October 26, 2008

The Barbirolli experience

I was planning something else for today, but it’s been a mad week (prepared a cartload of documents needed to apply for a certain fellowship) and I just don’t have the steam to write anything of my own. (In fact, I’ve been so busy that I forgot to check what the Polish Radio was programming for this week and missed a Warsaw Autumn retransmission. ) So let me, once more, reach for the Henryk Czyż treasure trove. This is from a different book of memoirs than the previous ones:

I had the fortune to meet sir John Barbirolli several times. It started like in the movies: A phone call in the morning that on his way to Moscow Barbirolli with his Halle Orchestra would detour to give concerts in Warsaw and Lodz, where I was chief of the philarmonic at that time. (…) I was excited that I would meet the famous Barbirolli. Less so - that I would be the one conducting the regular Friday concert on the next day. That sort of lineup would have to make me seem uninteresting. But what was I to do?

On Monday I started my regular rehearsals. On Thursday morning we bought flowers and I selected a delegation to go with me to the station. Sir John was to arrive with his orchestra around 3 PM, so for the time being we were rehearsing the main item of our Friday program - Sinfonia antarctica by Williams.

It was then that the heaters started to buzz - started playing, emitting an odd whistling sound. I made a fuss at the administration - that it was scandalous, a disgrace. The great Barbirolli and… heaters. A plumber was called. Not wanting to waste time, I continued with the rehearsal despite the difficulties. The plumber entered the hall during the Adagio. A small dark man in a long black coat. He was making noises, so I shouted over my shoulder that he should keep quiet, this is a rehearsal, he can fix the heaters later. But he continued to walk around the hall, looked here and there, shuffled around, so I screamed harshly that he should leave at once. He came closer, onto the podium. Then I recognized him. And I was, of course, terrified. Barbirolli was stirred:

‘This is most extraordinary! I come to a city whose name I cannot pronounce, of whose very existence I had never heard until yesterday. I come earlier, to see the hall where I am to give a concert in the evening. I arrive and what do I hear? My symphony! Are you aware, young man, that Williams dedicated it to me? I conducted the premiere. It is my symphony. Cellos: the slur goes throughout the whole bar! Clarinets: pp two bars before 7. Enough! You will now play for me. You may begin!’

He sat in the first row. I raised a trembling hand.

I had never heard the Lodz Philharmonic play so beautifully before. Never. Then, Barbirolli climbed the podium again. He was touched.

‘I thank you, gentlemen. You have made me very happy. Young man, you will conduct my orchestra in Manchester before this year is over.’

And he kept his word.

(Henryk Czyż Ucieczka spod klucza, w: Jak z nut…: Ucieczka spod klucza - Porcelanowy amorek - Wybrane tizery, Tryton: Warszawa 1993, s. 43-44)

Newcomers are encouraged to check out previous installments of the Czyż saga:

Czyż and Penderecki - the end of the affair, part 1 (of 2)

Czyż and Penderecki - the end of the affair, part 2 (of 2)

Czyż on Maciejewski

Posted in Polish performers Tagged: Henryk Czyz, John Barbirolli, Lodz Philharmonic

Originally from Fantastical melancholy, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 26, 2008 at 12:57 AM | Comments (0)

Copland will rock you

Listening to the New York Phil play Copland at a Young People's Concert the other night, I realized I'd omitted a favorite tidbit from the Audio Guide for my book: the derivation of Queen's "We Will Rock You" from the Fanfare for the Common Man. The sonic evidence is, I believe, incontrovertible:

exrossmusic.typepad.com/audio/audio-player.js">

k Philharmonic, Sony 63082.

Originally posted by Alex Ross from Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 26, 2008 at 12:57 AM | Comments (0)

Noise: the ultra-pretentious edition

Readers may be surprised to hear that I spent much of the summer working on The Rest Is Noise — a book I supposedly finished writing last summer. These things have a way of pulling you back in. In anticipation of the paperback edition (to be published by Picador Books on Oct. 14), I have been devising a couple of web-only features that will become operational in the next few weeks. The paperback itself required a little more work than expected. And I have been preparing the manuscript for translation into German, French, and various other languages. The task has been to track down, as much as possible, the original-language versions of all quotations that appear in the book. Only the translators will see this somewhat ridiculous multilingual incarnation, but here's a sample paragraph:

“Il y a trop de musique en Allemagne,” Romain Rolland wrote, back in the heyday of Mahler and Strauss. Something was lurking, the French writer suspected, in these humongous Teutonic symphonies and music dramas—a cult of power, un “hypnotisme de la force.” Germans themselves recognized the demonic strain in their culture. During the First World War, the not yet liberal-democratic Thomas Mann wrote a manifesto titled Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, in which he praised all the backward German tendencies that he would later come to lament in the pages of Doktor Faustus. In the earlier work, Mann states that die Kunst “hat einen unzuverlässigen, verräterischen Grundhang; ihr Entzücken an skandalöser Anti-Vernunft, ihre Neigung zu Schönheit schaffender ‘Barbarei’ ist unaustilgbar . . . .”

To summarize briefly, there is too much music in Germany, and beauty-creating barbarism may also be a problem.

The other exciting development around here is that I have finally acquired Sibelius — the software, not the composer. Up above is the Salome clarinet line that I'm always rattling on about, the one with the scale that starts off in C-sharp major and then detours weirdly into a semblance of G major. For more, go to my Chapter 1 page, now featuring l'auteur lui-même at the piano.

Originally posted by Alex Ross from Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 26, 2008 at 12:57 AM | Comments (0)

Political music

Judd Greenstein is among New York's most gifted younger composers. I extolled his piece Folk Music sometime in the early days of this blog, and have followed his work closely since then. I couldn't possibly have predicted, though, the latest turn his career has taken: Folk Music is now serving as the soundtrack for the Obama-Biden Tax Calculator. The recording is from the NOW Ensemble's recent disc on the New Amsterdam label. (Hat tip: Dan Johnson.) On Oct. 29, NOW plays with composer-vocalist Corey Dargel at Le Poisson Rouge in NYC, on the same evening the Jack Quartet plays Xenakis quartets.

As regular readers know, I strive to be strenuously fair and balanced in political matters. In the interest of equal time, I offer this video of Sarah Palin's magisterial explication of the Wall Street bailout, with an ingenious, speech-based accompaniment somewhat in the manner of Steve Reich's Different Trains. The pianist is Henry Hey:

Originally posted by Alex Ross from Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 26, 2008 at 12:56 AM | Comments (0)

Come out of her

New York City Council doesn't much care if the people voted in term limits, because they know best, and the Submessiah Michael needs to be there to keep his fellow billionaires from jumping out of windows. So term-limit Bloomberg yourselves. And every councilcreature who voted for this. Make sure they never ...

Originally from The Quick and the Dead, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 26, 2008 at 12:56 AM | Comments (0)

October 25, 2008

Herreweghe's Bruckner Edition

Bruckner, Mass in F Minor (No. 3), I. Bohlin, I. Danz, H.-J. Mammel, A. Reiter, RIAS Kammerchor, Orchestre des Champs-Elysées, P. Herreweghe (released October 14, 2008) Harmonia Mundi HMC 901976 Bruckner, Mass in E Minor (No. 2)Philippe Herreweghe is not really compiling a complete recording of the works of Bruckner, but he has shown a long-term interest in the Austrian composer's works. Whether

Originally from Ionarts, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 25, 2008 at 11:10 PM | Comments (0)

Me on Twitter

Whetstone, in a comment on my last post, pointed out that I didn't link to Twitter in the best way. i linked to the main site, not to my own page, so people who want to follow me have to search for me. Which only underlines my point about how much many of us have to learn about the new online world.

You can reach me directly on Twitter right here.

Originally from Sandow, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 25, 2008 at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)

Harrison Birtwistle, "An Imaginary Landscape"

-- Liner Notes --

By the time he composed An Imaginary Landscape three years later Birtwistle was beginning to move towards the sound world of his stage work on the Orpheus legend. if one wanted to find a portmanteau title for a Birtwistle work of that period, (which includes his most celebrated early score, The Triumph of Time) then 'imaginary landscape' would be as good as any. It is a title first used by John Cage for a series of electronic works in the early 1950s but it is peculiarly appropriate for a composer who has frequently used a geographical metaphor to describe the way a listener might orientate his or herself in his music: 'One starts, stops, moves around, looks at the overall view, fixes one's attention on a particular feature or on a detail of that feature or on a fragment of that detail or on the texture of that fragment.'

Birtwistle calls An Imaginary Landscape a 'processional', and the progress of the music is that of a steadily unfolding musical frieze which seems to be oblivious to the passage of normal human time. The ensemble of brass, percussion and double basses is divided into instrumental choirs, which are reassigned in the middle of the work; the groups of instruments call to each other, oppose or ally themselves with their colleagues, until finally they abandon their separate identities to play together for the final, very quiet chorale, composed in memory of the composer's mother. -- Andrew Clements

Originally from ANABlog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 25, 2008 at 08:11 PM | Comments (0)

Trapped in the Chinese Internet

I am currently in Hong Kong and will be traveling through parts of mainland China over the next two weeks. So far I survived a 15-hour flight from Newark, have had some good food, and am blown away by the incredible building spree that has taken place in this city. At first glance everything seems new, tall, sheathed in glass, and spotlessly clean. The subway system is also new, spotless, very

Originally from Ionarts, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 25, 2008 at 08:10 PM | Comments (0)

Fugwhump Presents “Blps & Frts CC”

Blips, Bleeps and Farts created on a rare old school analog modular synthesizer. But we ain’t say’n which one.

Download Blps & Frts CC at ccmixter. Licensed under Creative Commons.

Disclaimer: I’m affiliated with Fugwhump.

Originally posted by jake from thumbuki, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 25, 2008 at 05:15 PM | Comments (0)

Colin Currie/Nicolas Hodges - musicOMH.com

Colin Currie/Nicolas Hodges
musicOMH.com, UK - 2 hours ago
The structure of them (the one a Trio, the other a Toccata) was echoed in Hodge's later selection of Elliott Carter's Two Thoughts about the Piano. ...

Originally from lutoslawski OR xenakis OR boulez OR Dutilleux OR ligeti OR "elliott carter" OR stockhausen OR "steve reich" AND music - Google News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 25, 2008 at 05:13 PM | Comments (0)

The "Intimate Art" of Chamber Music - Pasadena Now

The "Intimate Art" of Chamber Music
Pasadena Now, CA - 2 hours ago
... the twentieth-century works of Bartok, Messiaen and Shostakovich, we find some of the most profound and moving works in the entire literature of music. ...

Miguel Harth-Bedoya's 'Inca Trail' -- to where? -- in Chicago

Here is the full version of my Saturday, October 25, 2008 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday, October 23, 2008 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert conducted by Miguel Harth-Bedoya with Jennifer Warren-Acosta and Kenneth Olsen as soloists.

Baffling 'Inca Trail' veers off course

BY ANDREW PATNER

Repeated Saturday at 8 p.m.

SOMEWHAT RECOMMENDED

^{In the groves of academe far from daily life, professors toil in a subject they call "post-colonial studies," an attempt to examine the topsy-turviness of the world that started in the latter half of the 20th century.}

A graduate student in this area could have a field day with this week's Chicago Symphony Orchestra program. Assembled and led by the young Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra music director Miguel Harth-Bedoya, Music from the Inca Trail/Caminos del Inka starts with Harth-Bedoya's native Peru and moves around several other South American countries, mostly those on the Pacific coast.

Harth-Bedoya (left) is clearly inspired by Yo-Yo Ma's massive Silk Road Project and has assembled audiovisual artists, soloists, and composers to help him build up his vision. But as with Ma's concept, which had a lengthy residence in Chicago last season, The Inca Trail is often confusing and confused.

Are we looking for musical influences here between Europe and South America, Western and native peoples? Are we trying to see how South American composers of various and variously mixed ancestries worked and work in the idiom of Western art music? Are we hearing music that has been selected for reasons of quality or geography? And why must we be distracted by film and video images when we are trying to listen?

As muddled as the agenda is here, and as schlocky and tasteless as some of the arrangements of historic compositions are, the program does showcase two talented soloists, one a member of the CSO, and introduces us to another promising young composer.

Jessica Warren-Acosta's work on Andean flutes in Peruvian-American Gabriela Lena Frank's 2004 tone poem Illapa (named after the Andean weather god) was striking, but the music sounded like something you would hear in the waiting room of a day spa, as did Ecuadorian composer Diego Luzuriaga's 2000 Responsorio.

In just three years and in his very first job, CSO assistant principal cello Kenneth Olsen (left) has become a linchpin of the orchestra and the local chamber music scene. In the Chicago premiere of Osvaldo Golijov's new orchestral reworking of his 1999 cello and marimba piece Mariel, Olsen's remarkable singing tone in all registers and his deep interpretive skill showed him to be one of the best cellists out there. He made the music, with its sappy, second-rate Disney film-style orchestral accompaniment, sound like something for the 10 minutes of his solo.

Even the program notes suggested that Enrique Soro's 1942 Three Chilean Airs was on the level of movie music. They were generous. Three pieces of popular music collected by 18th-century Peruvian bishop Baltasar Martínez y Compañón were fascinating if too-heavily orchestrated.

Fortunately, Peruvian composer Jimmy López (right), a Harth-Bedoya protege, just 30 and with an intriguing seven years of study at the Sibelius Academy in Finland, displayed a real sense of making music from disparate sources in his ill-titled Fiesta! (2007). The intriguing blend of trance, techno, Latin rhythms, and a keen understanding of orchestral instruments made the 10-minute piece a highlight of the evening.

