynne Delacoma for the Chicago Sun-Times. The Lyric has already replaced the tenor lead, and director Peter Hall has had to withdraw for health reasons. I think Chicago readers should prepare for their own bloodletting.

UPDATE:
As I predicted, it ain't pretty in Chicago either.

Originally from ionarts, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 16, 2005 at 01:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Don't shoot . . .

. . . The Messenger. And don't miss Alex Ross' new article about Giacinto Scelsi in this week's New Yorker either.

Originally posted by Brian Sacawa from Brian Sacawa: Sounds Like Now, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 16, 2005 at 01:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Music of Invention: crossing stylistic boundaries

An article covers Trenton Avant Garde, a non-profit group putting on performances of contemporary music. Next month they will feature Harry Partch.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 16, 2005 at 01:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Scelsi morning after

Some addenda to my column on Giacinto Scelsi, out in the New Yorker this week. First, a couple of people have asked for a pronunciation guide. It's ja-CHEEN-to SHELLsi (almost like the hotel, or the boys). Second, Tony Tommasini reminds me that the personnel of the Flux Quartet has been in flux since they performed Morton Feldman's epic String Quartet (II) in 1999. Tom Chiu remains first violinist; the others in 1999 were violinist Cornelius Dufallo, violist-composer Kenji Bunch, and cellist Darrett Adkins. Profuse apologies, gentlemen. Dufallo and Bunch, by the way, will be performing George Crumb's Black Angels this Saturday at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, next to the great Gowanus canal. Finally, I wish to lament the fact that some of the best Scelsi recordings have dropped out of circulation. Mode's five superb Scelsi discs are readily available, including the orchestral volume with Konx-Om-Pax. You can also get a Kairos disc with Anahit. But Jürg Wyttenbach's pioneering Accord recordings are out of print, as is the Arditti Quartet cycle of the quartets (most recently on Naïve). I hope these return to the catalogue soon.

Scelsi was an original but not solitary figure. Many composers of the late twentieth century have made slow-moving soundscapes their milieu, perhaps in reaction to the sheer fidgetiness of so much early and mid-twentieth-century composition. Some composers have been directly affected by the Count's example (idea for a mashup: Count Basie plus Count Scelsi); others have simply worked along similar lines. Minimalism is one obvious analogue, having its origins in La Monte Young's "long tones." The question of whether Ligeti influenced Scelsi isn't quite resolved; obviously, the great Transylvanian's Atmosphères and Lontano inhabit a not dissimilar world. The Paris spectralists — Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, Hughes Dufour — had exchanges with Scelsi. The late, great Claude Vivier was a kindred spirit; so is Pascal Dusapin, who's turned into one of the most significant European opera composers (his neo-Futurist opera Perelà, on Naïve, is a fabulously strange voyage). Julian Anderson knows his Scelsi; Alvin Curran worked closely with the Count in his later years. (I've been meaning for a while to sing the praises of Curran's monumental piano cycle Inner Cities; I'll wait for the American CD release before taking it on.) The list goes on: Joshua Penman is one young composer with Scelsic tendencies.

Go to NewMusicBox for an interview with Curran that contains some lovely anecdotes: "Scelsi ... came to all my concerts in Rome even right up to the very last one I gave just a few days before he died.... This was in the summer time, and he was such a nut about being outdoors. He was there in a fur coat and a fur hat. It was an outdoor concert. He waved from a distance, beautiful sparking eyes and smile that he always had, and that's the last time I saw him."

Originally posted by Alex Ross from Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 16, 2005 at 01:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A life of Messiaen

The scholar-pianist Peter Hill and the musicologist Nigel Simeone have written the book on Messiaen. With the help of Yvonne Loriod, the composer's widow, they had unlimited access to the great man's manuscripts, diaries, letters, and files. Their labor of love is now out from Yale University Press, and it's a splendid achievement, something that every committed fan of Messiaen's music will want to own. Messiaen's life was not the stuff of drama, though it did have some dramatic incidents. Hill and Simeone seldom stray too far from the diaries and datebooks that form the core of their narrative, but they offer fascinating glimpses into Messiaen's inner life, which was never as naive or narrow as his public image as a "devout composer" let on. Much here has never been told, including the story of the tragic mental decline of Messiaen's first wife, Claire Delbos. The man himself emerges a richer, more complex presence — sometimes pedantic, sometimes fantastical, often charmingly ordinary in his habits. (There he is in 1980, at the height of his world fame, playing bits of the Messiah with the chorus at the Trinité.) The book also includes much testimony from people who knew Messiaen well, Hill included. I was especially struck by the testimony of Alexander Goehr, who describes the tense atmosphere in Messiaen's class at the Paris Conservatory amid the stylistic battles of the nineteen fifties. Goehr reports: "Face to face with his sometimes obstreperous students and opinionated hangers-on, he was even reduced to tears. We sat in silence for long periods, especially after an aggressive attempt by one of us to argue with him. Here were we, before one of the most perfect musicians of our times, combative and argumentative, in tense, unbroken silence. And he would say, 'Gentlemen, let us not argue like this. We are all in a profound night, and I don't know where I am going; I'm as lost as you.'" But he got out.

Originally posted by Alex Ross from Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 16, 2005 at 01:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Caro nome.

One night after hearing Marcello Giordani in William Tell at the Met, I got a most unexpected treat. While I was definitely sorry that Natalie Dessay wasn't up to the premiere of Roméo et Juliette at the Met tonight (and really do hope that my schedule allows me to hear one of her remaining performances), I instead got a chance to re-encounter Maureen O'Flynn, the soprano responsible for my personal damascene conversion, so far as opera is concerned.

As I've confessed previously, it was O'Flynn's "Caro nome" in a Houston Grand Opera Rigoletto during the '89-'90 season -- opposite the young Giordani and Leo Nucci -- that well and truly provided my first glimmering of what a night at the opera could be. Before that single moment, I'd been put off by all the dated pageantry and insider bloat, to the point that I couldn't see any reason to be concerned with musty old shows about musty old characters. But O'Flynn's liquid, effortless voice and utterly absorbing emotion in that one aria, expressing intense devotion to a cad that we observers know is going to play her wrong, shook me up in a way I still have trouble describing adequately.

Maybe it was just a realization that no matter how times change, human behavior is pretty consistent. Gilda's ravishing gush over someone we know to be a bad apple is a painful place we've all visited at one time or another. Subtract the historical distance and funny costume, and she's your best friend blurting intimacies between classes, on the phone, by e-mail, whatever. You want to tell her to be careful, but there's no getting that point across. That might seem obvious, but it was a point no professor or textbook had managed to convey in such pointedly human terms before. Something in the radiant passion and utterly innocent trust O'Flynn conveyed that night did the trick -- and it's no hyperbole to say that I've never looked at opera in the same way since.

Did I have the same sense of epiphany tonight? No, but then, why should I have expected to? You only lose it once. O'Flynn's Juliette was beautifully sung, no question. Her voice felt smaller here than it had in Houston, but it was no less precise, effortless and beautiful, and it certainly filled the hall at climactic moments. Dessay would likely (and will probably still) have brought the platinum ping of a superstar charting unfamiliar ground, but O'Flynn's solid performance most likely made me the most happy fella in the house.

I wasn't all that overwhelmed with the new production, an initially attractive but ultimately static affair that left me scratching my head pondering relations to Copernicus, Kepler, MC Escher and Swatch watches -- save for the gorgeous Act Four visual of a matrimonial bed hung among the stars. Ramón Vargas gave what struck me as a handsomely Italianate performance, thrillingly secure high notes and all. Stéphane Degout (as Mercutio), Dimitri Pittas (as Tybalt) and Joyce DiDonato (as Stéphano) provided the evening's most involving action.

Originally posted by NightAfterNight from Night After Night, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 16, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Blog and roll.

More voices have been added to the discussion of last night's Roméo. Sieglinde (to whom, happy anniversary) had the harshest words initially, but softened somewhat overnight. JSU draws attention to the general nervousness of the evening, and hopes for improvement with Dessay's arrival. Wellsungs Alex and Jonathan also had pointedly critical comments well worth reading. (A&J also helpfully provide links to Associated Press and New York Times reviews online, so do pay a call.)