Originally posted by Andrew Patner from Andrew Patner: The View from Here, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 25, 2008 at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

All About Jazz Reviews

: Image via Wikipedia

From All About Jazz:

Actis Furioso - 2
World People Leo Records
Reviewed by Jerry D’Souza

25-Oct-08 Anthony Braxton
Anthony Braxton: Beyond Quantum/Performance Quartet 1979/12 1tet Victoriaville 2007/Trio Victoriaville 2007/Solo Willisau
Reviewed by Jeff Stockton

25-Oct-08 Erik Friedlander
Broken Arm Trio Skipstone Records
Reviewed by Mark Corroto

25-Oct-08 David Haney
David Haney / Andrew Cyrille: Clandestine and Conspiracy A Go Go CIMP Records
Reviewed by John Sharpe

24-Oct-08 Mark O’Leary
Mark O’Leary: Two Avant-Fusion Guitar Trios
Reviewed by Eyal Hareuveni

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 25, 2008 at 02:10 PM | Comments (0)

Jazz Listings from the New York Times

In the Times:

PETER APFELBAUM AND NEW YORK HIEROGLYPHICS (Sunday) Mr. Apfelbaum, a saxophonist and pianist, formed his African-inspired Hieroglyphics Ensemble more than 20 years ago in the Bay Area. Here he presents, among other things, a suite called “Aural Histories — Nine Lives,” featuring the Malian vocalist Abdoulaye Diabate. At 7:30 p.m., Le Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street, Greenwich Village, (212) 796 0741, lepoissonrouge.com; $20. (Chinen)

CREATIVE MUSIC STUDIO CELEBRATION (Friday) From the early 1970s to the mid-’80s, the Creative Music Studio — established by the vibraphonist Karl Berger and the vocalist Ingrid Sertso in Woodstock, N.Y. — served as a base station for much of the era’s jazz-related experimental music. This benefit for the studio’s recorded archives spotlights both founders, along with Steven Bernstein’s Millennial Territory Orchestra and a pair of prolific saxophonist-composers, Anthony Braxton and John Zorn. At 7:30 p.m., Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway, at 95th Street, (212) 864-5400, symphonyspace.org; $35, $25 for members. (Chinen)

JOE FIEDLER TRIO (Wednesday) Revisiting music from his sparse but arresting recent album “The Crab” (Clean Feed), Joe Fiedler, a versatile trombonist, digs in with the bassist Lindsay Horner and the drummer Mike Sarin. At 8 p.m., Barbès, 376 Ninth Street, at Sixth Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn, (347) 422-0248, barbesbrooklyn.com; cover, $10. (Chinen)

TOMAS FUJIWARA AND THE HOOKUP (Saturday) Mr. Fujiwara, a drummer with extensive credits in the contemporary avant-garde, features his own compositions in a group stocked with penetrating improvisers: the trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson, the tenor saxophonist Brian Settles, the guitarist Mary Halvorson and the bassist Danton Boller. At 9 p.m., Jalopy Theater, 315 Columbia Street, Red Hook, Brooklyn, (718) 395-3214, jalopy.biz; $15. (Chinen)

DANIEL LEVIN QUARTET (Monday) Demonstrating an impressive breadth of texture and contrast, the cellist Daniel Levin comes well prepared for a career in jazz’s contemporary avant-garde. He has enlisted equally skilled partners here: the alto saxophonist Rob Brown, the bassist Peter Bitenc and, as on all three of his albums, the vibraphonist Matt Moran. At 9:30 p.m., Barbès, 376 Ninth Street, at Sixth Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn, (347) 422-0248, barbesbrooklyn.com; cover, $10. (Chinen)

BOBBY PREVITE CONSTELLATIONS ENSEMBLE (Tuesday) Inspired by a series of transcendent small paintings made during World War II, “The 23 Constellations of Joan Miró” is an ambitious multimedia undertaking of the drummer and composer Bobby Previte. First performed in Europe in 2004, it makes its American debut here, with Mr. Previte working alongside insightful musicians like the multireedist Ned Rothenberg, the harpist Zeena Parkins and the keyboardist Wayne Horvitz; Christian Muthspiel conducts, and the actor David Patrick Kelly reads text from Miró’s contemporaneous correspondence. At 7 p.m., Winter Garden, World Financial Center, West Street, south of Vesey Street, Lower Manhattan, (212) 945-0505, worldfinancialcenter.com; free.

JENNY SCHEINMAN (Tuesday through Thursday) As a violinist and composer, Ms. Scheinman often goes for rustic charm, but she never tempers her exploratory instincts. With this engagement she celebrates the release of an excellent new album, “Crossing the Field” (Koch), which features Jason Moran on piano; rounding out the group here are the bassist Greg Cohen and the drummer Rudy Royston. (Through Nov. 2.) At 9 and 11 p.m., Village Vanguard, 178 Seventh Avenue South, at 11th Street, West Village, (212) 255-4037, villagevanguard.com; cover, $25, with a $10 minimum. (Chinen)

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 25, 2008 at 02:10 PM | Comments (0)

Lou Reed Goes Back to “Berlin”

: Image via Wikipedia

Reed discusses the reissue of his “Berlin” album.

In 1973, Lou Reed released his third solo album, Berlin. It was a commercial and critical dud — one critic called it “the most depressing album of all time.” But in 2006, after much prodding from friends, Reed revisited the moody concept record, recruiting artist-director Julian Schnabel for a multimedia performance in Brooklyn. Now, after taking the show around the world, Reed is putting the album to rest again. “If you didn’t see it then, you won’t see it,” he says. “But the DVD is really good.” It’s out now.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 25, 2008 at 02:10 PM | Comments (0)

PSF Records New Releases

: Image via Wikipedia

New from PSF Records:

PSFD-8029
Keiji Haino / Koitsukara usetaitameno hakarigoto
Released: October 15, 2008

PSFDV-4
Maher Shalal Hash Baz with Masami Shinoda / Koshi kudake no inu (DVD)
Released: September 21, 2008
Guitar, vocals, organ, drums, trumpet-Tori Kudo
Alto sax, flute-Masami Shinoda
Euphonium, ocarina-Hiro Nakazaki
Bass-Hirofumi Mitani
Drums-Kanji Nakao
Guitar, bass-Takuya Nishimura

PSFD-181
Ryojiro Furusawa & Kan Mikami / Buriki/Tin
Released: September 21, 2008
Guitar, vocals-Kan Mikami
Drums-Ryojiro Furusawa

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 25, 2008 at 02:10 PM | Comments (0)

Avant Garde Project 123: US Electronic IV, Columbia-Princeton

From the Avant Garde Project:

The Avant Garde Project is a series of 20th-century classical-experimental- electroacoustic torrents digitized from LPs whose music has in most cases never been released on CD, and so is effectively inaccessible to the vast majority of music listeners today. This is wild stuff, so check it out if you’ve never heard this sort of music before. The analog rig used to extract the sound from the grooves is near state-of-the-art, producing almost none of the tracking distortion or surface noise normally associated with LPs.

AGP1-118 are now available for direct download in the archive at www.avantgardeproject.org

AGP119-122 and other recent AGP installments are also available at http://thepiratebay.org/user/loudav

=======================================

AGP123 continues our series of electronic compositions from the USA with a collection from some of the early leaders of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, which was established in 1959 and was one of the earliest centers for electronic music in the USA. Four of these tracks come from a Columbia LP released in 1964 and devoted to music from the center, and the rest are collected from various other LPs.

I’ve never been a huge fan of the nasal, ping-poing timbres that characterize so much of the output from the center, but the relatively limited tonal range does bring out the rhythmic and structural elements in these works. The three electronic studies by Mario Davidovsky are unjustly neglected works in contrast to his Synchronisms, which I suspect are so popular in part because they provide show pieces for the musicians who are paired with electronic sounds, while the electronic studies are purely electronic. Otto Luening’s Gargoyles for violin and tape also demonstrates the interesting structures that can be produced with a limited range of electronic tones.

The LPs transcribed for this and the next installment are all in quite good condition, but the combination of pressing noise characteristic of so many American releases and the hiss characteristic of much early electronic music does increase the ambient noise level in many tracks. The torrent includes a PDF file with scans of the liner notes from all of the LPs in this installment as well as AGP124.

14 - Davidovsky, Electronic Study No 1 [5:56]
15 - Davidovsky, Electronic Study No 2 [6:30]
16 - Davidovsky, Electronic Study No 3 [5:23]
17 - Davidovsky, Synchronism 1 [4:19]
18 - Davidovsky, Synchronism 2 [5:56]
19 - El-Dabh, Leiya [5:25]
20 - Babbitt, Composition for Synthesizer [10:41]
21 - Luening, Gargoyles [9:25]
22 - Luening and Ussachevsky, Concerted Piece [8:41]

Equipment used for A/D conversion: Lyra Helikon phono cartridge, Linn LP12/Lingo turntable, Linn Ittok tonearm, Audioquest LeoPard tonearm cable, PS Audio PS2 preamplifier, Kimber PBJ interconnect, M-Audio Audiophile USB A/D converter.

NOTE: To the best of my knowledge, these recordings are currently out of print. If you know otherwise, please let me know ASAP, as I do not wish any artists to be deprived of the royalties that they so richly deserve.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 25, 2008 at 02:10 PM | Comments (0)

Music Lessons - New York Times

Music Lessons
New York Times, United States - 1 hour ago
Adams deftly lacerates Schoenberg, Stockhausen and Babbitt for what he hears as mechanistic severity and coldness in 12-tone music and serialism. ...

Guitar Hero, DDR, and Music Education

I've just been featured in a Toronto Star article on the relationship of musical video games (such as Guitar Hero and DDR) to music education. Raju Madhar's Games Mould Future Musicians is sure to raise the ire of many a traditional musician. Here's what I said in the interview:

Dr. Christopher Foley has assigned video games as homework as part of his job as head of the voice department and piano teacher at the Conservatory School at the Royal Conservatory of Music. "The thing about those games is that while they don't directly teach musical skills, they teach a lot of indirect skills," he says. "The main one that I think is useful is that you have to internalize the rhythm, and something like DDR (Konami's Dance Dance Revolution) teaches the physicality of rhythm. By having to learn the dance moves, it's not something you learn intellectually, it's something you learn physically, and that's something you can bring to any instrument.

As for Guitar Hero, "what it does teach you is the eye-hand co-ordination and being able to integrate seeing and hearing, which is really important to music. ...There is a little bit of (music) theory in these games, too, in that you have to figure out their specific musical notation, whether it's the arrows in DDR or the coloured blips on Guitar Hero."

Another indirect effect of these games – and other video games including role-playing games – is that they help kids develop dedication and work ethic as they learn how to play and improve, said Foley.

"That way of thinking works very nicely with the whole idea of work ethic; that musicians need to develop, that it's not something you do once a week, it's something that you become totally obsessed by, that you have to work on it every single day."

Your thoughts?

Originally from The Collaborative Piano Blog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 25, 2008 at 12:59 PM | Comments (0)

Zephyr Wind Ensemble at Dorset County Museum - this is hampshire.net

Zephyr Wind Ensemble at Dorset County Museum
this is hampshire.net, UK - 45 minutes ago
This six-movement piece enabled the players to display their chamber music-making skills. The unusual item in this half came next. Ligeti arranged his Six ...

More Head Than Toes: Septime Webre's 'Genius2' - Washington Post

More Head Than Toes: Septime Webre's 'Genius2'
Washington Post, United States - 2 hours ago
This piece had a deliciously weird, Hitchcock mood -- helped along by the sinuous Gyorgy Ligeti score, gorgeously played by the Flux Quartet -- and though ...

BSO ingeniously showcases new styles from French composers - Boston Globe

BSO ingeniously showcases new styles from French composers
Boston Globe, United States - 2 hours ago
Messiaen, whose centenary is being celebrated this year, wrote music that is stark and monumental, this piece in particular. Levine's rather slow pacing ...

HALLELUJAH JUNCTION - New York Times

HALLELUJAH JUNCTION
New York Times, United States - 2 hours ago
Adams deftly lacerates Schoenberg, Stockhausen and Babbitt for what he hears as mechanistic severity and coldness in 12-tone music and serialism. ...

`Infinita' to be staged in Paris - Jakarta Post

`Infinita' to be staged in Paris
Jakarta Post, Indonesia - 1 hour ago
... her piece aims to bring Javanese traditional movements to modern music, with piano etudes from Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti. ...

10 Posts in 10 Hours #9: Freelancing Resources

How the economy is changing these days...here are some links to help you stay abreast and benefit from the shifting landscape:

-Cinncinnati-based pianist and teacher Joshua Nemith continues his series on how to retool your musical skill set with Freelancing in the "New" Economy series Part 2. This time around, Joshua looks at getting a church job, pursuing a sessional faculty position, learning other keyboard instruments and musical styles, as well as the ever-present possibility of changing careers. As an aside to Joshua's last point, I know an awful lot of musicians who have in the last year gone on to Teacher's College in order to pursue teaching at either elementary or secondary schools. With K-12 positions (at least in Canada) offering better pay, benefits, job security, and satisfaction than most college positions, who can blame them?

-Worried about freelancing in a changing economic climate? Why not simply become a better freelancer? Freelance Switch has a huge list of 50+ Ways to Improve Your Productivity as a Freelancer. From having a clear set of objectives to cutting down distractions and utilizing better tools, there's something in Steven Snell's list for everyone.

-For a look at how arts organizations are navigating economic change, take a look at Chamber Music Today's Performing Arts, Free-Market Failure, and New Institutional Economics:

Should we change our ticket prices or booking fees this year? How much discounting or comping should we do to get more attendee butts in seats and, if we do more than we’ve done in the past, will that help or hurt sales of regular tickets or subscriptions? If our ensemble does pro bono or deeply-discounted performances in some cities, will that help or hurt our bookings for bigger-margin gigs elsewhere?

How have your freelancing experiences changed in the last few months, if at all?

Originally from The Collaborative Piano Blog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 25, 2008 at 05:11 AM | Comments (0)

10 Posts in 10 Hours #10: RCO Offers Free Downloads Until November 24

Via Classical Convert, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in conjunction with Radio 4 is offering free downloads of 10 well-known symphonies until November 24. After entering some personal data and responding to a confirmation email, away you go with free recordings of Schuber 8, Beethoven 2, Mendelssohn 4, Franck D-, Mahler 1, Dvorak 8, Saint-Saëns 3, Sibelius 2, Bruckner 8, and Brahms 2. Happy 120th, RCO!

Here's a recent video of the RCO with Bernard Haitink playing the last movement of Mahler's 4th Symphony. Christine Schafer is the soprano soloist.

dburner.com/~a/TheCollaborativePianoBlog?a=fniHUT">

Originally from The Collaborative Piano Blog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 25, 2008 at 05:11 AM | Comments (0)

10 Posts in 10 Hours #6: Two Composers of New Canadian Art Song

One of the hottest new classical music blogs in Canada of late has been From the voice of..., from the pen of mezzo soprano Elizabeth McDonald on the Queen's University faculty. A recent post about Martha Hill Duncan and Maria Molinari highlights the contributions of these women to the field of Canadian art song for developing singers, not traditionally an important niche market for composers, but one that can potentialy fill a tremendous demand throughout Canada.

Interested in knowing how new works for the voice are created? Read Creating Opera From Scratch at the 2008 Tapestry Composer/Librettist Laboratory.

Originally from The Collaborative Piano Blog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 25, 2008 at 01:20 AM | Comments (0)

10 Posts in 10 Hours #7: Canadian and American Orchestral Websites Compared

One of the most professionally written and designed classical music blogs over the last few years has been Adaptistration by Drew McManus. Those in the orchestral field should definitely check out his rankings of both American and Canadian orchestra websites. Drew has done an incredible amount of analysis, taking into account elements such as ease of navigation, biographical information on musicians, as well as the ability of audiences to both book tickets and donate online. He has put together rankings from both countries to create comparisons between orchestral websites in both countries. And guess what? It doesn't look too good for those websites north of 49, with only two orchestras receiving a mark above a C+. Spoiler alert: the three highest rated orchestral sites in North America are those from Chicago, Nashville, and Edmonton.

Originally from The Collaborative Piano Blog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 25, 2008 at 01:20 AM | Comments (0)

10 Posts in 10 Hours #8: Studio Policies Galore

Studio policies--they always seem to be a work in progress, always being tweaked, always with grey areas, but an integral way to run a studio of any size, define expectations, and lay down the law if need be. Susan Todd has created a dedicated studio policy website taken from the archives of the Pno-Ped-L mailing list. Take a look at them, extract ideas and formats that work for your studio, fine-tune, and revise!

(Via Music Matters Blog)

More articles:

8 Ways to Improve Your Marks in RCM/NMCP Piano Examinations
9 Ways to Connect Online With Other Pianists
10 Ways to Compete With the Lowest-priced Piano Teachers in Town

Originally from The Collaborative Piano Blog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 25, 2008 at 01:20 AM | Comments (0)

All Nite Soul 2008

Master of Ceremonies Rob Crocker of WBGOThe Society had a blast at this year's All Nite Soul Festival at St. Peter's Church on Oct. 12, and we hope you did as well (despite the legendarily behind-schedule start time). It was...

Originally from Darcy James Argue's Secret Society, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 25, 2008 at 01:20 AM | Comments (0)

Sonic Conversations

The Center for Educational Outreach and Innovation, Teachers College, Columbia University presents Sonic Conversations: A Concert of South-Asian Traditional & Contemporary Music, featuring contemporary works by various composers including Boston-based composer Shirish Korde’s work for Bass flute — Anusvara , and Anglo-Indian composer John Mayer’s Sri Krishna for flute, piano and tanpura and Padma Phool for flute, tabla, sitar and tanpura. South-Asian traditional music will also be performed by the sitar and tabla performers.

Sonic Conversations:
A Concert of South-Asian traditional and contemporary music

Featuring

Dibyarka Chatterjee tabla
Neel Murgai sitar
Laura Falzon flute
Max Lifchitz piano
&
Joseph Palackal tanpura

Date:
November 1st, 2008 at 6:00 pm EDT

Location:
Milbank Chapel,
Teachers College, Columbia University
525 West 120th Street, between Amsterdam and Broadway.

Contact:
For further information regarding this event, please send an email to lfb2107@columbia.edu

Info: http://www.tc.columbia.edu/conferences/conversations/musicianmain.html

Price: $20/$10(concessions)

Originally from Latest Events - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 25, 2008 at 01:19 AM | Comments (0)

Composers' Forum

Music by undergraduate and graduate student composers at California State University, Fullerton.

Originally from Latest Events - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 25, 2008 at 01:19 AM | Comments (0)

Jason Silver Live in Hamilton

Come see Jason Silver play live at Faloney's of Ancaster, and enjoy a delicious meal at the same time!

Originally from Latest Events - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 25, 2008 at 01:19 AM | Comments (0)

Violin Futura - Contemporary Solo Violin Project

Violin Futura is a contemporary solo violin project created by violinist/composer Piotr Szewczyk. It is a recital of sixteen, brand new, short, exciting and innovative solo violin pieces written especially for Piotr by composers from around the world, including Mason Bates, Lawrence Dillon, Jeff Harrington, and Moritz Eggert.

Originally from Latest Events - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 25, 2008 at 01:19 AM | Comments (0)

October 24, 2008

Autumn cleaning - Alchymy CD-R sale.

While doing some cleaning, I unearthed eight un-opened copies of my Alchymy CD-R which was released throughthe Con-V netlabel last eyar. I have a description and some exceprts on my Alchymy page, and an in-depth review can be found on Earlabs. I’m selling them for $10 US each, or purchase it with my Collected Works DVD-R for $20 US (you save $5! — shipping is inclusive.)

Contact me directly if you are interested in this offer.

Originally posted by K.M.Krebs from K.M.Krebs \ 833-45, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 11:12 PM | Comments (0)

Dance Listings - New York Times

Dance Listings
New York Times, United States - 56 minutes ago
Ms. De Keersmaeker also offers her own curatorial take on Mr. Reich’s oeuvre by adding his “Pendulum Music” and “Marimba Phase” and Ligeti’s “Poème ...

10 Posts in 10 Hours #4: Koldofsky Benefit Memorial Recital

On Tuesday, October 28th at 7:30pm, the University of Southern California's Thornton School of Music will be presenting the annual Koldofsky Benefit Memorial Recital, an evening dedicated to the legacy and memory of the great Gwendolyn Koldofsky, who pioneered the world's first Master of Music degree in Piano Accompanying. On the program will be Kevin Fitz-Gerald, Alan Smith, Rod Gilfry, and a selection of special musical guests. Suggested donation is $25 with proceeds to benefit Keyboard Collaborative Arts at USC.

More Madame K mentions on CPB:

Read her famous six-step method for learning a song in Some Ideas on How to Learn a Song or Aria

Rare Footage of Gwendolyn Koldofsky Playing in Lotte Lehmann Master Class
Erlkönig Hacks for the Schubertian Pianist

Originally from The Collaborative Piano Blog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 11:11 PM | Comments (0)

10 Posts in 10 Hours #5: Auditions Schmauditions

Here are a few articles from the last while on the subject of auditioning for singers:

First of all, a first person account of going through the process from an aspiring choral singer on a mission to infiltrate her favorite school of music:

Finally, my name was called and it was time to go in. I was surprised by the number of people in the room. They were a mix of grad students and professors, probably ten or eleven people in all. I brought my music over to the accompanist, realizing as I did so that it had come off the copier slightly askew and that it was hard to tell what a couple of notes were. "I hope this is readable," I apologized as I handed it to him.

Erica Hansen in the Deseret News hosted a panel of theatre experts in Here are some audition tips to get you a callback instead of a brushoff. Although the article is from the musical theatre point of view, there is still plenty of great information for classical singers as well.

Kim Witman on Wolf Trap Opera has recently written an incredible amount of information on auditions, much of it in response to reader inquiries. Articles worth a gander include Reruns Welcome, In the Audition Room, Naked Toes and Aria Advice, Opening the Screen Door, and More Aria Questions and Audition Guidelines. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Kim for being the first person ever to link to the CPB in November 2005.

More audition stuff on CPB:

Audition Strategies for Singers
Am I Too Soft?
Professional-level Singing and That Certain Je ne said quoi
The 2008 Aria Frequency List

Originally from The Collaborative Piano Blog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 11:11 PM | Comments (0)

Steve Martin Meets Aaron Copland (And Encounters Black Thongs)

In Born Standing Up, Steve Martin recounts the time he drove from Los Angeles to Peekskill in 1966 because a friend of his had the opportunity to interview Aaron Copland:

Three days after we left Los Angeles, Phil and I arrived at Aaron Copland's house, a low-slung A-frame with floor-to-ceiling windows, set in a dappled forest by the road. We knocked on the door. Copland answered it, and over his shoulder we saw a group of men sitting in the living room wearing only skimpy black thongs. He escorted us to his flagstone patio, where I had the demanding job of turning the tape recorder on and off while Phil asked questions about Copland's musical process. We emerged a half hour later with the coveted interview and got in the car, never mentioning the men in skimpy black thongs, because, like trigonometry, we couldn't quite comprehend it. We drove to West Redding, Connecticut, for a tour of the house of another great American composer, the late Charles Ives. Speaking with Ive's son-in-law, George Tyler, we learned the peculiar fact that Ives was an avant-garde composer by night and an insurance agent by day...

...I sent this postcard to Nina:

Dear Nina,

Today (about an hour ago) I stood in front of e.e. cumming's home at Harvard; his wife is still living there--we saw her. But the most fantastic thing was when we asked directions to Irving Street, the person we asked said to tell Mrs. Cummings hello from the Jameses! She turned out to be William James's great-granddaughter!

Then I added:

I have decided my act is going to be avant-garde. It is the only way to do what I want.

I'm not sure what I meant, but I wanted to use the lingo, and it was seductive to make these pronouncements. Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration.

Originally from ANABlog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 11:11 PM | Comments (0)

Principal products of Padania

In lieu of actual work: random things named after Verdi's Nabucco:

The Raymond Weil "Nabucco Cuore Caldo" watch.

Nabucco Island resort, off the coast of Indonesia.

The DeLonghi BCO70 Caffe Nabucco espresso/coffeemaker.

The CMA CGM container ship Nabucco.

The Salvatore Ferragamo 'Nabucco' sandal.

The EU's proposed Nabucco gas pipeline. Okay, this last one isn't entirely random—it's supposed to echo the theme of freedom and independence (in this case, from reliance on Russian natural gas fields). But really—a gas pipeline into the heart of Europe named for an opera about exiled Jews? Really?

Originally from Soho the Dog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 11:11 PM | Comments (0)

The Op. 111 Club

I refuse to do those "playlist" things that tell you what I'm listening to lately, because 1. I go for long periods without listening to anything, and I'm entitled because I've already spent way too much of my life involved with other people's music; 2. half of what I do listen to is for teaching reasons; 3. I often listen to pieces because I'm planning to steal ideas from them, so admitting it would sometimes be too revealing. But lately I'm listening over and over to a mammoth work that's long fascinated me, Grand Hotel by Cornelis de Bondt. I found a score of it last year in Amsterdam at Donemus, and in fact, I envy the Dutch that they have such a helpful, friendly, professional institution as Donemus as a one-stop-shopping center for Dutch music. I hiked over to their spacious office (way off in an inconvenient corner of eastern Amsterdam) several times, and was welcome to listen to recordings and peruse scores for hours before buying anything. Imagine if the U.S. had a central place you could go to and look through scores by John Luther Adams, David Lang, Elodie Lauten, and almost any other American composer you could name - that's what the Netherlands has. Although some of the younger Dutch composers have refrained from selling their scores through Donemus because, they told me, the place has gotten a reputation for representing the stodgier side of Dutch music. Given that they handle music by people as hip as Jacob ter Veldhuis, I couldn't quite see the criticism myself, but I report what I was told. One easily imagines that if there were such a place in the U.S. it would get swamped by the officially approved orchestral New Romantic crowd of whom our elites are so dubiously proud, but Donemus struck me as admirably democratic in its absence of stylistic bias.

Anyway, back to Grand Hotel. It's a huge, sprawling, 37-minute essay, one of those complex pianistic virtuoso marathons mostly notated on three if not four staves, played in a frantic fury by Gerard Bouwhuis, and based on Beethoven's Op. 111 Sonata. The opening diminished-seventh chords of that piece burst forth frequently, and many of the streams of falling 32nd-notes come from the concluding scale passages of Beethoven's first movement. The longer (naturally) second movement is dotted with less obvious references to Beethoven's tranquil Arioso theme, often simply sudden secondary dominant chords that hang quietly in the air. Key signatures - three flats, six sharps, five flats - run through the piece, although it more often sounds atonal than diatonic. The title, according to the liner notes, is a reference to the crumbling edifice of tonality, which certainly stands nobly, but in ruins, here. I'm told by one of his students that Cornelis de Bondt (b. 1953) teaches theory at the Hague Conservatory. I'll upload an mp3 here for you, as is my wont, but only temporarily, for it's a big file and I can't spare the space forever.

Grand Hotel is a interesting contrast to Clarence Barlow's Variazioni e un pianoforte meccanico, which is a theme and variations for live pianist and Disklavier based on the theme of Op. 111's second movement. Barlow's achievement is a stunning logical and technological feat, the computer grabbing data from Beethoven's theme and composing its own cheery, sometimes almost humorous variations. Grand Hotel is far darker and more introspective, a kind of existential, manic-depressive drama featuring Op. 111's elements in dozens of flashbacks, playing with sudden recognitions and buried shards of memory.

As documented here, though 95% of my musical influences are American, I've got my own long history of associations with Op. 111, a piece which haunts me almost as much as the Hammerklavier haunted Brahms. (Other European pieces deep in my compositional bloodstream include Mahler's Sixth - which turned up in Custer and Sitting Bull - the adagio of Bruckner's Eighth, and Boulez's Rituel.) I've never directly quoted Op. 111 except in my Disklavier piece Petty Larceny, which consists entirely of quotes from the Beethoven sonatas, but my I'itoi Variations of 1985 was a kind of spiritual homage to it, and my two-movement piano concerto Sunken City mimicked Op. 111's proportions and movement contrasts. In grad school, for Peter Gena's class on the late Beethoven sonatas, I wrote a paper titled "Zen and Op. 111," in which I analyzed the piece as a contrast between samsara and satori, between the earthly veil of illusions and the tranquility of Zen consciousness. My idea was that the first movement's angry diminished sevenths chords represented a relentless drive to the final, sad resolution, while the arioso variations gradually defuse the polarity between tonic and dominant, creating an image of timelessness in which resolution becomes unnecessary:

(Years later, in a review of Pauline Oliveros, I described that same C-D-F-G sonority as a musical equivalent of the Yin-Yang symbol, a union of tonic and dominant with no thirds to specify major or minor.)