Meanwhile, due to a combination of unlikely, unpredictable and unfortunate production issues -- and yes, let's face it, human error -- I was gently informed today that two-thirds of my feature on conductor David Robertson did not actually make it to the printed page in the new issue of TONY. (By afternoon, the error was being referred to in the office as "the perfect storm.") Everyone was duly apologetic; everyone tiptoed around me for most of the day. I'm positive I strained a few muscles exercising diplomatic skills well above and beyond the norm.

Now, truly -- in what I personally came to refer to as the "sulphur lining" of this sorry tale -- I'm genuinely glad that this happened to a piece I wrote myself, as opposed to a contribution from a freelancer. That would be an unbearable phone call to make. But the really sad part, on the other hand, is that this was a piece I actually cared quite a lot about; David Robertson is an artist I admire rather intensely, all the more so after spending a morning speaking with him about music, art, and what is genuinely good about the St. Louis Symphony, and in American society.

As a way of making amends, TONY is going to put the entire article on the new, improved company website tomorrow -- a big deal, actually, since the whole site is actually being relaunched tomorrow with a big splash. Before now, as followers of Vilaine Fille have surely sussed, most features don't reach the site until they're buried in the archives six to eight weeks after publication. I'll update with a direct link when the time comes.

On the bright side, my other article in the new issue -- an interview with Ville Valo, charismatic and funny singer for the Finnish glam-goth "love metal" band H.I.M. that appears in the pop section -- made it to the printed page with no difficulties. And in the classical section, Marion Lignana Rosenberg's review of the new Naxos CD by Ana María Martínez is well worth reading.

I don't usually spend this much time boosting what's in the mag, but I'm still cheering myself up, okay?

Playlist:

Johann Sebastian Bach - Goldberg Variations - Simone Dinnerstein (as-yet unreleased demo)

Eleanor Sandresky - A Sleeper's Notebook (One Soul)

The Ramones - Weird Tales of the Ramones (Sire/Rhino)

Originally posted by NightAfterNight from Night After Night, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 16, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Downloading Pro or Con: It's Not About Ethics; It's About Storage

Molly and Frank don't agree on anything today, especially not what format they prefer for listening to music.

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 16, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

New York: Our Lady of Late

Downtown music luminaries celebrate Meredith Monk's 40 years on the scene with a marathon concert.

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 16, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Symphony No. 2 (1930). Howard Hanson

When I listen to say, Captain Beefheart, I can't help but react, be it in joy or disgust. Listening to Howard Hanson's Second Symphony, I have no response. It it me or is the music tepid?

Strubel in The History of American Classical Music describes how Hanson had none of the experimentalism running through the modernists of the time -- Copland, Cowell, Sessions, Varèse, etc:

Had he done so, his music might have benefitted from more intellectual or emotional substance.

Ok, back to Captain Beefheart grooving on 1960s Americana like Click Clack, ABBA Zaba and a version of Diddy Wah Diddy (along with a new Nielsen purchase -- some depression-era symphonic music I do like).

Originally posted by Robert Gable from aworks :: "new" american classical music, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 16, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

New music at Cornell

Look out for the Cornell Symphony's December 11th concert at Ford Hall, Ithaca College, which includes a performance of Chris Gendall's 'So It Goes'. This exciting young composer is currently studying at Cornell, and his jazz and funk influenced compositi

Originally posted by Pliable from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 16, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Jack's Back

A pleasant hour-and-a-half bus ride on Saturday deposited me in East Stroudsburg, PA for their 2005 Jazz Jubilee. The event was a tribute to Al Cohn and Zoot Sims to benefit the Al Cohn Memorial Jazz Collection at East Stroudsburg University. The cause

Originally posted by Lanier Sammons from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 16, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Pointers

Dave Thomas channels a conversation between Mahler and Bob the Demon...Blackdogred picks up the Fiery Furnaces thread (with a somewhat contrarian view) and points to an online performance at the BBC...Alan Theisen has a hilarious error message for compose

Originally posted by Jerry Bowles from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 16, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

ACO at Zankel

Steven Sloane led the American Composers Orchestra in four modern works at a sold-out performance at Zankel Hall in Midtown last Friday night. Three of the four works were world premieres. The musicianship was first-rate, as one would expect from this ens

Originally posted by D. Edward Davis from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 16, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Ab-So-Bloomin-Lutely Free

Corey Dargel is co-producing a concert series called "MTC at the MERC" (Meet The Composer at the Mercantile Library) and tomorrow night (November 16) the program will feature a performance by three members of the Jazz Passengers - Roy Nathanson (sax and v

Originally posted by Jerry Bowles from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 16, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

"The Little Prince" at City Opera

In stark contrast to “The Mines of Sulphur,” City Opera is presenting this fall a new opera to which you can bring the kids. So it was that, surrounded by squirmy kiddie-poos, I checked out last night’s performance of Rachel Portman’s “The Little Prince

Originally posted by David Salvage from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 16, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 15, 2005

Scelsi Article

An article covering the Giacinto Scelsi’s life and works has been posted.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 15, 2005 at 01:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Ligeti Performance Reviewed

A recent New York Ligeti performance has been reviewed.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 15, 2005 at 01:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Scelsi morning after

Some addenda to my column on Giacinto Scelsi, out in the New Yorker this week. First, a couple of people have asked for a pronunciation guide. It's ja-CHEEN-to SHEL-see (almost like the hotel, or the boys). Second, Tony Tommasini reminds me that the personnel of the Flux Quartet has changed over almost completely since they performed Morton Feldman's epic String Quartet (II) in 1999. Tom Chiu remains first violinist; the others in 1999 were violinist Cornelius Dufallo, violist Kenji Bunch, and cellist Darrett Adkins. Apologies, gentlemen. Finally, I wish to lament the fact that some of the best Scelsi recordings are currently out of circulation. Mode's five superb Scelsi discs are readily available, including the orchestral volume with Konx-Om-Pax. You can also get a Kairos disc with Anahit. But Jürg Wyttenbach's pioneering Accord recordings are out of print, as is the Arditti Quartet cycle of the quartets (most recently on Naive). I hope these come back soon.

Originally posted by Alex Ross from Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 15, 2005 at 01:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A life of Messiaen

The scholar-pianist Peter Hill and the musicologist Nigel Simeone have written the book on Messiaen. With the help of Yvonne Loriod, the composer's widow, they had unlimited access to the great man's manuscripts, diaries, letters, and files. Their labor of love is now out from Yale University Press, and it's a splendid achievement, something that every committed fan of Messiaen's music will want to own. Messiaen's life was not the stuff of drama, though it did have some dramatic incidents. Hill and Simeone seldom stray too far from the diaries and datebooks that form the core of their narrative, but they offer fascinating glimpses into Messiaen's inner life, which was never as naive or narrow as his public image as a "devout composer" let on. Much here has never been told, including the story of the tragic mental decline of Messiaen's first wife, Claire Debos. The man himself emerges a richer, more complex presence — sometimes pedantic, sometimes fantastical, often charmingly ordinary in his habits. (There he is in 1980, at the height of his world fame, playing bits of the Messiah with the chorus at the Trinité.) The book also includes much testimony from people who knew Messiaen well, Hill included. I was especially struck by the testimony of Alexander Goehr, who describes the tense atmosphere in Messiaen's class at the Paris Conservatory amid the stylistic battles of the nineteen fifties. Goehr reports: "Face to face with his sometimes obstreperous students and opinionated hangers-on, he was even reduced to tears. We sat in silence for long periods, especially after an aggressive attempt by one of us to argue with him. Here were we, before one of the most perfect musicians of our times, combative and argumentative, in tense, unbroken silence. And he would say, 'Gentlemen, let us not argue like this. We are all in a profound night, and I don't know where I am going; I'm as lost as you.'" But he got out.

Originally posted by Alex Ross from Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 15, 2005 at 01:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Those who live in glass houses.....

I can think of a few composers who need the following error message on their pieces. But I'll be kind and refrain from naming names: In related news, IBM's Glass Engine is a great navigational tool for over sixty works by Philip Glass. I personally reco

Originally posted by Alan Theisen from Alan Theisen, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 15, 2005 at 01:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Nocturne.