Obsessively quoting every historical thinker from Basho to Nietzsche and beyond, "Zen and Op. 111" was too embarrassingly immature to make public now, but at the time I was moved to write it by a book that I recently had the tremendous pleasure of rereading: R.H. Blyth's Zen in English Literature. This is one of the books Cage read in the '40s, and one I had discovered through his writings. Blyth was a British Japanese scholar who sat out World War II in Japan, and whose books on haiku elevated that genre to heightened visibility in the West. Zen in English Literature is an absolutely charming tome, a virtuoso display of astonishing erudition (which I tried ineffectively to imitate) in which he traces examples of Zen consciousness through Wordsworth, Dickens, Shakespeare, Keats, Blake, Pope, Donne, Milton, Chaucer, Cervantes (not English, but included anyway), and many others. Hamlet's "There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so" is the book's continually recurring mantra, and he finds Zen in every perfectly self-forgetful artwork: "Art is frozen Zen." No isolated example will do the book's flavor justice, but for instance Blyth compares George Herbert's

I made a posie, while the day ran by:
Here I will smell my remnant out, and tie
My life within this band,
But time did beckon to the flowers, and they
By noon most cunningly did steal away
And wither'd in my hand.

With Basho:

Leaves of the willow tree fall:
The master and I stand listening
To the sound of the bell.

as a type of self-identification with nature. Zen is Blyth's poetic criterion, in fact, and for want of it he damns Coleridge as merely a sentimental pantheist.

Zen in English Literature is the liveliest and most compelling introduction to Zen for a Westerner I've ever found; it's long out of print, but I located a used copy from Amazon, and enjoyed it all over again. By Blyth's way of thinking, Zen could be found in much (or any) great music, but there's something special about the second movement of Op. 111 and its gradual dissolution of 19th-century goal-directed syntax. In fact, one could impose the two movements of Op. 111 as a metaphor on modernism versus minimalism, or perhaps postclassical music, in general: anxiety, portentousness, climax-orientation, and ambition versus calm, intuition, flatness, and paradoxical nonsequitur. Perhaps that's why the piece has never relaxed its hold on me, and every musical work that makes reference to it demands my attention.

Originally from PostClassic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 11:10 PM | Comments (0)

Beethoven! Beethoven is IT, pure and simple, do you understand? - Macleans.ca

Beethoven! Beethoven is IT, pure and simple, do you understand?
Macleans.ca, Canada - 44 minutes ago
Gielen is an avant-garde composer who’s also a busy conductor, like a nicer version of Pierre Boulez. He was music director of the Cincinnati Symphony ...

Jacobs School of Music given “treasure trove” of rare music - Indiana University

Jacobs School of Music given “treasure trove” of rare music
Indiana University, IN - 1 hour ago
We were the first to perform European composers Pierre Boulez, Karlheintz Stockhausen and Luigi Nono." "Contemporary music presents many challenges for ...

From Middle Earth to Place des Arts? - Barre Montpelier Times Argus

From Middle Earth to Place des Arts?
Barre Montpelier Times Argus, VT - 2 hours ago
The two prove their mettle in 20th century sonatas of American composers Samuel Barber and Elliott Carter. The Barber, a big and grand piece, is extremely ...

10 Posts in 10 Hours #3: Hive Call for Career Options Updates

One of the things I've always been fascinated about in my field is the nature of its work, and how musicians are always finding new and unexpected ways to both make a living and satisfy their muses. One of the most popular pages on this site is the large list of Career Options in Collaborative Piano, covering everything from life in opera companies, to universities, to freelance work, to admistration.

Take a look at the Career Options list. In light of the changing nature of professional life, influenced as it is by factors such as technology and the overall health of the economy, are there any other career options that you are noticing either in your own work or the work of your colleagues that need to be mentioned? Bear in mind that the original posting was created nearly 3 years ago, and a lot of things have changed since then. Leave a comment below or send me a quick email (collaborative piano [at] gmail dot com) describing any work niches in our field that are worth a mention, as well as observations or anecdotes that you would like to share with the CPB readership.

Originally from The Collaborative Piano Blog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)

10 Posts in 10 Hours #2: Guerrilla Musical Theatre Performance in London's Stansted Airport

What a surprise it must have been for the unsuspecting Stansted Airport travellers in this viral video. I'm not crazy about the pastiche style of the music (nor am I too excited to see it's a thinly disguised ad for an online travel agency), but it's always refreshing to hear music taken out of its traditional venues and taken to places one doesn't usually associate with live theatre.

href="http://classicalconvert.com/2008/10/all-saturated-with-song/">Classical Convert)

More musical performances in unexpected places:

Impromptu Opera Performance Spotted in Vancouver's West End

Los Angeles Food Court Musical

Originally from The Collaborative Piano Blog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)

10 Posts in 10 Hours #1: The 5 Browns Play Stravinsky--in the Desert

It's dawn in the Bonneville Salt Flats. The sun rises over a massive salt pan incapable of growing plant life. What a perfect locale for the music of Stravinsky--here's a video of the 5 Browns playing an excerpt from Stavinsky's The Firebird, arranged for 5 pianos.

usly on CPB: Not Your Average Piano Quintet

Originally from The Collaborative Piano Blog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)

The Composers Chair, Episode 4: Veronika Krausas

The Composers Chair, Episode 4: Veronika Krausas

From Podcast: Sounds New.

Originally posted by jeff from cacophonous.org, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 08:11 PM | Comments (0)

Agusti Fernandez and Evan Parker in Tel Aviv

: Image via Wikipedia

All About Jazz reviews this show.

Agusti Fernandez and Evan Parker
Levontin 7
Tel Aviv, Israel
September 4 and 5, 2008

Catalan pianist Agusti Fernandez and English master reed player Evan Parker have been cooperating for more than a decade in different formations, as a duo on Tempranillo (Nova Era, 1996), on the collaborative quartet Topos (Maya, 2007) and on Parker’s Electro-Acoustic Ensemble’s The Eleventh Hour (ECM, 2005). Both are master improvisers and both are gifted with a highly idiosyncratic musical language that sounds like it’s never abandoning a desire to push beyond its expressive limits. On their first visit to Israel they were featured in two concerts of solo performances, duos and trios with Israeli reed player Assif Tsahar. A third concert, which I unfortunately missed, presented Parker with Israeli musicians.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 08:10 PM | Comments (0)

Musique Machine Reviews

From Musique Machine:

Mort Garson & Jacques Wilson - The Wozard of Iz
This is an highly welcome and long overdue reissue of this long out of print ahead of it’s time sneering early synth/ avant-grade/ bizarre Broadway musically masterpiece with music by Moog and electronics genius Mort Garson and text’s written by Jacques Wilson.

Acid Mother Temple & The Cosmic Inferno - Pink Lady Lemonade- You’re From Out of Space
This new Slice of the ever expanding AMT cake find’s the band in a rather mellow, laid back and spacey mood, with the album more cursing and hovering than fire-up, rocking & brain melting

Hush Harbours - Self Titled
Hush Harbours mine a mixture of America 70’s country rock with psychedelic folk touches and slight grungy edger’s. With the lead singer Keith Wood voice sounding like Neil young after a bad night or a stoned and wavering Michael Nesmith

Hum Of The Druid - Raising The New Wing b/w Braided Industry
As if they knew it the day after I bought a new recordplayer this LP was delivered at my door. Excellent timing, but putting the needle into these doomfilled grooves almost seemed a bad idea, as it made me fear for my stylus.

Steinbrüchel - Mit Ohne
Mit Ohne is a collection of shadowy vibe heavy electronic tone manipulations by Zurich based electronic and installation artists Ralph Steinbrüchel that were original conceived for a installation piece using 3rd animation of Yves Netzhammer.

Quest For Blood With Yukihiro Isso - Self Titled
Quest for blood are the perfect blending of extreme metal with authentic Asian music utilizing your standard guitar, drums and keyboards of a metal band with flute and traditional Asian instrumentation. And unlike a lot of bands that try to blend extreme and traditional forms Quest for blood balance both disciplines perfectly with each giving Equal sonic air to breath.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 08:10 PM | Comments (0)

The Squid’s Ear Reviews

: Image via Wikipedia

From the Squid’s Ear:

Roscoe Mitchell - Nonaah
(Nessa)
- Brian Olewnick

Teiji Ito Teiji Ito - Watermill
(Tzadik)
- Brian Olewnick

Marcel Duchamp Marcel Duchamp - The Entire Musical Work
(Dog with a Bone)
- Brian Olewnick

Coh Plays Cosey Coh Plays Cosey
(Raster-Noton)
- Max Schaefer

French, Frith, Kaiser, Thompson French, Frith, Kaiser, Thompson - Invisible Means
(Fledg’ling)
- Wyman Brantley

Pedal Pedal
(Staubgold)
- Max Schaefer

K-Space K-Space - Infinity
(Ad Hoc)
- Jeph Jerman

Vorwolf Vorwolf - Snake’s Eyes
(Formed Records)
- Jeph Jerman

Lowell Davidson Trio Lowell Davidson Trio
(ESP)
- Jeph Jerman

Anthony Braxton, Milford Graves, William Parker Anthony Braxton, Milford Graves, William Parker - Beyond Quantum
(Tzadik)
- Wyman Brantley

Hilde Marie Kjersem Hilde Marie Kjersem - A Killer For That Ache
(Rune Grammofon)
- Max Schaefer

Conny Bauer Conny Bauer - Der Gelbe Klang
(Jazzwerkstatt)
- Paul Serralheiro

McPhee / Ellis / Plimley McPhee / Ellis / Plimley - Sweet Freedom–Now What?
(Hatology)
- Paul Serralheiro

Rivers of Sound Ensemble Rivers of Sound Ensemble - News from the Mystic Auricle
(Not Two Records)
- Paul Serralheiro

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 08:10 PM | Comments (0)

Embryo riot ! Cambreling Messiaen Poemes pour Mi

Think Messiaen, think colour. This concert combined basic Messiaen works with popular standards, so it might have helped audiences unfamiliar with the composer. Perhaps it might have worked earlier in the year. By now, most people will have figured out how Debussy, Scriabin and Messiaen connect. Nonetheless, it was a chance to hear another prolific Messiaen specialist, Sylvian Cambreling conduct two basic works often held up as classic examples of the composer’s work. Réveil des Oiseaux and Poèmes por Mi are Messiaen in embryo.

Embryo is the right work, for Poèmes por Mi was conceived at a critical moment in Messiaen’s life. His first wife, Claire Delbos was pregnant again after suffering several miscarriages. At the same time, Delbos wrote her own cycle, L’Âme en bourgeon (The Soul in bud) to texts by Messiaen’s own mother, who wrote them while she was carrying him. This is a perfect, mystical union, the signifigance of which was not lost on those who knew the composer. Sadly, after Delbos’s child was born, she became mentally ill and died in an institution 30 years later. “Study this cycle”, said the composer, “and you’ll understand my work”.

What we heard tonight was the orchestral version of the piano/voice original. The delicate “moonlight” textures in the piano part become more elaborate, and are attractive, but something of the intensely “inward” intimacy is lost. Messiaen and Delbos had just bought an isolated cottage : some of the images in the text are quite domestic. One refers to the small lake nearby, “Le lac comme un gros bijoux bleu”. The orchestration puts more pressure on the singer, too. Unfortunately, Mirielle Delunsch, who was scheduled, had to cancel as early as June 2008. Lauren Flanigan, who stood in has extensive experience singing new American operas and has worked with conductors like Michael Tilson Thomas and Gerald Schwarz in Seattle, but this doesn’t make anyone a natural for Messiaen’s idiosyncrasic idiom. Best not, then, to dwell on the vocal part. Those unfamiliar with the cycle might be advised to listen to a recording. Françoise Pollet, with Boulez and the Cleveland Orchestra is the benchmark. Hopefully we’ll be able to hear it again soon as there are several very good Messiaen singers around, and London is only two hours from Paris by train these days. On 17^th October, I heard a stunning performance of the piano/voice version by Gweneth Ann Jeffers and Simon Lepper in Oxford.

If the orchestral version has a different ambience to the piano/voice version, Cambreling made the most of the more elaborate colorations. He conducted with great refinement and got lustrous, detailed playing from his musicians. Each of these songs is distinctive and needs individual emphasis : horrified dissonances in Épouvante, shimmering glissandi in Le Collier. The “wavering” sounds in the string section were not like vibrato in voice, but built up from careful modulation, precisely controlled. The final song, Prière exacuée, is particularly well suited to orchestra, where a rich carillon like multiple bells is created by different instruments and combinations. The ending is vivid, picking up the staccato refrain “Frappe, tape, choque”, cymbals crashing on the crest.

Birdsong appears early in Messiaen’s work, but reaches maturity in Réveil des Oiseaux. It’s a key work, for here Messiaen is drawing musical ideas directly from the sounds and movements of nature, rather than incorporating them symbolically. It’s a breakthrough, for Messiaen observes how, in a dawn chorus, each bird has its own distinctive character, and different sound exist together on different levels, rather than combing. Thus the woodlark on piccolo, Cetti’s Warbler on E flat clarinet and so on. No wonder ornithologists marvel at this music – they can identify the birds, even though they are not “realistic” in a scientific way. The piano part represents a robin, singing on its own, above and within the tumult. Messiaen notices, too, how birds are aware of their surroundings : the chorus stops suddenly, as the birds “listen”, then starts again. Birds don’t stay still, they dart about in random patterns : this is in gestation the idea of multi layered time George Benjamin demonstrated in his concert of 21^st October. Roger Muraro provided a depth that held the piece together, allowing the individual soloists to soar. Specially impressive was Maya Iwabuchi, Leader of the First violins. At the end, the dense panoply of sound dissipates; All we hear is the tapping of a woodpecker. The heat of the noonday sun has arrived, and the birds take shelter. This is the germination of the intensive, multi-level invention behind the “spectralist” master piece, Gérard Grisey’s Les Espaces acoustiques, which created such an overwhelming sensation on 14^th October. Embryos gain !

Rather less successful, on the surface, was Cambreling’s Debussy Prélude de l’Aprè-midi d’un Faune. It was nicely refined and glossy rather than erotic. Perhaps he realises we’ve heard this so often before we merely need to remember its impressionistic colours in relation to Messiaen, and hear it in those terms rather than through the imprint we all carry from Nijinsky’s powerful realization in ballet. After having heard so much Messiaen this year, the relevance of Scriabin’s Le Poème de l’extase is obvious. Scriabin gorges on colour so much so that he gets congested. It’s when Messiaen releases the constraints of structural form that extremes of orchestral colour run riotously free. For descriptions of the concerts mentioned above go to the list on the right and hit "Messiaen"> Also, read what Mark says in Boulezian.blogspot on the George Benjamin concert of 21 Oct.

Originally from CLASSICAL- ICONOCLAST, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)

Elgar and RVW conference

Over the weekend of 22 and 23rd Nov
ember at the British Library there will be a confer
ence about the influence of literature
and poetry on Elgar and Ralph Vaughan Williams. This is as "star studded" as a conference gets - all the big guns in the Elgar RVW world - Michael Kennedy, Alain Frogley, Philip Lancaster, Richard Hickox... plus an evening recital with the finest RVW/Elgar baritone today, Roderick Williams. Look at the detailed programme on the RVW site and click on the link "Let Beauty Awake" to reach the pdf.

All one sentence, sing in single span of breath ! 

After the sea-ship, after the whistling winds,
After the white-gray sails taut to their
spars and ropes,
Below, a myriad myriad waves hastening,
lifting up their necks,
Tending in ceaseless flow toward the track of
the ship,Waves of the ocean bubbling
and gurgling, blithely prying,
Waves, undulating waves, liquid,
uneven, emulous waves,
Toward that whirling current, laughing and buoyant,
with curves, Where the great vessel sailing and
tacking displaced the surface,Larger and smaller
waves in the spread of the ocean yearnfully flowing,
The wake of the sea-ship after she passes, flashing
and frolicsome under the sun,A motley procession
with many a fleck of foam and many fragments,
Following the stately and rapid ship,
in the wake following.

http://www.rvwsociety.com/i-frame/newsmaster.html

Originally from CLASSICAL- ICONOCLAST, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)

The Sixteen celebrate their 30th anniversary in 2009!

Back in 1979, Harry Christophers would not have dreamt that the group he had just named 'The Sixteen' would be celebrating its thirtieth anniversary season with a worldwide reputation, close on a hundred recordings, regular radio and TV appearances and yet preserving its original aims: championing great music whether well known or unknown, reveling in the joy of live music and above all maintaining an ensemble bound by a strong bond of friendship.

2009 is a year of significant musical anniversaries - not only the thirtieth anniversary of The Sixteen but also the 250th anniversary of Handel's death, the 350th anniversary of Purcell's birth and James MacMillan's 50th birthday. To celebrate this extraordinary year, The Sixteen is undertaking an ambitious season of concerts both in the UK and abroad, focusing on these particular composers, with corresponding releases on their record label, Coro.

The ensemble's third season as Associate Artists of Southbank Centre continues on 30 October with a wonderful programme recorded by Universal (A Mother's Love), and ends of 12 May with a celebratory performance of Handel's Dixit Dominus. In between will be a Christmas concert of early English secular and sacred carols on 12 December and the London Choral Pilgrimage performance on 17 March.

The Sixteen returns to the Barbican on 3 December for what experience tells us will be an electrifying Messiah - book your tickets early! Also at the Barbican the group will perform Handel's popular oratorio Samson on 12 February with Mark Padmore as the eponymous hero and Lucy Crowe as Dalila.

For the first time, marking the growing scale and ambition of the series, the Choral Pilgrimage from February 2009, will tour across the country with two different programmes. Masterpieces both ancient and modern feature in an a cappella Purcell and MacMillan programme, and the choir will be joined by the Orchestra of The Sixteen for a Handelian programme including the joyous Coronation Anthems.

A celebration not to be missed!

Of course of all of this coincides with another significant 30th anniversary - that of Chandos who were one of the first record labels to record The Sixteen! 2009 is going to be a big year!

Originally from Chandos Records, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)

My Blog on the Huffington Post

Much of my writing efforts of late have been devoted to my blog on The Huffington Post, a web-based "newspaper" covering culture and politics. You can find the blog...

Here

Note that Huffington Post has a feature where you can click to make yourself a "fan" of my blog. If you do this, you will get an email alert every time I make a new posting.

Also, Huffington Post keeps track of how many "fans" each writer has, and the more "fans" I have the more readers will be likely to find my blog.

Thanks!

Originally from Bob Ostertag - Blog (plus News), ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)

What Part of 'Soderbergh's 3-D Rock 'n' Roll Cleopatra Movie' Don't You Understand?

Steven Soderbergh is planning to make a rock 'n' roll musical about Cleopatra.

Originally posted by By Dave Itzkoff from ArtsBeat, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)

Guns N' Roses — And Soda

Dr Pepper makes good on its promise to provide free soda if Guns N' Roses releases its album "Chinese Democracy."

Originally posted by By Dave Itzkoff from ArtsBeat, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)

New culture (2)

First I should say that you can find me on Facebook, and follow me on Twitter. If you're on Facebook yourself, I'd be happy to be your friend. Just look for me, and friend me.

I like what I've learned about social networking. I've made friends, reconnected with old friends, and done some useful networking. And the communications we all set up are a lot quicker, a lot more direct, and also a lot more fun than plain old e-mail. In at least one professional situation, I've strengthened contacts with some of the younger people involved much more quickly than could have happened in any other way. Plus, it's fun -- and, I think, even professionally helpful -- to give people a fuller picture of myself than they'd get from my in-need-of-updating website, or from this blog. By being on Facebook, I think I advertise myself as available for informal contact, in a way that wouldn't happen in any Web 1.0 way, through an e-mail list, a website, or even a blog.

So in the midst of all that, I was fascinated to see that the New York Times and the Washington Post both have Twitter streams, and in fact many of them. I looked at the Post's streams, and signed up for one of them. Some are for news stories -- I signed up for politics, and get maybe four to six links each day to politics stories in the Post. But I could also follow Post personalities, columnists and bloggers, which I'm sure would be much more fun.

Obviously these newspapers use Twitter to connect with younger people. So I was interested to see whether big classical music institutions do the same. I couldn't check dozens of them, but I did look for the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera, both of which have made efforts to reach a younger audience. (Yes, even the Philharmonic, with what looks like success. Check out the search page on the Philharmonic's website, and see from the word cloud of search terms that "student discount" and "student rush tickets" -- and other student-related things -- are among the most frequent searches.)

But neither the Met nor the Philharmonic currently use Twitter. That's a mistake, I think, though I believe both institutions will be using it before too long. What concerns me, though, is that I don't think either is using Facebook very well. They've both got lots of Facebook friends, but they don't communicate with their friends often enough, or in the right way. The Philharmonic, for instance, mostly sends what amount to press releases. Yes, they're livelier than normal press releases, which is a good thing. But what's missing is any kind of personal touch, any sense that there are people involved in each institution who'd be interested in making contact with others outside.

Which, after all, is how social networking works! That's why they call it social networking. If you ask me, the Met and the Philharmonic -- and any other classical music institution that uses Facebook -- should be sending out updates every day. Most of these updates should be something more than press releases, or attempts to get people to buy tickets, or participate in some other activity the institution has going on. Most of the updates should be more personal -- news tidbits, quick anecdotes, snapshots of something behind the scenes, or, best of all, communications from individuals.

Ideally musicians, singers, staff members, and others would send out updates in their own names. The Philharmonic and the Met could do what the Times and the Post do, and have many Twitter streams, some from the institution, and some from people involved with it. Maybe this violates some sense these institutions have of their proper dignity, but I promise them -- if they really do want to engage younger people, at some point they'll have to do what I suggest. The world is moving that way, and classical music can't afford to be left behind.

I'd love to hear from classical music people who use social networking the right way.

(And for an example of an organization that, I fear, doesn't quite get it, see the comment to my first new culture post, from someone with From the Top, the radio and TV show that presents young classical musicians. They're going to great lengths to get kids to participate, but if they were approaching kids in the right way to begin with, they wouldn't have to do all that. Nothing on their home page suggests that they want people to contact them.

(They have a Facebook presence, but they don't seem to take it seriously. They post just a few updates each month, all of them are press releases, and they have only 90-odd friends, many fewer than I have. For a show that's been around for years, and is all about younger people, that's not nearly enough. They don't seem to be on Twitter.)

Originally from Sandow, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 05:13 PM | Comments (0)

UNCSA Symphony Orchestra Concert on Oct. 25 to Celebrate Four ... - Kudzu Gazette

UNCSA Symphony Orchestra Concert on Oct. 25 to Celebrate Four ...
Kudzu Gazette, NC - 47 minutes ago
American composer Elliott Carter turns 100 in December, and to honor the occasion Maestro Wilson will conduct Carter’s HOLIDAY OVERTURE. ...

The show goes on - Buffalo News

The show goes on
Buffalo News, United States - 2 hours ago
Martin teamed with cellist David Schmude for “Louange a l’Eternite de Jesus,” from Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time.” It was a beautiful interlude, ...

Four-star quartet - ChronicleLive

Four-star quartet
ChronicleLive, UK - 42 minutes ago
... and chamber music repertoire. In 1994 she gave the world premiere of the Sonata for Solo Viola by György Ligeti, a work composed especially for her. ...

Stockhausen Tribute Concert in LA

My roommate in Kuerten this year was an incredible guy named Bruce Friedman. He's a wonderful trumpeter and composer (his OPTIONS project is included in the new Notations21 book).

Bruce has lined up a really strong tribute program for this Saturday at Harbor College:

Telemusic (electronic music)
Klavierstück 7 and 9 (piano solos)
Cheer Up (from Amour for solo clarinet)
Connection (from “The Seven Days”)
Proposal (from “Freitag aus Licht”)
Halt (from “Donnerstag aus Licht”)
Tierkreis (for two guitars and trumpet)

Originally from ANABlog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 02:02 PM | Comments (0)

Ionarts at Large: Widmann World Premiere with Mariss Jansons and the BRSO

Widmann / Schumann, Cello Concerto, Vogler / MKO / Poppen Widmann / Kurtag, Botschaften / ...umdüstert..., Austrian Ensemble for New Music et al. Widmann, String Quartets, Leipzig String Quartet On Thursday, September 25th, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra opened the 2008/2009 Season with two Beethoven symphonies, preceded by the world premiere of a commissioned overture by Jörg

Originally from Ionarts, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 02:01 PM | Comments (0)

Success or Failure?

a beautiful feeling of misconception

Originally posted by Neil Luck from Cut & Splice: From the Seven Days, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 02:01 PM | Comments (0)

So Are We 'In' For The 'Long Haul'?/Are We Creating With Purpose?

What's the verdict?

Originally from Discussion Forum - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 11:13 AM | Comments (0)

Pianist captivates audience - Ripon Today

Pianist captivates audience
Ripon Today, UK - 1 hour ago
Liszt, he appeared at the BBC Promenade concerts in August with conductor Pierre Boulez. On Saturday evening he began with Liszt's Harmonies poetiques et ...

Experimental Piano Series’ Inaugural Concert - Jazz Police

Experimental Piano Series’ Inaugural Concert
Jazz Police, MN - 1 hour ago
These performances include approaches that are influenced and informed by jazz, “new music,” classical music, world music, and other genres. ...

KFJC Reviews

From KFJC:

Golijov, Osvaldo / Berio, Luciano “Ayre” [Deutsche Gramophon]
Nurse With Wound, “Bacteria Magnet”, Cargo Records (UK) LP 33
Kihlstedt, Carla / Fujii, Satoko - “Minamo ” - [Henceforth]
Preston, Joe and Menche, Daniel - “Cerberic Doxology ” - [Anthem Records]

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)

Eclectic Improvisers Release First Disc and Play Firehouse 12

From Courant.com:

The New Haven Improvisers Collective, a catalytic force in New Haven’s burgeoning music scene, is celebrating the release of its debut disc, “Interference” (NHIC Records), a live recording of its 2007 performance at New Haven’s Firehouse 12.

The collective champions what it calls “avant progressive chamber punk jazz.”

The seven players, led by Bob Gorry, a guitarist/composer with a rock, jazz and experimental music background, return to Firehouse 12 to perform Saturday at 8:30 and 10 p.m., presenting highlights from the new disc and premieres of new works.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)

Stockhausen Memorial Concert Saturday - LAist

Stockhausen Memorial Concert Saturday
LAist, CA - 1 hour ago
... on his electronic music, which we'll get plenty of in December at the Disney Hall anyway, but more on pieces from Stockhausen's "Light" opera cycle, ...

Conductor, performers create compelling concert - The Herald-Times (subscription)

Conductor, performers create compelling concert
The Herald-Times (subscription), IN - 2 hours ago
Gyorgy Ligeti’s “Ramifications,” written in 1969, hints at our world in the distant future; the sounds produced, at times, brought to mind swarming insects ...

Rousing music arrives in two trios - Tallahassee.com

Rousing music arrives in two trios
Tallahassee.com, FL - 1 hour ago
FLYING SOLO ON THE CELLO: Talented FSU College of Music cello professor Gregory Sauer will feature music by JS Bach, Gaspar Cassado and Gyorgy Ligeti during ...

Hicks showcases orchestra's depth in conducting debut - Pioneer Press

Hicks showcases orchestra's depth in conducting debut
Pioneer Press, MN - 1 hour ago
By contrast, Lutoslawski's massive concerto, written before he was inspired by John Cage's chance music, is a monster of orchestral effects, from shimmering ...

Dance Review | Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker No Distractions: Just ... - New York Times

Dance Review | Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker No Distractions: Just ...
New York Times, United States - 1 hour ago
... of Mr. Reich’s “Pendulum Music” and “Marimba Phase,” with Gyorgy Ligeti’s “Poème Symphonique Pour Cent Métronomes” thrown in as a witty breather. ...

Classical Music/Opera Listings - New York Times

Classical Music/Opera Listings
New York Times, United States - 1 hour ago
... in new music plays the four intensely virtuosic string quartets by Iannis Xenakis, the idiosyncratic Greek-born French composer and architect. ...

Library Lines - Belmont Citizen-Herald

Library Lines
Belmont Citizen-Herald, MA - 1 hour ago
Join flutist Tim Macri, clarinetist Todd Brunel, and pianist Joe Reid for a concert called “Trio Noire,” presenting classical and jazz music in the spirit ...

From Middle Earth to Place des Arts? With strings attached Diving ... - Barre Montpelier Times Argus

From Middle Earth to Place des Arts? With strings attached Diving ...
Barre Montpelier Times Argus, VT - 5 minutes ago
(Haimovitz and Vermont Youth Orchestra Music Director Troy Peters were classmates at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music.) So, Haimovitz took his cello ...