Three straight days overwhelmed by work and three straight nights deprived of live performances have threatened to make me a dull boy indeed; happily, I'm overcompensating this weekend. Saturday afternoon brings the New York premiere of Rachel Portman's lovely all-ages charmer, The Little Prince, at City Opera. That evening's Ligeti-palooza at Miller Theatre will at long last tend to my Koh dependency (rimshot!). And on Sunday night I'll be taking in Eve Queler's Opera Orchestra of New York in William Tell at Carnegie Hall, featuring my main man Marcello Giordani (as well as a fresh young catch about whom La Cieca and Sieglinde are both abuzz).

Thanks to Sieglinde, Alex and Anastasia for their thoughtful comments on yesterday's LHL/NYT post, and to Vilaine Fille and Marc Geelhoed for ruminations elsewhere. Thanks, too, to TONY buddy -- and, by the way, one of this city's most outstanding theater critics -- Adam Feldman for pointing out to me that the excellent actor now playing Cosme McMoon in Souvenir is Donald Corren, not "Corben." I've corrected that mistake in the pertinent post.

Playlist:

György Ligeti - Violin Concerto - Frank Peter Zimmerman, Asko/Schönberg Ensemble/Reinbert de Leeuw (Teldec)

György Ligeti - Ramifications - Asko/Schönberg Ensemble/Reinbert de Leeuw (Teldec)

György Ligeti - Mysteries of the Macabre - Peter Masseurs, Asko Ensemble/Reinbert de Leeuw (Teldec)

György Ligeti - Síppal, Dobbal, Nádihegedüvel - Katalin Károlyi, Amadinda Ensemble (Teldec)

The Sword - The Sword (Kemado, to be released Feb. 14, 2006)

Isis - Panopticon (Ipecac)

Led Zeppelin - Presence (Swan Song)

Ludwig van Beethoven - Piano Sonatas Nos. 21, 20 & 16 - Kun-Woo Paik (Decca)

Originally posted by NightAfterNight from Night After Night, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 15, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Caro nome.

One night after hearing Marcello Giordani in William Tell at the Met, I got a most unexpected treat. While I was definitely sorry that Natalie Dessay wasn't up to the premiere of Roméo et Juliette at the Met tonight (and really do hope that my schedule allows me to hear one of her remaining performances), I instead got a chance to re-encounter Maureen O'Flynn, the soprano responsible for my personal damascene conversion, so far as opera is concerned.

As I've confessed previously, it was O'Flynn's "Caro nome" in a Houston Grand Opera Rigoletto during the '89-'90 season -- opposite the young Giordani and Leo Nucci -- that well and truly provided my first glimmering of what a night at the opera could be. Before that single moment, I'd been put off by all the dated pageantry and insider bloat, to the point that I couldn't see any reason to be concerned with musty old shows about musty old characters. But O'Flynn's liquid, effortless voice and utterly absorbing emotion in that one aria, expressing intense devotion to a cad that we observers know is going to play her wrong, shook me up in a way I still have trouble describing adequately.

Maybe it was just a realization that no matter how times change, human behavior is pretty consistent. Gilda's ravishing gush over someone we know to be a bad apple is a painful place we've all visited at one time or another. Subtract the historical distance and funny costume, and she's your best friend blurting intimacies between classes, on the phone, by e-mail, whatever. You want to tell her to be careful, but there's no getting that point across. That might seem obvious, but it was a point no professor or textbook had managed to convey in such pointedly human terms before. Something in the radiant passion and utterly innocent trust O'Flynn conveyed that night did the trick -- and it's no hyperbole to say that I've never looked at opera in the same way since.

Did I have the same sense of epiphany tonight? No, but then, why should I have expected to? You only lose it once. O'Flynn's Juliette was beautifully sung, no question. Her voice felt smaller here than it had in Houston, but it was no less precise, effortless and beautiful, and it certainly filled the hall at climactic moments. Dessay would likely (and will probably still) have brought the platinum ping of a superstar charting unfamiliar ground, but O'Flynn's solid performance most likely made me the most happy fella in the house.

I wasn't all that overwhelmed with the new production, an initially attractive but ultimately static affair that left me scratching my head pondering relations to Copernicus, Kepler, MC Escher and Swatch watches -- save for the gorgeous Act Four visual of a matrimonial bed hung among the stars. Ramón Vargas gave what struck me as a handsomely Italianate performance, thrillingly secure high notes and all. Stéphane Degout (as Mercutio), Dimitri Pittas (as Tybolt) and Joyce DiDonato (as Stéphano) provided the evening's most involving action.

Originally posted by NightAfterNight from Night After Night, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 15, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Obituary: Composer and Music Scholar Gardner Read, 92

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 15, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Kronos Quartet: San Diego Nov. 9

In case you haven't heard, the Kronos Quartet has a new cellist: Jeffrey Zeigler. On the basis of his performance Wed. evening, he's a worthy successor to Jennifer Culp and Joan Jeanrenaud. The Kronos Quartet hadn't been in San Diego County in 11 years;

Originally posted by Christian Hertzog from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 15, 2005 at 01:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Berlin Philharmonic Stockhausen blog exclusive

Director Thomas Grube's highly acclaimed new film 'Rhythm Is It!' is winning much needed new audiences for classical music with its highly seductive mix of the Berlin Philharmonic, Simon Rattle, German underground rock, and a cast of two hundred and fifty

Originally posted by Pliable from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 15, 2005 at 01:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

When in Rome

Whatever happened to art for art's sake, wonders Elodie Lauten? To get a grant nowadays, you have to say you want to save humanity or something...Lawrence Dillon had a busy weekend listening to new music...Blackdogred writes about Sun Kil Moon's reconstr

Originally posted by Jerry Bowles from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 15, 2005 at 01:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

National Insecurity

I've just started reading Elizabeth Crist's (so far anyway--no reason to think it'll get any different) excellent book on Copland in the Depression and the War--World War II, that is, which is concerned very much with his politics and where that got him.

Originally posted by Rodney Lister from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 15, 2005 at 01:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Last Night in L.A. - One From Column A...

Yesterday’s Phil concert was a throwback to the bad old days of concert programming: choose three pieces which have absolutely nothing whatsovever to do with each other. The individual performances were good, very good in fact, but the whole was certain

Originally posted by Jerry Zinser from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 15, 2005 at 01:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 14, 2005

In The Beginning...

In the beginning was the Tone. Throughout musical history, composers have commenced major works with a primordial hum, as if to suggest that the universe...

Originally from sounds & fury, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 14, 2005 at 01:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

On The Virtue Of Impenetrable Prose

Writing that is incomprehensible or near-incomprehensible and yet impresses readers has spread like a toxic fungus across Western culture since Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel were...

Originally from sounds & fury, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 14, 2005 at 01:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Are they hedging it or is it honest conviction?

Originally from Renewable Music, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 14, 2005 at 01:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Year is '72

What were you doing in 1972, or dare I ask, were you even born then?

1972 was a bad year for violence. It started on 'Bloody Sunday' January 30 when British troops opened fire on civilian demonstrators in the Bogside, Derry, Northern Ireland, killing thirteen people (below). And it continued through the year, and beyond, as the US B-52s (above) unleashed their Christmas bombardment on Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam. The bombing was started by president Richard Nixon against the advice of the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command, and with opposition from the majority of Congress (does that sound familiar?).

Violence and sport collided in September when members of the Israeli Olympic team were taken hostage by Palestinian terrorists. A failed rescue attempt resulted in the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes, five kidnappers, and one German police officer, and sparked a series of Israeli revenge assassinations. 1972 was also a bad year for FBI director J. Edgar Hoover who died in office in May age 77, having held the position since 1924.

Space travel and missiles were much in the news. The three-man US spacecraft Apollo 17 successfully landed on the moon, and the crew took the last moon walk. Back on earth the SALT 1 Treaty between the US and USSR introduced limits on strategic nuclear missiles. And the whole Xbox thing started with the simple paddle operated Pong video game.

In a year of violence the committee for the Nobel Peace prize dediced not to make an award, instead the prize money was allocated to the main prize fund. But the Literature prize was awarded, to German novelist Heinrich Boll for his acute observations of post-war Germany. He produced one of my all time favourite quotations, 'meddling is the only way to stay relevant', and his view on the role of art in society was pungently expressed in his Nobel acceptance speech.

"Art is always a good hiding-place, not for dynamite, but for intellectual explosives and social time bombs. Why would there otherwise have been the various Indices? And precisely in their despised and often even despicable beauty and lack of transparency lies the best hiding-place for the barb that brings about the sudden jerk or the sudden recognition." (from Nobel Lecture, 1973)

The top selling non-fiction title for the year didn’t contain too much intellectual explosive – it was Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull. But the number two title did contain some well-placed social time-bombs, it was Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914 (he went on to win the Nobel Literature prize in 1970). Another sort of revolution was started with the publication of Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution, the first of a sequence of titles that have lived off the fat of the land for the last thirty years.

In rock music the albums were the Rolling Stone’s Exile on Main Street (right), and the Pink Floyd ‘concept album’ Dark Side of the Moon. Also expressing lunar preoccupations was the last album from the tragically talented Nick Drake, Pink Moon. And another last album was Clear Spot, made by the team of Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band before the magic failed and they went their own ways.

In the jazz world Weather Report produced their fusion classic I Sing the Body Electric, while Chick Corea moved in the other direction with his sparse Light as a Feather. Gospel legend Mahalia Jackson died in Chicago, and violence came to the performing arts when talented young hard bop trumpeter Lee Morgan was shot dead by his mistress New York City jazz club.

Change was also abroad in classical music. Pierre Boulez was in his second year as Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and new music ruled in London. UK premieres included Maderna's Julliard Serenade, Stockhausen's Mixtur (version for small orchestra), Ligeti's Ramifications, Crumb's Echoes of time and the river, Sessions Fifth Symphony, Xenakis' Avrova, Berio's Chemin 11b, Boulez's e.e. cummings ist der dichter, and Maxwell Davies' Blind Man's Buff.

I joined the BBC from university in 1972 (see trivia note below). One of my most vivid musical memories of that time is a searing Mahler Ninth at the Proms conducted by Bruno Maderna; I think it must have been 1972 as he was already mortally ill, and was to die the following year. His tragically early death was the inspiration for one of Boulez's most moving compositions, the funeral elegy Rituel in memoriam Maderna. Other personal musical memories for '72 include the trail-blazing Boulez concerts at the Roundhouse in London, particularly the premiere of Peter Maxwell Davies' Blind Man's Bluff.

1972 was certainly a year of violence and change in politics, and new directions in the arts. What an extraordinary time then for the composition of a tonal work using a formal design reflecting the Bach Passions. Yet that is exactly what Edmund Rubbra produced for his Op. 140, his Ninth Symphony, the Sinfonia Sacra. Subtitled 'The Resurrection', it is a setting for soprano, alto and baritone soloists, chorus and orchestra, of words from the New Testament telling the story of the events from the Crucifixion to the Ascension It is arguably his masterpiece and, in my view, is a grossly under-rated work. The scoring was completed appropriately on Good Friday 1972, and the first performance was given the following year by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Charles Groves.

In many ways Rubbra (photo below) defies categorisation. He was born in 1901 to of musical working-class parents. In his early years he was influenced by Holst and Vaughan Williams, but his compositions do not belong to the so-called 'pastoral school' of English Music. Instead his love of the polyphonic music of the 16th - 18th centuries infuses the texture and structure of his compositions. His mid-life conversion to Roman Catholicism was important to his musical development (and forges a link to Bruckner, both composers use cathedral like structures in their music), and in later years he became interested in Buddhism and Taoism.

The initial inspiration for the Ninth Symphony came from the painting of the Risen Christ by the Italian Renaissance painter Donato Bramante (1444-1514). The structure of the work reflects the Bach Passions, although clearly this Resurrection symphony deals with later events. It is scored for soprano, contralto, baritone, chorus and orchestra (S C Bar soloists, chor 2.2(ca).2.2. -4.2.3.1. timp perc str) and takes a contemporary feminist view by stressing the role of the women in the Resurrection story.

Each of the four sections of the forty-five minute work ends with a Catholic hymn set by Rubbra. Three of the four sections end with a Lutheran chorale, which develop seamlessly from the preceeding hymn. The chorales are based on those by Johannes Crüger (1598-1662) - see audio file below, Melchior Teschner (1584-1635) and Hans Leo Hassler (1562-1612). The use of Catholic hymns coupled with Protestant chorales was an important gesture in a year which opened with the sectarian violence of Bloody Sunday.

Rubbra’s encapsulation of the Christian message, and homage to polyphony must have seemed very out of step with the zeitgeist of 1972. But his central themes proved to be remarkably prescient, and were a precursor to a group of composers that can be said to loosely include Arvo Pärt, John Tavener and James MacMillan.

But sadly, even though Rubbra can be identified as a forerunner of some of today's fashionable composers, his works remain resolutely unfashionable in the concert hall, although the Fourth Symphony was performed at the Proms a while back. (His neglect may have something to do with the fact that his scores are published by Lengnick, a subsidiary of a pop publisher, Complete Music).

His Ninth Symphony, like most of his compositions, remains a rarity reserved for the recording studio. Fortunately we are well served by the magnificent premiere recording with Lynne Dawson (soprano), Della Jones (alto), Stephen Roberts (baritone), and the BBC National Chorus of Wales and BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Richard Hickox. Here as a sampler of this magnificent work are three brief audio files:

From the Prelude -

From the Chorus 'Crux Fidelis'-

From the Chorale 'Almighty Lord we pray thee' -

Next year is the twentieth anniversary of Rubbra's death. Thankfully his publisher, Lengnick, is preparing a new edition for the anniversary. It would be good if the BBC could give similar recognition at their Promenade Concerts, or elsewhere. But increasingly the internet driven BBC sees itself as a global brand delivering global music to global audiences. Sadly in this brave new global world local masterpieces such as Rubbra's Ninth Symphony (and Malcolm Arnold's similarly masterly and important ninth symphony) increasingly fail to register on their global radar. Regular readers will know I rate the music of J.S.Bach as one of the pinnacles of Western civilisation. Currently the BBC are putting massive PR efforts behind their forthcoming, and globally bankable, Bach Christmas. But I just wish 1% of those efforts could be put behind spreading the word about the music of Rubbra, Arnold, and other neglected 20th century composers.

Follow this link for the Edmund Rubbra website

Credits:
Audio clips - Amazon
Photos
B52 - Air Force Link
Bloody Sunday - InfoSatellite.com
Rolling Stones - Rocks Off
Rubbra - Paul James
Ninth symphony CD - Musicweb-international
Trivia corner - In 1972 I was on a BBC training course, follow this link for only the fourth personal photograph in 244 posts On An Overgrown Path. Where are they now? Chris Swann went on to direct some excellent TV arts programmes including the documentary (with Humphrey Burton) on the studio recording by Bernstein of his 'West Side Story'. Andrew Mussett was a fine BBC Radio 3 Producer before bailing out, like many other talented people, in the John Birt era. Stewart Taylor moved from a career on the technical side to loudspeaker manufacturers KEF and Celestion. None of us changed the world, but it was fun.
Report broken links, missing images, and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

If you enjoyed this post take an overgrown path to The Year is '42

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 14, 2005 at 01:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Just out on New Albion

New Albion Records has released two new CDs. ZIPORYN, EVAN: Typical Music CD (NA 128CD) “I grew up believing musical boundaries to be porous, flowing into one another: my father playing chamber music and Gypsy violin, my grandmother’s Yiddish chorus, my mother’s Folkways collection, plus the radio, open-minded teachers, and my own garage prog-rock excursions. At age [...]

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 14, 2005 at 01:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Giacinto Scelsi

The Messenger. The New Yorker, Nov. 21, 2005.

Bonus track: The Night of Too Many Concerts.

Originally posted by Alex Ross from Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 14, 2005 at 01:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

My hero.

Anyone who knows me soon also knows that when it comes to tenors, Marcello Giordani is my main man. Part of that probably has to do with formative bonding. I was way too young for my very first operatic experience, which was (I kid you not) Jon Vickers in a Houston Grand Opera Peter Grimes, when I was in high school and knew far less than the little I know now. Since the Adams and Glass operas I favored in college and just after didn't really offer the stuff of full-blown awe -- Sanford Sylvan's Chou En-lai perhaps the exception (and not a tenor, mind you!) -- the first hero to well and truly rock my aesthetic boat was the 20-something Giordani, a cocky, sinister-but-seductive Duke of Mantua at HGO circa 1989.