BSO ingeniously showcases new styles from French composers - Boston Globe

BSO ingeniously showcases new styles from French composers
Boston Globe, United States - 39 minutes ago
Messiaen, whose centenary is being celebrated this year, wrote music that is stark and monumental, this piece in particular. Levine's rather slow pacing ...

Estes Park Music Festival Winter Concert Series begins - Estes Park Trail Gazette

Estes Park Music Festival Winter Concert Series begins
Estes Park Trail Gazette, CO - 1 hour ago
... and a series of lecture-recitals for Olivier Messiaen’s centennial year in 2008. Chamber music appearances include Weill Hall and Bargemusic in New York ...

Starting Friday at 1pm: 10 Posts in 10 Hours

Friday afternoon starting at 1pm EDT I will be posting an article every hour for 10 hours on a variety of subjects near and dear to the hearts of CPB readers. Stay tuned...

Originally from The Collaborative Piano Blog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 08:13 AM | Comments (0)

Variations (7): Culture wars edition

WILLIAMS: Who is a member of the elite?

PALIN: Oh, I guess just people who think that they're better than anyone else. And-- John McCain and I are so committed to serving every American. Hard-working, middle-class Americans who are so desiring of this economy getting put back on the right track. And winning these wars. And America's starting to reach her potential. And that is opportunity and hope provided everyone equally. So anyone who thinks that they are-- I guess-- better than anyone else, that's-- that's my definition of elitism.

WILLIAMS: So it's not education? It's not income-based? It's--

PALIN: Anyone who thinks that they're better than someone else.

WILLIAMS: --a state of mind? It's not geography?

PALIN: 'Course not.

WILLIAMS: Senator?

MCCAIN: I-- I know where a lot of 'em live. (LAUGH)

WILLIAMS: Where's that?

MCCAIN: Well, in our nation's capital and New York City. I've seen it. I've lived there. I know the town. I know-- I know what a lot of these elitists are. The ones that she never went to a cocktail party with in Georgetown. I'll be very frank with you. Who think that they can dictate what they believe to America rather than let Americans decide for themselves.
—Brian Williams interviewing John McCain and Sarah Palin,
NBC Nightly News, October 23, 2008 (via)

While I was studying the frozen
food department of Gristede’s one
day, Mrs. Elliott
Carter came up and said,
“Hello, John.
I thought you
touched only fresh foods.”
I said, “All
you have to do is look at
them and then you come
over here.” She said,
“Elliott and I have
just gotten back from Europe.
We’d sublet
to some intellectuals whose
names I won’t mention.
They had been
eating those platters with
all sorts of food on them.”
I said,
“Not TV dinners?”
She said, “Yes,
I found
them stuffed around everywhere.”
—John Cage, Indeterminacy

Originally from Soho the Dog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 08:13 AM | Comments (0)

AUM Fidelity to Release David S. Ware Album

: Image via Wikipedia

From Improvised Communications:

AUM Fidelity is proud to announce the January 27th release of Shakti (AUM052), eminent saxophonist/composer David S. Ware’s fifth album for the label and his first studio recording since 2003. This release marks the recorded debut of Ware’s new working ensemble, his first since the disbanding of the long-lived and prolific David S. Ware Quartet (1989-2006). Shakti presents a distinctive selection of Ware compositions written specifically for this ensemble, as well as a new interpolation of “Antidromic” from 1997’s Wisdom of Uncertainty (AUM001). The group, which has solidified both its sound and its line-up through various performances over the past year and a half, features guitarist Joe Morris, bassist William Parker and drummer Warren Smith.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 08:11 AM | Comments (0)

Possibly Maybe - Artforum

Possibly Maybe
Artforum, NY - 1 hour ago
His Quartet for the End of Time, which draws its name and much of its inspiration from the music Olivier Messiaen famously composed in a Nazi war camp, ...

Faculty musicians to pay tribute to composer - The Daily Beacon

Faculty musicians to pay tribute to composer
The Daily Beacon, TN - 1 hour ago
“We would like to introduce people to the inherent beauty of Elliott Carter’s music in a way that does not scare them out of the auditorium,” Baldwin said. ...

Cecil Taylor and Marilyn Crispell: Running mates you can count on - Examiner.com

Cecil Taylor and Marilyn Crispell: Running mates you can count on
Examiner.com - 1 hour ago
"People with a classical background will hear everything from Ravel to Messiaen or Mozart to Brahms, and those with a jazz background tend to talk about Bud ...

Bernstein At His Worst

There's just no pussy footing around what an absolute turd burglar of a piece Bernstein's Mass is. I was just listening to Baltimore rehearse it at Carnegie, and it is done no favors by their production.

I don't know why orchestras can't wrap their head around this, but once you have a rhythm section playing with you, you've got to mic everything. You can't leave half of the acoustic up to chance. Well, you can, but the result is an awful goop of a sound which should be an embarrassment to any self-respecting musician. No orchestra would ever consciously play out of tune, but they are perfectly content (and oblivious to) bad sound projection.

Jubilant Sykes was marking most of his part, but he does sound like he'll be the one bright spot in an otherwise miserable evening. He's got a fantastic, complex voice.

Beyond that, nothing else is worth hearing, unless you are hardcore into Bernstein or music theater. The street chorus is chock full of musical theater singers all overacting their hearts out. Marin Alsop is along for the ride, rather than driving the piece, and it's just a shame to see so much time and money wasted on such crap.

Bernstein was a musician of the first rank, and a composer of the third rank. He punched out some of my all-time favorite music, but his ambition was so much greater. He had the ultimate masterpiece complex: feeling that every piece needed to be a 'masterpiece'. Sadly, the more he tried to write great music, the more his efforts showed. Bernstein just always reminds me of someone standing on his tiptoes to try and seem taller than he really is.

There are great moments in Mass, but they are too few and far between to be worth the effort of excavation.

Originally from ANABlog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 02:11 AM | Comments (0)

Zeena Parkins premieres "right after"

Saturday, October 25th & Sunday, 26th @ 8:30pm
Zeena Parkins (Commissioned with funds from Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust)
ZEENA PARKINS, composer/improviser/sound artist, well known as a
pioneer of the electric harp, has also extended the language of the
acoustic harp. Zeena makes scores for film, video, theater and dance.
She is especially interested in exploring unpredictable
orchestrations, live processing of acoustic instruments and
installations combining multiple speakers with live players.
Collaborators include Ikue Mori, Fred Frith, Elliott Sharp, Bjork,
Matmos, Kim Gordon,Yoko Ono, Christian Marclay, Nels Cline, filmmakers
Cynthia Madansky, Jennifer Reeves, Daria Martin, Mandy McIntosh and
choreographers John Jasperse, DD Dorvillier, Jennifer Monson, Neil
Greenberg, Jennifer Lacey and Emmanuelle Vo-Dinh. For two evenings in
a row she presents the debut of her new piece: right after, a dense
array of crisp contours, sophisticated color studies and deskilled
gestural marks.for four loudspeakers and large ensemble, including:
Christine Bard, Anthony Coleman, Erin Cornell, Miguel Frasconi,
Christopher Mcintyre, Loren Parkins, Jim Pugliese, Josh Quillein, Ned
Rothenberg, Jane Rigler, Jim Staley, Christopher Tignor.

Originally from Latest Events - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 02:10 AM | Comments (0)

Saxophonist Tim Ries Celebrates Release of Stones World: The Rolling Stones Project II

Known to millions as the saxophonist/keyboardist with the Rolling Stones touring band, Tim Ries launches a nationwide tour at the Jazz Standard with a three-night series premiering new works off of his latest album STONES WORLD: THE ROLLING STONES PROJECT II. As a fusion of Ries’ eclectic musical roots, STONES WORLD showcases multi-genre rearrangements from the Stones immortal songbook peppered by an international roster of musicians.

Performances nightly at 7:30pm and 9:30pm on Tuesday, Oct. 28th thru Thursday, Oct. 30th.

www.timries.com

Originally from Latest Events - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 02:10 AM | Comments (0)

Sleeping Restraint

Originally posted by Neil Luck from Cut & Splice: From the Seven Days, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 24, 2008 at 02:10 AM | Comments (0)

October 23, 2008

The Kudsi Erguner Ensemble - The Age

The Kudsi Erguner Ensemble
The Age, Australia - 5 hours ago
"I would be very proud to be someone like Xenakis, say. But I said to myself 'this is not honest'. Because since the artists I admire are unknown, ...

Stage Listings - Vancouver Sun

Stage Listings
Vancouver Sun, Canada - 4 hours ago
Halloween Piano Music Corey Hamm performs works by Ligeti, Liszt, Holst, MacDowell, Prokofiev and Bolcom. UBC Recital Hall,, 6361 Memorial, Oct. 30, 7 pm, ...

The festival celebrating Karlheinz Stockhausen's glories - Times Online

The festival celebrating Karlheinz Stockhausen's glories
Times Online, UK - 2 hours ago
Four decades after celebrity endorsements, and an era when Stockhausen was new music to Joe Public in the way that Louis Armstrong personified jazz, ...

The Post-Materialist | Cold War Modern - New York Times

The Post-Materialist | Cold War Modern
New York Times, United States - 29 minutes ago
... formalist electronic music similar to the lovely, slightly frightening “Poème Electronique” by Varèse and Xenakis, unleashed on visitors to the 1958 ...

Rain Event

3 minutes

Originally posted by Neil Luck from Cut & Splice: From the Seven Days, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 08:10 PM | Comments (0)

the symphony in my stomach

( ) achievable (?)

hot enough to melt
yellow separation
constant stasis (?)
break from comfort
fear-installation

don’t answer questions don’t answer questions don’t answer questions

if something seems boring, try it for 2 minutes, then 4, then 8 etc, you soon realise…etc etc

Originally posted by Matthew Lee Knowles from Cut & Splice: From the Seven Days, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 08:10 PM | Comments (0)

Lucerne Festival Mahler on DVD

Mahler, Symphony No. 3, A. Larsson, Lucerne Festival Orchestra, C. Abbado (released September 30, 2008) Medici Arts EDV 1333 2056338At last week's performance of Mahler's third symphony by the National Symphony Orchestra, a few marvelous recordings hung uncomfortably in my ears. Not least among them was Claudio Abbado's latest, with his Lucerne Festival Orchestra at the Proms two years ago, heard

Originally from Ionarts, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

Comfort

comfort in sound - 20 minutes

comfort in time

comfort in thought (uncomfortable)

comfort in liquid (unsettling)

Originally posted by Neil Luck from Cut & Splice: From the Seven Days, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

Distinctive and recognizable - Prague Post

Distinctive and recognizable
Prague Post, Czech Republic - 49 minutes ago
There are elements of Igor Stravinsky, Richard Strauss, Gyorgy Ligeti and Thomas Ades in the music, along with clear influences from jazz heavyweights such ...

Edwin van der Heide at Lampo

From Chicago’s Lampo

A quick reminder - this Saturday, October 25 Lampo brings Edwin van der
Heide from Rotterdam to Chicago for a special two-part performance.

In part 1, we’ll project a beautiful 35mm ’scope film for which Edwin
composed the soundtrack. The work, by Dutch filmmaker Joost Rekveld, is
made of abstract images of moire light patterns.

You can see stills and read about the film here:
http://www.lumen.nu/rekveld/wp/?p=50

In part 2, Edwin will perform several live audio works that explore his
interest in the interactions of sound and space. Not to be missed!

Details and bivious blurb below.

EDWIN VAN DER HEIDE
SAT OCT 25 - 9:00PM
LAMPO 216 W. CHICAGO Ave., 2ND FLOOR, CHICAGO, ILL.
between Franklin and Wells
Admission open to all ages
http://www.lampo.org

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 02:10 PM | Comments (0)

New Walküre opens in Hamburg

Claus Guth´s new staging of Walküre opened on October 18th at the Hamburgische Staatsoper. This is the second installment of the Guth-Simone Young conducted Hamburg Ring (after last season´s Rheingold).

For this run Deborah Polaski has replaced Lisa Gasteen. Yvonne Naef is Sieglinde, Stuart Skelton is Siegmund, Mikhail Petrenko is Hunding, Jeanne Piland Fricka and substituting for the indisposed Falk Struckmann Thomas Johannes Mayer (house debut) sang Wotan from the pit. Plenty of boos for the premiere, not entirely sure at whom they were directed.

Based on the broacast the performance sounded rather fine (boos for both Simone Young and Claus Guth as expected). Yvonne Naef was a wonderfully dark Sieglinde. Thomas Mayer, though essentially a lyrical barytone got away with the Wotan at a level Falk Struckmann (I know his recent vocal status well) will be hard pressed to match.
Briskly and emotionally conducted, with plenty imaginative details from Simone Young in one of the best performances I have heard from her, though the brass section could need some group rehearsals. All in all a vastly superior cast may not be assembled anywhere.

As I will attend one of the November performances, I´ll limit this post to quoting the review from Hamburger Abendblatt, who finds Claus Guth´s staging "cool and calculated", reducing the love drama to "an experiment carried out on orders from the above".

Originally from mostly opera..., ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 12:43 PM | Comments (0)

but fancy, it was there in brixton all along!

Climaxing “a two-year search,” Glimmerglass Opera has pulled off the unique coup of persuading a British music director to lead an American music festival. According to the New York Times, David Angus, whose international credits include the Glyndebourne Festival, the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the London Mozart Players, will succeed his compatriot Stewart Robertson at the post. In anticipation of the 2009 season, Dame Anne Evans and Jonathan Peter Kenny are already packing their bags.

Originally posted by La Cieca from parterre box presents La Cieca, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 12:43 PM | Comments (0)

Grading 1st species counterpoint

I’m back into super teacher mode: correcting 70 assignments every week, a job I will eventually have the TAs help with, but for now, I want to get to know each student’s work habits and musical abilities. Tonight I have 200 more 1st species counterpoint exercises to look at. (1st species just means note against note. You and I sing together on different notes but with the same rhythm, and in this case, all the beats are the same: 1 1 1 1 .) It’s whole note against whole note. Good basis of counterpoint and harmony.

It’s been a while since I’ve graded counterpoint assignments, but my mind grabs onto the task, and it goes very quickly.

The students will all have to do 3rd species counterpoint exercises in their desks for their midterm exams. It seems like a magical ability — writing down music by thinking about it, rather that accessing a musical instrument — but it is one that can be learned, and teaching that ability to students is satisfying.