When the immediate superstardom I'd anticipated for Giordani failed to materialize, I initially wondered... and then then lost track. Of course, his subsequent vocal crisis has now been well publicized. Although it's clearly still painful, Giordani willingly speaks of his travails now, as something of a cautionary tale. I spoke to him about it for TONY when he came to the Met for Il Pirata, opposite Fleming. This singer worked hard to rehabilitate his instrument, and when his second chance arrived, he surely delivered. I thrilled to his appearance in that production, as well as his following triumph in Benvenuto Cellini.

Giordani did it for me again in the Opera Orchestra of New York's William... er, sorry, Guillaume Tell at Carnegie Hall tonight. The voice was spot on, secure and ringing even -- especially! -- from my odd perspective at fifth row, center. His pièce de résistance, of course, was the one-two punch of "Asile héréditaire" and "Amis, amis, secondez ma vengeance." Giordani threw himself into the cabaletta heart and soul, stalking each side of the stage in turn, and letting the high notes rip. And perhaps since Giordani had been utterly gracious in acknowledging collaborators all night long, it didn't seem at all like hubris when he responded to the crowd's uproar by reprising the last stanza of "Amis..." As he lurched toward the stage door during the repeat, I half expected one of James Brown's handlers to rush out and toss a robe over his shoulders, escorting him to the wings... only to have the tenor shrug it off and belt a few more high C's for good measure. Like the Godfather of Soul, Giordani knows what the crowd wants, and delivers it.

He was well-matched by what struck me as a superlative cast... even the smallest parts were remarkably well delivered. You probably don't need me to tell you that Marco Chingari presented a richly voiced Tell. (He did.) Angela Maria Blasi, as Mathilde, offered meltingly beautiful sounds and exacting diction; her "Sombre forêt" was another show stopper. Other big moments included the radiant faith Ellie Dehn projected as Jemmy when reassuring dad prior to the arrow-through-the-apple scene, and the utterly gorgeous trio of Blasi, Dehn and mezzo Heather Johnson (who I'd previously heard only in a scattering of disjunct notes during Wuorinen's Haroun) at the opening of Act Four's second scene. Paul Mow (as Rodolphe) and Patrick Carfizzi (as Gesler) dug into their nasties, serving up sumptuous menace. And while buzzed-about Fisherman Stephen Costello was a bit raw, his instrument holds unquestionable promise.

Since I'm reasonably certain I spotted La Cieca a couple of times tonight, more insightful dish is no doubt forthcoming. And since Tony Tommasini was in tha house, a Times review is presumably on the way. But I'll close by reporting the response of the rapt observer who sat next to me tonight, who offered that he hadn't heard a more overwhelmingly high-voltage operatic performance in this hall since Semele. (And even I know what that means.)

Playlist:

Witold Lutoslawski - Symphony No. 1; Silesian Triptych*; Jeux vénitiens; Chantefleurs et Chantefables*; Postludium I - Olga Pasiecznik*, Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra/Antoni Wit (Naxos)

Witold Lutoslawski - Symphony No. 4; Les Espaces du sommeil*; Symphony No. 3 - John Shirley-Quirk*, Los Angeles Philharmonic/Esa-Pekka Salonen (Sony Classical)

Eliane Radigue - Adnos I (Table of the Elements)

Originally posted by NightAfterNight from Night After Night, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 14, 2005 at 01:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

NEW MUSIC FROM FRANCE, San Francisco

Originally from NetNewMusic Contemporary Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 14, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Issue Project Room Dispatch

Just got back from a svelte program of Silvestrov and Pärt courtesy of Jenny Lin and the Issue Project Room. Located in Brooklyn, the IPR holds all kinds of crazy programs in a small room atop a concrete tower overlooking the Gowanus Canal. To get ther

Originally posted by David Salvage from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 14, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Philadelphia Sounds: Fresh Ink with Wu Man

Wu Man returned to open the Fresh Ink season with pipa music old and new. A concert by Wu Man is always a lesson in technique, styles, and this time, in history of how the instrument is used. Notes come in continuously-strummed clusters or sharp single

Originally posted by Deborah Kravetz from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 14, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Year is '72

In 1972 the big rock and jazz albums were the Rolling Stone’s Exile on Main Street (right), and the Pink Floyd ‘concept album’ Dark Side of the Moon. In the jazz world Weather Report produced their fusion classic I Sing the Body Electric, while Chick Core

Originally posted by Pliable from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 14, 2005 at 01:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 13, 2005

Studios

Originally from Renewable Music, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 13, 2005 at 03:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

A culture of Arrival

'The Cro-Magnons lived with fear and amazement in a culture of Arrival, facing many mysteries .... Neither agriculture nor metallurgy existed. Music and jewellery did. The average life expectancy was twenty-five .... Their culture lasted for some 20,000 years. We live in a culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress which has so far lasted two or three centuries. Today's culture, instead of facing mysteries, persistently tries to outflank them.'
From John Berger's novel 'Here is where we meet' - which is highly recommended.

'Here is where we meet' is published by Bloomsbury ISBN 0747573174.
Follow this link to the Guardian review which describes the novel as 'a triumph'.
Picture credit - Herve Martin, image created by digital rendering
Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrown path at hotmail dot co dot uk
If you enjoyed this post take An Overgrown Path to Bare ruined choirs

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 13, 2005 at 03:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Fred Frith Discography Update

Yet more has been added to the most comprehensive Frith Discography in existence.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 13, 2005 at 03:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Bloody heck.

The technical perils of blogging are revealing themselves to this newbie only gradually. Which is to say I just spent more than two hours tallying impressions of Rachel Portman's The Little Prince in its Saturday afternoon premiere. One false click, and it all disappeared without a trace.

No way I'm going to try reconstructing at this late hour, and besides, I'm too damned frustrated. (Short version: I love this show, I would have sat through it again right then and there, the cast is outstanding, the production is eye-popping, the orchestra outdoes itself, grown-ups and kids will both find something to enjoy, and I'm altogether likely a sentimental fool -- so just go.)

Anne Midgette's New York Times insta-review is here. And while Anne demonstrates her usual penetrating insight, I must reiterate that I obviously liked this show a lot more than she did. But for now, you'll just have to take that on faith. (And no way can I talk about tonight's excellent Ligeti Koh-motion at Miller Theatre in this state.)

Crap.

Originally posted by NightAfterNight from Night After Night, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 13, 2005 at 03:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Did Berio have help?

In the, um, lively comments about Julius Eastman, this sentence by Lawrence Dillon triggered a memory of something I haven't thought about for some time: But in the end, Berio's work made a direct, immediate impact on a multitude of composers. To which I

Originally posted by Christian Hertzog from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 13, 2005 at 03:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Rockin' in the Free World

Man, we are so happening today. You'd almost think people were getting paid. In addition, to all the action here on page one, Alan Theisen is planning his first visit to New York and wondering how he can avoid looking like a rube. Perhaps a few of us c

Originally posted by Jerry Bowles from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 13, 2005 at 03:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Kronos Quartet: San Diego Nov. 9

In case you haven't heard, the Kronos Quartet has a new cellist: Jeffrey Zeigler. On the basis of his performance Wed. evening, he's a worthy predecessor to Jennifer Culp and Joan Jeanrenaud. The Kronos Quartet hadn't been in San Diego County in 11 years

Originally posted by Christian Hertzog from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 13, 2005 at 03:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Silent protest

'If the world of hip-hop is still a little too exclusive, most popular music suffers from the opposite problem of being too corporate. By the early 1970s protest culture had been absorbed by capitalist enterprise. Rock became big business. Small record la

Originally posted by Pliable from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 13, 2005 at 03:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Issue Project Room Dispatch

Just got back from a svelte program of Silvestrov and Pärt courtesy of Jenny Lin and the Issue Project Room. Located in Brooklyn, the IPR holds all kinds of crazy programs in a small room atop a concrete tower overlooking the Gawanas Canal. To get ther

Originally posted by David Salvage from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 13, 2005 at 03:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 12, 2005

New music ......

'New music has degenerated to mere noise, bludgeoning our ears rather than than caressing them. Noble song is lost ....'
Frederick the Great writing in 1777.

'His failures will be better than most people's successes'
Alexander Goehr about Pierre Boulez in 2005.

BBC4 TV broadcasts Pierre Boulez conducting his 80th birthday concert, including his cantata Le soleil des eaux, tonight (12th Nov), 19.00H GMT
Picture credit - Guardian
Report broken links, missing images, and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
If you enjoyed this post take an overgrown path to Classic misunderstandings - Hildegard

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 12, 2005 at 03:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Words get in Monk’s Way

Another Meredith Monk article, this one including an interview.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 12, 2005 at 03:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

DMG Newsletter

Another friday, another DMG Newsletter.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 12, 2005 at 03:23 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Electro-acoustic classics, part one

I've decided to put my blog to good use: to talk about some electro-acoustic classics. I'm not making a 'best of' list (not yet, anyway), but I'd like to use this a forum for discussing electro-acoustic works that I feel are influential, important, unusu

Originally posted by Anthony Cornicello from Anthony Cornicello, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 12, 2005 at 03:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Nocturne.

Three straight days overwhelmed by work and three straight nights deprived of live performances have threatened to make me a dull boy indeed; happily, I'm overcompensating this weekend. Saturday afternoon brings the New York premiere of Rachel Portman's lovely all-ages charmer, The Little Prince, at City Opera. That evening's Ligeti-palooza at Miller Theatre will at long last tend to my Koh dependency (rimshot!). And on Sunday night I'll be taking in Eve Queler's Opera Orchestra of New York in William Tell at Carnegie Hall, featuring my main man Marcello Giordani (as well as a fresh young catch about whom La Cieca and Sieglinde are both abuzz).

Thanks to Sieglinde, Alex and Anastasia for their thoughtful comments on yesterday's LHL/NYT post, and to Vilaine Fille and Marc Geelhoed for ruminations elsewhere. Thanks, too, to TONY buddy -- and, by the way, one of this city's most outstanding theater critics -- Adam Feldman for pointing out to me that the excellent actor now playing Cosme McMoon in Souvenir is Donald Korren, not "Korben." I've corrected that mistake in the pertinent post.

Playlist:

György Ligeti - Violin Concerto - Frank Peter Zimmerman, Asko/Schönberg Ensemble/Reinbert de Leeuw (Teldec)

György Ligeti - Ramifications - Asko/Schönberg Ensemble/Reinbert de Leeuw (Teldec)

György Ligeti - Mysteries of the Macabre - Peter Masseurs, Asko Ensemble/Reinbert de Leeuw (Teldec)

György Ligeti - Síppal, Dobbal, Nádihegedüvel - Katalin Károlyi, Amadinda Ensemble (Teldec)

The Sword - The Sword (Kemado, to be released Feb. 14, 2006)

Isis - Panopticon (Ipecac)

Led Zeppelin - Presence (Swan Song)

Ludwig van Beethoven - Piano Sonatas Nos. 21, 20 & 16 - Kun-Woo Paik (Decca)

Originally posted by NightAfterNight from Night After Night, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 12, 2005 at 02:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

On second (and third) thought...

It was late. I was tired. And emotions ran high when I spotted, and linked to, the New York Times article on Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's cancellations. I'm guessing that's why it wasn't until later in the morning, when I read Susan Elliott's report on that article at Musical America, that the Times piece finally struck me as being potentially objectionable.

But Elliott -- for whom I've written for pay on occasion, let the record show -- is a reporter and editor of sharp instinct and direct utterance. And once I read her headline ("NY Times Goes on a News Hunt") and description ("When a performer is ill, what is the media's role?"), it finally did dawn on me that the Times piece -- much of it speculation, denial and innuendo -- was indeed rather troubling. That night, I had dinner with a dear friend who also plays a role in this classical-music business, and practically the first thing she asked me was, "What did you really think of that article you linked to?"

For most of us who admire Ms. Hunt Lieberson's work and have followed her career, the Times piece didn't tell us anything we weren't already thinking. Even Craig Smith, the close professional associate of the singer whose published quote gave voice to our greatest fear, didn't say anything we hadn't all begun to ponder -- privately.

But is it news, in the sense that it belongs on a printed page in the mass media?

Maybe so -- after all, Hunt Lieberson's cancellations have no doubt cost some presenters money, and doubtless many music lovers are confused and concerned as to why this highly touted performer mostly hasn't been turning up lately.

But at the same time, to what end should speculation be allowed to virtually substantiate rumor? What role should an individual's right to privacy play in determining whether a story like this one should be reported to a broad public -- many of whom will most likely accept what the article suggests as truth, simply based on where it appeared? And why, lacking hard facts, should this particular story be spun this particular way in print, when in the case of any number of other famous artists -- one cult-favorite pianist in particular -- constant cancellation has been spun as jitters, even caprice?

I am most certainly not here to indict the Times. Far from it. My respect for the knowledge and ability of that congregation of writers and editors is immense. I've personally benefitted from writing for the paper a couple of times -- and I don't just mean in terms of prestige (although that can't be denied), but in terms of bettering my craft through working with some of those people. Nor do I doubt for a moment the genuine concern individuals there hold for Hunt Lieberson, whose performances have been covered in the most glowing terms imaginable.

Still, all newspapers -- the Times included -- are beset these days by other media offering more immediate access to both fact and opinion. Hard news turns up on the net and the tube long before printing presses can roll. (Elliott's report on the Wakin article, you'll note, appeared only hours after the article itself turned up online.) On a far more mundane level, concerts are subject to almost-immediate online chatter, and new discs are inevitably discussed on blogs and boards long before they hit the streets.

So naturally, the Times tries harder, even in its cultural coverage, to assert a primacy both among those who don't frequent chats, blogs and boards and those who do, or might. New albums by Kanye West and Kate Bush, to name but two attention-grabbing musicians, were discussed in the Times well ahead of release date, which used to be something of an unspoken starting line. And critics are forced to dash up the aisles in order to file reviews that might appear on the paper's website in a matter of hours. (Just like the old days!)

I acknowledge all of that as the way the game is played, at least in this city. But how much is too much? At what point does breaking a story become invasive, perhaps even offensive? I'm only just beginning to mull this over, and really can't begin to come to a definitive conclusion. So if anyone happens to come across discussion of this article and its impact, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know.

Playlist:

Kurt Weill - Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2; Lady in the Dark Symphonic Nocturne - Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Marin Alsop (Naxos)

Johannes Brahms - Piano Trios Nos. 1 & 3 - Trio Solisti (Marquis)

Gioachino Rossini - La Cenerentolla - Joyce DiDonato a.o., SWR Radio Orchestra Kaiserslautern/Alberto Zedda (Naxos)

Witold Lutoslawski - Twenty Polish Christmas Carols*; Lacrimosa*; Five Songs for female voice and 30 solo instruments** - Olga Pasichnyk*, Jadwiga Rappe**, Polish Radio Chorus Krakow, Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra/Antoni Wit (Naxos)

King Crimson - The 21st Century Guide to King Crimson - Volume Two: 1981-2003 (DGM)

King Crimson - Larks' Tongues in Aspic (Virgin)

Originally posted by NightAfterNight from Night After Night, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 12, 2005 at 02:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Dreaming in public.

Tonight brought a special treat, somewhat off my usually beaten path: a preview performance of Souvenir, Stephen Temperley's two-character, two-act play about the legendarily off-key society warbler Florence Foster Jenkins. The show was generally well received, and Judy Kaye's portrayal of Jenkins roundly lauded, in an initial run late last year, which I didn't see. (My former TONY comrade Jason Zinoman's New York Times review is here, while the reaction of my current TONY ally, the fabulous Adam Feldman, can be found here.)

The play opens in a Greenwich Village piano bar, where Cosme McMoon, a washed-up cocktail tinkler, reminisces about his "glory" days accompanying Ms. Jenkins's benighted follies. The main sticking point most critics had with the original production was the portrayal of McMoon by a veteran Broadway music director who was a fine pianist but apparently a sub-par actor. That's certainly not the case with Donald Corren, who portrays McMoon's turn from embarassment and anxiety to deep affection with genuine aplomb. Observing and interacting with Jenkins, McMoon grapples with essential questions of worth, delusion and valor much as any stifled creator might.