Originally posted by Roger Bourland from rogerbourland.com, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 12:42 PM | Comments (0)

An Interview with Sarah Palin

JD: Governor, may I call you Sarah?

SP: You betcha.

JD: I just simply can’t believe in the midst of this intense campaign season, you could find the time to talk with me about the “Hammerklavier” Sonata.

SP: Well, ya know, Beethoven was the dude who said thanks but no thanks to Napoleon. Plus from all the mavericky songs he wrote, maybe this one could be known as the most maverickyest.

JD: I have to confess I’m a bit surprised you are so familiar with this particular work.

SP: Well, Mr. Snooty Juilliard Graduate, I’ll have you know I did my thesis on the Hammerklavier at Hawaiian Pacific University. Of course I had to continue revising it at Northern Idaho Massage Institute. And at Montana College for Bear-Loving Beauty Pageant Alumni. But also too the Hammerklavier’s on my ‘Pod whenever I go wolf hunting … those dactyls get me SUPER pumped.

JD: What was your thesis called?

SP: Originally I wanted to call it “Frickin Kick-Ass Beethoven,” but my advisor was in a bad mood that day because Felicity chose Noel over Ben. So I had to change it to “Trickle-Down Fugonomics: A Reaganian Model of Beethoven’s Counterpoint.” That’s how I got funding from the American Enterprise Institute.

JD: What was the main thrust of your thesis?

SP: Jeremy, I guess my point is, a fugue is more than one voice, just like America. And it has certain values.

JD: Please elaborate …

SP: Well, you know Jeremy, we’re overtaxed. And Beethoven says, well, goshdarnit, just try and govern that fugue subject. Cause he knows that government is really the problem, and the scariest two words in the English language are “Schenkerian Analysis.”

JD: So you don’t think a Schenkerian 3-line governs the unfolding of the Hammerklavier?

SP: Let’s put it this way, Jeremy. And I know your type has a hard time getting past the filter, so let me unfilter you right here and now. Nobody, but no one, can do better than the free enterprise of the notes left to themselves. And Beethoven himself, look right here, says “fugue in 3 voices, with some license.” And also too license is just another word for maverick and and maverick is another word for freedom and freedom is just another word for America and no Austrian analyst tells America what to do.

JD: Word! Explain to me this trickle-down theory.

SP: The “Hammerklavier” is the perfect instance of my example, Jeremy. Ever notice how the piece is full of chains of thirds?

JD: Sure, Sarah. It is well noted in Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style, and many other sources.

SP: Well, ask yourself another question: do they ever go up?

JD: Hmm. Well, I guess not.

SP: Booyah! As my grandma used to say, you can’t bag a moose with a spoon.

JD: Ok, l think I see where you’re going with that. Tell me a bit about the harmonic language of the work.

SP: It’s great to see Beethoven being so pro-B-flat major.

JD: I guess I would have said it’s “in” B-flat major, not “pro-” B-flat major? …

SP: Oh, Jeremy, I wouldn’t expect a naive Upper West Side nacho-eating liberal like yourself to understand that every key is, in fact, a war against every other key. And you know unless we defend B-flat major one day we’ll wake up and there won’t be a B-flat major. Two flats come at a price, eternal vigilance, or I guess what I’m sayin’ is, these flats don’t run.

JD: But Sarah—to play devil’s advocate here—you could make that one of the defining, most beautiful elements of the piece is the presence of sort of “radical” notes, notes that don’t really belong in B-flat major, strange other notes, neither major nor minor …

SP: All that sounds really good on paper, Jeremy, at your Ivy League coffeeshops and so forth, but out here in the real world where I’m sitting there’s plenty of common sense telling me that wrong notes are wrong notes. There was a great piece on Lou Dobbs the other day about this, called “Why Is G-Flat Getting My Tax Dollars?”

JD: I didn’t know he was a Beethoven scholar.

SP: There’s Walmarts and Walmarts of stuff out there you don’t know. I agree with Lou, we can put up with these immigrant notes, but only if they enter the key legally, through the proper channels, and for heck’s sake let’s not get in the business of givin’ ‘em driving licenses. They should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

JD: I’m not sure how that applies to Beethoven … ?

SP: Just cause Beethoven can wigglewaggle his way into all sorts of keys doesn’t mean we have to give them amnesty. Next question.

JD: Tell me your thoughts about the slow movement.

SP: [pause] In what respect, Jeremy?

JD: The third movement: how would you describe it?

SP: [pause] I gotta confess, I usually fast forward through that one … It’s kind of a bummer. And since unlike some Americans out there I don’t hate America, I don’t want to dwell on all those negativity.

JD: But some people might make the case that the third movement is kind of the emotional core of the work … ?

SP: Ya know, I feel pretty strongly that a composer is a lot like a musicologist, except that he has actual notes to put down on paper. [Applause]

JD: Sarah, you didn’t really answer my question …

SP: I got some questions for you. For example, why does Beethoven decide to kick fugal butt at the end of this song? What’s the point? I think another interesting question is why in fact is this piece in B-flat major? I mean didn’t he already write the “Archduke” Trio, which is ALSO in B-flat major? Why couldn’t he just write the “Archduke” trio again? I know a lotta folks out there, in Main Street all across this land of ours, they’ll tell you, they’re just more “Archduke” kinda folks then they are “Hammerklavier” folks. And that’s fine. That’s why America is so great. I would never take away their right to bear “Archduke.” And its true the “Archduke” is a lot more Budweiser to those folks the “Hammerklavier” seems like some sort of weird imported wheat beer or somethin’, but my point is, it’s like Beethoven sat down to write the “Archduke” but then as his pen or quill or chalk or whatever hit the paper it took a kind of wrong turn, God bless him …

JD: A wrong turn?

SP: Well, I don’t mean wrong in a bad way, but in a weird way. I think the best way to explain it is it’s like that movie with the guy, you know, who turns into a fly. It’s like there’s the “Archduke” trio and all that good noble normal Beethoven stuff, but then it gets fused with some alien DNA and so, like instead of a normal scherzo you get this little strange runt of a crazy scherzo and then in place of a really long slow movement you get an even longer slow movement and everything just spirals out of control, like some sort of crazy Bach futuristic Beethoven hybrid thingamabob.

JD: That’s actually not totally uninsightful, Sarah. I’m sorry I liberally condescended to you. It’s true everything in the slow movement of the “Hammerklavier” speaks in exaggerated or caricatured ways. When you compare it to the symmetrical arches of the “Archduke” slow movement the “Hammerklavier” has a tendency to get stuck, to wander or obsess, as if Beethoven were commenting on the very nature of musical narrative itself, as if he were questioning the foundations of phraseology … Whereas the “Archduke” seems the very summit of phraseology, a kind of Mount Olympus.

SP: Yeah, whatever.

JD: Sarah, what’s your favorite part of the “Hammerklavier”?

SP: Well that’s really hard to say, but I think I gotta go with the opening of the last movement.

JD: The Largo introduction? Mine too! Maybe we have more in common than we thought!

SP: Yah, I really love how those chords just kind of sit there waiting for something to do … and then something will happen … and then we’ll be waiting again … lotsa suspense and mystery you know … it’s sort of a transition with no clear or obvious goal … how do I put this …

JD: Kind of a bridge to nowhere?

SP: Smart ass.
JD: Sarah, the last movement is one of the most famously difficult things in all the piano repertoire. Do you have any advice for this American pianist about this movement before he performs this work on tour?

SP: You don’t want to hear my advice.

JD: Oh come on let me have it.

SP: I think it’s pretty obvious.

JD: I’m dying to know.

SP: You’re not gonna like it.

JD: Please …

SP: Trill, baby, trill!

JD: [sinks head in hands] The interview is over.

Originally posted by Jeremy Denk from think denk, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 12:42 PM | Comments (0)

Ice Cream Wishes

A lot of this post deals with Yoko Ono.

One night many years ago when I was a freshman in college I spent what seemed like hours, stoned out of my mind, standing in front of the menu board of the school's late-night snack bar, The Tea Room, trying hard to pick the perfect munchie-crunching taste treat.

Suddenly There It Was - Chocolate Marshmallow Ice Cream!! I knew instantly that it was my favorite flavor even though I can't remember ever having tasted it before that night.

And so it was - Chocolate Marshmallow was indeed my favorite flavor of ice cream for many years afterward. When I arrived in California I found that chocolate marshmallow ice cream was called Rocky Road and made with bits of real marshmallows. How bizarre. Yuchh. It had been the swirls of sweet marshmallow creme inside the chocolate which sealed my passion. Life went on and new flavors replaced chocolate marshmallow on top of my fave list.

Years later -- many years later -- at Tutti Gelato, a small ice cream spot hidden away in the corner of an off-street courtyard in Old Pasadena - I again studied the menu, completely straight this time, searching for the perfect after-dinner taste treat. Here's a picture of the menu. Click it to enlarge. What would you have picked?

My choice? A combination of mascarpone and sour cherry gelato in a cup. In my mind the smooth creamy cheesy mascarpone and the tart bright citrus sour cherry instantly became the perfect flavor combination - just as chocolate and marshmallow had years before. I decided that I must have it.

Alas, they were out of one flavor (or the other). I returned to Tutti Gelato many times over the years - okay it was about a half dozen times over two years - and either they were out of one flavor (or the other) or they were too busy or I was too stuffed after dinner or something.

But then, a couple weeks ago, on a Sunday morning, just at opening time, I scored the perfect cup of gelato: half mascarpone and half sour cherry. Here's a picture I took just before my first highly anticipated bite.

Tutti Gelato Pasadena CA sour cherry and mascarpone gelato

Disappointment. The mascarpone wasn't cheesy enough. The sour cherry wasn't terribly sour - more like a watered down cherry soda flavor. My taste bud imagination had let me down big time. I was highly dissatisfied. Plain old chocolate would have been so much better.

To be fair Tutti Gelato serves great ice cream and sorbet. I would not hesitate to suggest that you try it. The problem was that I had imagined such a high level of unobtainable perfection in the synthesis of flavors.

Disillusioned, I wandered around that off-street courtyard (click here for satellite view). In the courtyard there's a Crate and Barrel at one end, a trendient Italian restaurant at the other. There's a micro-brewery and a Johnny Rockets and a sushi bar. There's a movie multi-plex. There are a couple more even more trendient boutiques and a sculpture of plexiglass workmen digging a trench. Click on the next picture for a panorama shot of the whole courtyard.

What I found in the middle of the courtyard that Sunday was an ongoing interactive art project by Yoko Ono. It's called Wish Tree. Here are Yoko's old fashioned fluxian instructions:

Wish Piece by Yoko Ono (1996)
Make a wish
Write it down on a piece of paper
Fold it and tie it around a branch of a Wish Tree
Ask your friends to do the same
Keep wishing
Until the branches are covered with wishes

Each tree has a little set of steps so the top branches can be reached. Pencils and little tie-on cards are provided. From a distance the trees look like they are blooming a lot of white flowers. In my imagination the cards were provided in many different colors: chocolate, sour cherry and the like.

Here's some description of the project at Yoko's website. She tells of tying wishing papers to trees as a young child in temples in Japan. The notion of supplicating the higher powers with a words on a small piece of paper probably exists in many religions. Here it is, in action at the Western Wall, serving an important function in the religion of U.S. presidential politics. The ancient Jews didn't have many trees to tie their wishes to. But they had plenty of rocks.

Barack Obama making a wish at the Western wall

I wandered around the courtyard reading peoples wishes. No one folded their cards as Yoko instructed. Most, as is predictable, ask for health or wealth for themselves or for loved ones. Peace for the world. Love. A few, however, were much less predictable. I snapped photos of my favorites.

I wish I had a rocket propelled corgi! Adorable.

Yoko Ono Wish Trees Pasadena CA rocket propelled corgi

I wish for my sunglasses to make me look sexy!

Yoko Ono Wish Trees Pasadena CA sexy sunglasses

I wish to swirl forward

Yoko Ono Wish Trees Pasadena CA swirl forward

I wish I had another wish - Nathan

Yoko Ono Wish Trees Pasadena CA wish I had another wish

I wish I wans't dyselxic

Yoko Ono Wish Trees Pasadena CA wish I wasn't dyslexic

I wish for the chance to make a difference with
my music and go to music school - Melinda

(Poor Melinda. Someday she'll find out how little effect music has on the real world.)

Yoko Ono Wish Trees Pasadena CAmusic school

A lot of ice cream!
(I suggest you avoid combining mascarpone & sour cherry)

Yoko Ono Wish Trees Pasadena CA lot of ice cream

How to make marshmallow videos: here (yuchh) or here (yuchh yuchh yuchh)

Search for the phrase "chocolate marshmallow ice cream"

Mascarpone and Sour Cherry Tags: ice cream. . . gelato. . . Wish Tree. . . Yoko Ono. . . Pasadena CA

Originally from Mixed Meters, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 12:41 PM | Comments (0)

I Should Be Doing Spanish Homework Because It's Due Today, But I Don't Feel Like It

In classic 30 Second Spot fashion the long title of this short quarter-tone piano piece was a sentence spoken by a high school student to no one in particular while he was relaxing at Starbucks before class at the very same moment I was writing music at Starbucks because I did feel like it. He'd probably be mortified to discover that his disinterest had been frozen in time -- immortalized.

It's kind of a non-sequel to the previous 30 Second Spot called Live Chat.

45 Seconds - Copyright (c) 2008 David Ocker

If you don't feel like listening to this, maybe there's something you would feel like doing intead. Leave a message and tell me what you did instead of listening to "I Should Be Doing Spanish Homework Because It's Due Today, But I Don't Feel Like It"

Homework Tags: 30 Second Spots. . . David Ocker. . . Spanish Homework

Originally from Mixed Meters, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 12:40 PM | Comments (0)

Orchestrating Pop Music with Classical Instruments

In some respects the two styles of music are not so different (depending, of course) on what you consider 'pop' and what you consider classical. But, there are elements of each that can be found in the other.

One of the reasons so many classical vocalists stray into singing pop songs (I'll include Broadway tunes in with that category as most don't consider the songs from Broadway in the Classical Genre) is because their well trained voices can add power and emotion to the music and yet, singing these pieces isn't unfamiliar from what they sing normally. It can also be a lot of fun, letting your hair down sort of thing.