For her part, Jenkins -- according to Temperley -- seems to have rarely if ever questioned the validity of her performances. Time after time, she reiterates a fundamental faith in her art and the transcendent power of music. And in this role, Kaye simply slays. True, this fine singer and comedic actor delivers a tour de force of miraculously awful singing. (The short, sweet cameos of Jenkins's infamous Carnegie Hall recital, a benefit for the war effort, are utterly howl-inducing.) But Kaye also limns this quixotic "career" with an utterly winning depth of character that tends to crop up both when you least and most expect it. And like Quixote, Jenkins accrues a hard-won dignity despite her utter lack of eptitude.

The ending, which I wouldn't conceive of revealing, is perhaps obvious in retrospect. But I freely admit that I didn't see it coming, and it well and truly misted me up. While I hate to sound like a pitchman, I can't imagine any lover of fine song and opera not being completely captivated by this show, and I plan to see it again later in what I hope will be a long and healthy run.

Added to the blogroll: the lucid opera blog An Unamplified Voice, and Felsenmusick, busy composer-critic Daniel Felsenfeld's new online bulwark against the advancing hordes of pop cultcha. (But watch out, Danny, or Picker is gonna gently smack you for not acknowledging his second opera, the as-yet-unrecorded Fantastic Mr. Fox...)

Playlist:

Alberto Ginastera - Estancia; Harp Concerto*; Glosses; Panambi - Isabelle Moretti*, Orchestra National de Lyon/David Robertson (Naive)

Pierre Boulez - Rituel in memoriam Maderna; Notations I-IV, VII; Figures-Doubles-Prismes - Orchestre National de Lyon/David Robertson (Naive)

Valentin Silvestrov - Symphony No. 5; Postludium* - Alexei Lubimov*, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin/David Robertson (Sony Classical)

Shakira - Oral Fixation, Vol. 2 (Epic)

Ernst Krenek - String Quartets Nos. 5 & 8 - Sonare Quartett (MD+G)

Originally posted by NightAfterNight from Night After Night, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 12, 2005 at 02:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Cleveland: Making the Old Sound New Again

The COYO commissions and performs a new score from second-year graduate student Casey Hale.

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 12, 2005 at 02:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Harmonielehre (1985). John Adams /veteran's day/

To celebrate Veteran's Day, San Jose has a modest downtown parade with a working-class, personal, and friendly feel and since it's San Jose, the crowd is very integrated and multi-ethnic. Since I've read a fair amount of political vitriol lately, this event provides a pleasant contrast.

Last year, I remember seeing in the parade Viet Nam vets as well as Vietnamese vets. This year, I had an even bigger surprise. Following a banner proclaiming "Soviet Veterans of World War II," fifteen or twenty elderly men and women walked in the parade, mostly carrying American flags although there was at least one with the former Soviet Union flag.

Is it right to have these people in this parade?  Let me think it through. The holiday celebrates living veterans so that's good. But weren't these our enemies at one time? My WWI history is weak but I don't think Czarist Russia was particulary anti-American. Then, at the beginning of WW II, the Soviet Union was allied with Germany but at some point, flipped, bore the brunt of the German military machine, and played a (the?) major role in the defeat of the common enemy. Things turned worse for decades and then it got better.

So, the ex-soldiers in today's parade represent our valliant allies at the time, without which life would be much different. Three cheers for these as well as our traditional veterans...

By the way, Stephen Hickens recommends music for today, including John Adams' civil war-based The Wound-Dresser.

Back to the United States and it's sometime enemy, I don't know how much American classical music was performed during the Soviet era. I do have a CD box set of an 1988 Leningrad contemporary music festival, with music by Schnittke, Gubaidulina, Tchaikovsky, etc., and the Lithuanian Philharmonic Orchestra performing John Adams' Harmonielehre. Mike Silverton reviews this performance and others of the same work here.

Finally, an apparently positive comment from a Russian chat board:

John Adams и все-все-все Единочаятели! Скажите о Джоне Адамсе! Очень любопытно как кто к нему относится, особенно к масштабным симфоническим произведениям типа "Harmonielehre". Ответы можно не аргументировать.

Originally posted by Robert Gable from aworks :: "new" american classical music, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 12, 2005 at 02:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

New music .....

'New music has degenerated to mere noise, bludgeoning our ears rather than than caressing them. Noble song is lost ....' Frederick the Great writing in 1777. 'His failures will be better than most people's successes' Alexander Goehr about Pierre Boulez i

Originally posted by Pliable from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 12, 2005 at 02:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

November 11, 2005

On second (and third) thought...

It was late. I was tired. And emotions ran high when I spotted, and linked to, the New York Times article on Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's cancellations. I'm guessing that's why it wasn't until later in the morning, when I read Susan Elliott's report on that article at Musical America, that the Times piece finally struck me as being potentially objectionable.

But Elliott -- for whom I've written for pay on occasion, let the record show -- is a reporter and editor of sharp instinct and direct utterance. And once I read her headline ("NY Times Goes on a News Hunt") and description ("When a performer is ill, what is the media's role?"), it finally did dawn on me that the Times piece -- much of it speculation, denial and innuendo -- was indeed rather troubling. That night, I had dinner with a dear friend who also plays a role in this classical-music business, and practically the first thing she asked me was, "What did you really think of that article you linked to?"

For most of us who admire Ms. Hunt Lieberson's work and have followed her career, the Times piece didn't tell us anything we weren't already thinking. Even Craig Smith, the close professional associate of the singer whose published quote gave voice to our greatest fear, didn't say anything we hadn't all begun to ponder -- privately.

But is it news, in the sense that it belongs on a printed page in the mass media?

Maybe so -- after all, Hunt Lieberson's cancellations have no doubt cost some presenters money, and doubtless many music lovers are confused and concerned as to why this highly touted performer mostly hasn't been turning up lately.

But at the same time, to what end should speculation be allowed to virtually substantiate rumor? What role should an individual's right to privacy play in determining whether a story like this one should be reported to a broad public -- many of whom will most likely accept what the article suggests as truth, simply based on where it appeared? And why, lacking hard facts, should this particular story be spun this particular way in print, when in the case of any number of other famous artists -- one cult-favorite pianist in particular -- constant cancellation has been spun as jitters, even caprice?

I am most certainly not here to indict the Times. Far from it. My respect for the knowledge and ability of that congregation of writers and editors is immense. I've personally benefitted from writing for the paper a couple of times -- and I don't just mean in terms of prestige (although that can't be denied), but in terms of bettering my craft through working with some of those people. Nor do I doubt for a moment the genuine concern individuals there hold for Hunt Lieberson, whose performances have been covered in the most glowing terms imaginable.

Still, all newspapers -- the Times included -- are beset these day by other media offering more immediate access to both fact and opinion. Hard news turns up on the net and the tube long before printing presses can roll. (Elliott's report on the Wakin article, you'll note, appeared only hours after the article itself turned up online.) On a far more mundane level, concerts are subject to almost-immediate online chatter, and new discs are inevitably discussed on blogs and boards long before they hit the streets.

So naturally, the Times tries harder, even in its cultural coverage, to assert a primacy both among those who don't frequent chats, blogs and boards and those who do, or might. New albums by Kanye West and Kate Bush, to name but two attention-grabbing musicians, were discussed in the Times well ahead of release date, which used to be something of an unspoken starting line. And critics are forced to dash up the aisles in order to file reviews that might appear on the paper's website in a matter of hours. (Just like the old days!)

I acknowledge all of that as the way the game is played, at least in this city. But how much is too much? At what point does breaking a story become invasive, perhaps even offensive? I'm only just beginning to mull this over, and really can't begin to come to a definitive conclusion. So if anyone happens to come across discussion of this article and its impact, I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know.

Playlist:

Kurt Weill - Symphonies Nos. 1 & 2; Lady in the Dark Symphonic Nocturne - Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Marin Alsop (Naxos)

Johannes Brahms - Piano Trios Nos. 1 & 3 - Trio Solisti (Marquis)

Gioachino Rossini - La Cenerentolla - Joyce DiDonato a.o., SWR Radio Orchestra Kaiserslautern/Alberto Zedda (Naxos)

Witold Lutoslawski - Twenty Polish Christmas Carols*; Lacrimosa*; Five Songs for female voice and 30 solo instruments** - Olga Pasichnyk*, Jadwiga Rappe**, Polish Radio Chorus Krakow, Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra/Antoni Wit (Naxos)

King Crimson - The 21st Century Guide to King Crimson - Volume Two: 1981-2003 (DGM)

King Crimson - Larks' Tongues in Aspic (Virgin)

Originally posted by NightAfterNight from Night After Night, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 11, 2005 at 06:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

The Friday Informer: All that's left now is for the sky to fall

A woman on the Vienna Phil podium, a woman writing "great" music, Eno selling off his studio...what is the world coming to?

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 11, 2005 at 06:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Book 'em, Danno: A Look At Composer Biographies as PR

I'm not quite ready to comment on our pal Greg Sandow's book yet -- I'm waiting until we get to some of the real meat, although he's off to a good start -- but last Sunday the New York Times Review of Books published his review of Edmund Morris's new Beet

Originally posted by Galen H. Brown from Sequenza21/Composers Forum, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 11, 2005 at 06:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Scheduling the Muse

Who knows how and when the right idea will come? I’ve known artists who insist on the importance of blocking off a daily time for creative work. I’ve known others who force themselves to come up with a specific amount of work – pages, minutes, inches –

Originally posted by Lawrence Dillon from Sequenza21/Composers Forum, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 11, 2005 at 06:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Harrison Birtwistle's 'Private Passions'

Who would have thought one of our leading contemporary composers has a 'private passion' for Roy Orbison? Well that is precisely what Harrison Birtwistle revealed in his selection of music for the BBC Radio 3 programme Private Passions. While studying at

Originally posted by Pliable from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 11, 2005 at 06:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

ASCAP Wants My Blood for NetNewMusic

Coincident with my invitation to the ASCAP Deems-Taylor Awards (Sequenza21 won the Internet award this year, I'm their volunteer techie) I get another mailing... a license from ASCAP, so that I might continue to utilize their properties. Congratulations on having joined the growing number of interactive music sites and services on the Internet Wo... yeah! I started one of the first interactive music sites on the web, NetNewMusic, in 1994, for that matter and you guys have been making us composers use a freakin DOS program to input our licenses for a decade now... So thanks! Under the United States Copyright Law the public performance of copyrighted music requres permission from the copyright owners or their licensing representatives such as ASCAP. Musical performance presented by means of Internet transmissions are public performances because... blah blah blah... We at ASCAP are pleaed to offer you our new license agreement with which you willbe able to lawfully perform all the music in ASCAP's vast repetory... The minimum annual fee that they want from me is $340. This is obviously a mistake because NetNewMusic hosts neither MP3's or streams, and links to news stories and 3rd party sites solely. But I am quite worried to tell the truth after hearing stories about restaurants etc... and I'm a freakin ASCAP member to boot.... What is most disturbing is that they send me this (ahem) contract and (veiled threat of legal persecution) without even clicking a fucking link. If they would have explored the site a bit, they would have immediately seen that all links lead to 3rd party sites, that their confusion is possibly because they don't understand how URL's can employ DB lookups and redirects. I've written, called, pulled a few connections... and nothing so far. They're probably quaking in their boots... Frankly, I feel sick. If we continue down this path, from Sony RootKits, DRM methods that hurt computers, threats before research from corporate giants, the only music services left will be pirate services and binary newsgroups....

Originally posted by jeff from beepSNORT, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 11, 2005 at 06:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Stuffed

Saw a giant billboard in Tokyo once showing a huge nose and a nasal spray applicator with the English words underneath "For stuffed nose and snot." That's about where I am this morning. The uncommonly warm weather has left with me a bad case of the snif

Originally posted by Jerry Bowles from Sequenza21, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 11, 2005 at 06:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Harrison Birtwistle's cheesy 'Private Passions'

ave thought one of our leading contemporary composers has a 'private passion' for Roy Orbison? Well, that is precisely what Harrison Birtwistle's revealed in his selection of music for the BBC Radio 3 programme Private Passions.

Birtwistle was born in Lancashire in 1934, and while studying at the Royal Northern College of Music with Peter Maxwell Davies, Alexander Goehr, John Ogdon and Elgar Howarth formed the influential New Music Manchester group. He then went on to study in the US on a Harkness Fellowship.

His music is influenced by Stravinsky, Messiaen and Varèse. He produced a number of compositions that were central to the development of late 20th century music. These included Harrison's Clocks (1998) for piano, The Triumph of Time (1971) for orchestra, and the operas Punch and Judy (1967) and The Mask of Orpheus (1984), the latter work winning the $150,000 Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition in 1987. His avant garde style made the media headlines in 1995 when his composition Panic for drums, alto saxophone and orchestra disturbed the complacent jingoism of the traditional Last Night of the BBC Promende Concerts season.

To sample his musical style here is a two minute sample from his Nine Settings of Lorine Niedecker, composed in 1998 for soprano and cello, performed by Claron McFadden and Paul Watkins -

But if you think all of Harrison's musical influences are cutting edge you are in for a surprise. One of his choices for Private Passions was Roy Orbison's In Dreams, and here is a sample from the lyrics:

In dreams I walk with you. in dreams I talk to you.
In dreams you’re mine. all of the time we’re together
In dreams, in dreams.
But just before the dawn, I awake and find you gone.
I can’t help it, I can’t help it, if I cry.
I remember that you said goodbye.
It’s too bad that all these things, can only happen in my dreams
Only in dreams in beautiful dreams.

That was selected by the composer of Punch and Judy! Here are Harrison Birtwistle's other choices:

* Palestrina, 'Si ignoras te', Oxford Camerate / Jeremy Summerly Naxos 8.550843
* Debussy, Prélude a l'après-midi d'un faune, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande / Ernest Ansermet Decca 414 040-2
* Ravi Shankar, 'Yaman kalyan', Anoushka Shankar (sitar) Angel 56969-2
* Boulez, Improvisation sur Mallarmé II, 'Une dentelle s'abolit' (from Ple selon pli), Christine Schaffer (soprano) / Ensemble Intercontemporain / Pierre Boulez DG 471 344-2
* Stravinsky, Symphonies of Wind Instruments, Netherlands Wind Ensemble, Edo de Waart Philips 441 583-2
* Orbison, 'In Dreams', Roy Orbison Orbison IM 00057-2

Programme broadcast on 31st October 2004
Listen to the latest BBC Radio 3 Private Passions programme with this link
Information taken for promotional purposes only from Private Passions by Michael Berkeley published by Faber ISBN 0-571-22884-4
Orbison lyrics - Lyricsfreak.com
Audio sample - via Boosey and Hawkes
Image credits: Punch from Civilisations.ca
Report broken links, missing images, and other errors to overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

If you enjoyed this post take an overgrown path to Hildegard comes to Norwich via IRCAM and Darmstadt and The real piano man

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 11, 2005 at 01:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Sessions

"American music is convention-ridden as has been that of no other modern nation... The prevalent attitude towards music... is that of the late nineteenth century. Our standards are very largely external ones. We demand music that, whether "programmatic"

Originally posted by Alan Theisen from Alan Theisen, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 11, 2005 at 01:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Music Alive Participants Announced

Seventeen living composers get paired with thirteen American orchestras for residencies.

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 11, 2005 at 01:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

We Do Not Torture, Do We?

Is it easier to hate music because it's beautiful?

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by jeff on Nov 11, 2005 at 01:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Four (1989). John Cage

What do these notable persons all have in common: Jane Goodall, Noam Chomsky, Tony Hoare (fyi: he did quicksort and communicating sequential processes), John Cage, Isamu Noguchi (aka LaPorte, Indiana's Sam Gilmour), and Karl Popper? They were all Mac users! No, just kidding. They all accomplished this -- Cage in 1989. At that time, Cage wrote:

...Harmony through a percussion composer, Edgard Varèse, is being brought to a new open-ended life by Tenney, James Tenney.  I called him last December after hearing his new work in Miami and said "If this is harmony, I take back everything I've ever said; I'm all for it."  The spirit of percussion opens everything, even what was, so to speak, completely closed.