Numerous orchestras perform 'pop' concerts, and there are even famous 'pop' orchestras. Jeff Tyzik of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra understands that "One loud snare-drum hit is louder than an entire string section. So it's technically impossible to balance an orchestra and a heavy-metal band." However, there are ways to blend the styles and that's where orchestration and technology play a role.

Heavy-metal, as an example of pop, stems from a fusion of blues and rock, both have their roots in classical music. The rhythms used in heavy-metal are nothing different that classical musicians have been playing for years. The driving beats we might associate with a Black Sabbath isn't all that different than the driving force behind Beethoven's 5th Symphony. Led Zeppelin occasionally used irregular rhythms, but in a repetitive manner, not unlike what Holst does with Mars. So, if you're trying to orchestra a heavy-metal piece for orchestra, the rhythms are pretty straight forward, just be aware of where the accents are in the music.

Distortion can be somewhat problematic, as heavy-metal uses a lot of electronics, and the nature of amplified sound, to create the music. However, numerous classical composers have used techniques like sul ponticello to get a different sound from the strings. Putting the low strings on a root note and the low brass a semitone up creates a nice warring sound between the sections, while maintaining a sense of the root. Add the same sort of effect using high winds split between two very high notes a semitone apart and then tremolo the high strings across the same two notes and you'll get a shimmering shrill. There are lots of other ways to play with sound to get a unique tonal color that emulates the biting sound of heavy-metal without using amplification.

Of course, you can use amplification and electronics too. Numerous composers since the 60's have been incorporating electronics into their compositions. So, if what you're trying to do is re-create an electronic sound, sometimes using the same electronics as in the original sound overtop an organic sound of the orchestra can be very new and yet, indicative of the original. Amplifying some of the instruments can also drastically alter the sound, as there are a number of effects that can be applied to the amplified sound making it unrecognisable to the original. However, the full force of an orchestra can produce a great deal of sound and amplifying the entire ensemble would not necessarily be effective (and would be very expensive). So, perhaps in all things, think moderation.

In the end, have fun, fun with the music, orchestrating music you enjoy, creating a "cover" for your favorite piece but for an orchestra. Be inventive, don't just stick with putting the loud bits in the brass, and the soft bits in the strings or woodwinds. Use percussions, use it lots and often. But most of all explore not just classical music, but classical instruments with all kinds of different forms of music. You'll be amazed at what you might find.

There is a group called Trans-Siberian Orchestra which plays symphonic rock, which is rather like 'Phantom of the Opera’ meets 'The Who'. They've sold millions of records, so not is this sort of thing fun, it can be profitable too.

Originally from Interchanging Idioms, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 12:39 PM | Comments (0)

Music for the Masses? - Free Times

Free Times

Music for the Masses?
Free Times, SC - 16 hours ago
First, there’s the ever-popular contemporary classical series Southern Exposure. Then there’s the South Carolina Philharmonic, exploring new repertoire and ...

Originally from "contemporary classical" | "avant garde" music - Google News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 12:39 PM | Comments (0)

MUSIC: Making sound into music - InsideVandy

MUSIC: Making sound into music
InsideVandy, TN - 23 hours ago
Their most recent album features more than two hours of rising and falling ambient sounds that have a large base in contemporary classical musicians, ...

Originally from "contemporary classical" | "avant garde" music - Google News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 12:39 PM | Comments (0)

The E-List: Halloween - The Province

The E-List: Halloween
The Province, Canada - 2 hours ago
6991 Killarney St - Oct. 29 and 30, 6-10 pm, Oct. 31 5 pm-12 am - Accepting donations for the Food Bank Students of Corey Hamm perform works by Ligeti, ...

Lutoslawski on EMI - Thenews.pl

Lutoslawski on EMI
Thenews.pl, Poland - 50 minutes ago
He was a member of several academies, including the Royal Swedish Academy of Music, the Royal Academy of Music in London and the Académie des Beaux-Arts in ...

Concert pianist Jeffrey Brown to perform at MBC for Sunday recital - Staunton News Leader

Concert pianist Jeffrey Brown to perform at MBC for Sunday recital
Staunton News Leader, VA - 3 hours ago
A strong advocate of new music, he champions works by contemporary composers that include Vine, György Ligeti, Lowell Liebermann and Martin Scherzinger. ...

Hyla compositions given masterful renditions - Deseret News

Hyla compositions given masterful renditions
Deseret News, UT - 6 hours ago
But instead of letting his music be dictated by these "non-classical" idioms, he skillfully incorporates them into the musical fabric of his works. ...

Chris’s office

Unknown

Chris Richardson, our new Administrative Director, officially begins working for us today. He sent us all a welcome email that included the above photo, taken today (on his 8bb iPhone) from his “morning office,” a little independent cafe in downtown Wheaton.

Originally posted by Tim from thirteen ways, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 11:11 AM | Comments (0)

Satoko Fujii: Four And More

Pianist Satoko Fujii is interviewed.

That refers to her age, although you could almost believe it refers to the number of albums she’s released in 2008 alone. Fujii appears on four records this year: a trio session called Trace A River (Libra, 2008); a quartet session with her band ma-do called Heat Wave (Not Two, 2008); a session with a completely different trio called Cloudy Then Sunny (Libra, 2008); and an album with the band Gato Libre (led by her husband, trumpeter Natsuki Tamura) called Kuro (Libra, 2008).

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)

Joe McPhee’s Intimate Conversations at RUCMA

: Image via Wikipedia

From NY’s RUCMA:

Start: 10/30/2008 - 10:30pm
End: 10/30/2008 - 11:59pm

Joe McPhee’s Intimate Conversations featuring Mikolaj Trzaska
Thursday, October 30 @ 10:30 pm
Living Theatre: 21 Clinton Street, near Houston
General Admission: $15
Students and Seniors: $10

Joe McPhee (saxophone & trumpet)
Jay Rozen (drums)
Mikolaj Trzaska (saxophone & bass clarinet)

www.joemcphee.com

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)

3ology Release Party at Creative Music Works

From Creative Music Works:

Creative Music Works and The Lab at Belmar presents The CD Release Party for 3ology’s new album “Out of The Depths”. This is the first 3ology record to be released on CMW Records, and we are very pleased to have them on our roster. This CD Release party is brought to you in partnership with Mystery Cabal and Object + Thought Gallery. Please take a look at the material. We are looking to get calendar listings and possible write-ups for this show.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)

Les espaces acoustiques: the reviews

Here’s what others have been saying about it.

Print media:

Geoff Brown, Times

Each section bled into the next, taking us into an ever-surprising wonderland. Fierce industrial blasts from the brass. A chorus of woodwind sea birds. Coarse stabbing notes from the double-bass. Fuzzy clusters drifting across space, like electronic music rescored for instruments. The rustle of pages and instruments being packed up (delicious music theatre, that). A seismic, thrilling, slow-paced crescendo. And the biggest thrill of the cycle? Everything fused and hung together; nothing seemed thrust in for effect, except perhaps for the four chugging horns brought in at the end to disrupt, then curtail, Grisey’s endlessly imaginative cosmic dance.

house; ecstatic applause; a major milestone in music triumphantly unveiled. I can’t imagine a more spectacular concert for the London Sinfonietta’s 40th birthday year.

Andrew Clements, Guardian

Ideas recur and transform themselves, while the whole harmonic space of the music gradually expands too, as quarter-tone inflected chords build and fall away, fracture into trills or generate climaxes of Wagnerian grandeur.

There are moments of pure theatre, too, when the players self-consciously retune an instrument or flamboyantly throw their music on the floor. It is as if Grisey wanted to ground his theorising in the real world, though the force of his extraordinary musical processes is real enough anyway.

Paul Driver, Sunday Times

The music systematically mines the expressive possibilities of overtones, frequently cleaving to a single pitch for long stretches, yet, in the later parts, building huge, complex, incandescent climaxes. This British premiere of the complete cycle became ever more enthralling.

Online:

Liam Cagney, Musical Criticism

This concert was a brilliant one and all involved deserve congratulation for carrying it off so well. The person I attended it with remarked that he would have sat immediately through a repeat performance and it was hard to disagree with that verdict; one was definitely left wanting more. Hopefully the concert’s outstanding success will encourage more performances of Grisey’s striking work here.

Ben.H, Boring Like a Drill

In America, composers as diverse as La Monte Young and James Tenney had spent the 1960s exploring tonality, the harmonic spectrum, new sounds, forms and structures. Europeans largely thought of them as amateurs, pranksters. Grisey, on the other hand, was the professional: he knew that a composer needed a computer laboratory, a symphony orchestra, and a tendency to disrupt his new sound world with conventional dramatic gestures to be taken seriously.

Anne Ozorio, Music OMH

Gérard Grisey’s Les espaces acoustiques is a ground-breaking work which defies all assumptions about what music “ought” to be. Not for nothing did the composer describe it as “a great laboratory”, exploring the way we listen. Written from 1974 to 1985, it’s actually six pieces which can be enjoyed separately. This was the first UK performance of the whole cycle.

It starts with a single violist, expanding to ensembles for 7, 18, 33 and 84 musicians. Grisey uses chords that endlessly morph and oscillate, displaying the full spectrum of sound. Hence the term “spectralism” which Grisey later abandoned. This is very organic music, in harmony with the biorhythms of the human body, like breathing, steadily exhaling and inhaling.

This isn’t music to “audit” passively as it’s complex, but it’s also strangely therapeutic. Afterwards, you feel refreshed, as if you’ve had a workout. If you’ve been listening well, you probably have, since the more you put into this, the more you get back.

Originally from The Rambler, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)

Grisey spoon

Grisey - Les Espaces acoustiques reviewed.

I’ve mixed feelings about how this came out. Could have done with another editorial sweep from me at the least. Oh well.

Xenakis, Benjamin, Ligeti and Messiaen reviewed.

This one’s less ambitious and probably better for it.

My feelings about the reviews reflect my feelings about the concerts.

Originally from The Rambler, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)

Michaels Reise in Dresden

Hat tip to jodru (as linker and participant) for these gorgeous stills from musikFabrik’s recent staging of Michaels Reise um die Erde (Act II of Donnerstag aus Licht) in Dresden.

Also for posting this video clip from rehearsals:

Wow.

Originally from The Rambler, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)

Ten Questions with Taylor Ho Bynum

Glowing Realm interviews THB.

Taylor Ho Bynum is a new music composer/trumpeter from New York. Working frequently with some of NY’s finest (Tomas Fujiwara, Mary Halvorson, Jessica Pavone) and leading groups such as SpiderMonkey Strings and The Thirteenth Assembly, Ho Bynum always brings a unique approach to composition, and improvisation. Also a frequent collaborator of Anthony Braxton’s, he has performed and recorded all over the world in any number of Braxton’s tone combinations. He also co-runs the great Firehouse 12 Records with Nick Lloyd. Readers of this blog will know Firehouse 12 because they released Tyshawn Sorey’s debut, which I gushed over awhile back. He also keeps a great great blog (his busy schedule is making it hard to keep it up to date, but read the past and ask nicely and maybe it will blossom again.)

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 08:11 AM | Comments (0)

Over-optimisation and the unforeheard event

First blogging economist Dani Rodrik and then composer/writer Charles Shere recommended Nassim Nicolas Taleb's book The Black Swan. Such recommendations are worth taking seriously, and the book, which is about the impact of highly improbable and unforeseeable events, is definitely of interest to composers. Now Shere has pointed to a conversation on the recent economic developments between Taleb and mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot here.

The cluster of ideas at work here — complexity/simplicity, predictability/unpredictability, determinancy/indeterminacy, the generalized and the precise (or system and state) — are very important to music. Composition is, to a large extent, about control (John Cage defined a composer as "someone who tells other people what to do", La Monte Young was "wildly" interested in demonstrating control), but more precisely about controlled situations that lead to the unforeseen, surprises, epiphanies, moments of sublime discomfort as well as release. Unlike an economic scenario, in which such events can have catastropic effects on the real lives and well-being of people and thus a large degree of stability and predictability is ordinarily desired, in music however, as well as in other aesthetic fields*, it's the reliable appearance of the extraordinary that we're after. (Taleb does, however, suggest a number of strategies for the highly profitable adaptation to unforseen events in the economic sphere as well.) There are a number of compositional strategies for achieving this: classical tonality used development as a way of getting so far away from the tonic that its eventual return was made surprising, non-tonal music used extreme contrasts in topic or texture to achieve similar effects, minimal music used the careful framing of highly controlled phenomena to allow the listener access to unforheard detail, complexity-oriented composers overlay a sufficient number of processes so that the net effect is unpredictable (and sometimes unperformable, or at least introducing notational competence — both writing and reading — into the mix), and, of course, Cage introduced a number of techniques, including chance elements in composition, indeterminant elements in performance, and the use of physically contigent but only coarsely controllable events.**

Composition is a balancing act. The greater part of music (the dark matter or passagework) is the routine, the continous, the predictable, the necessary background against which the rare event, the extraordinary, becomes extraordinary. Getting the relationship between these two elements right makes all the difference between just pushing sounds around and making that elevated experience we identify as musical.

_____
* Of other aesthetic fields, is it even necessary to mention Walter De Maria's Lightning Field, the most important work of visual art of our time?
** It has been my personal experience that the framing strategies of the minimal composers and the chance- and contingency-derived strategies associated with Cage have been more reliable than those of the complexity school, in which the relationship between audition and process is too often miscalculated if not ignored, leading necessarily to an impressionistic or gestalt-oriented form of listening, in which case the compositional effort must be regrded as highly inefficient. If our interest is in a music which can only be apprehended impressionistically or as a series of gestalts, then there are any number of more efficient techniques for arriving at such musics.

Originally from Renewable Music, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 08:10 AM | Comments (0)

Judy Kaye and Donald Corren in Souvenir at Baltimore's Centerstage

Souvenir is a musical comedy about the life of Florence Foster Jenkins, as narrated by Cosme McMoon, her pianist:

Hilariously funny and touchingly sincere, Souvenir is a fantasia on the wonders of illusion and delusion, by playwright Stephen Temperley. The theatrical duet with music follows the incredible-but-true story of real-life Manhattan socialite Florence Foster Jenkins, as told by her accompanist Cosmé McMoon. Jenkins, an eccentric, self-styled diva, won renown in the Thirties and Forties (and cult status since) for sharing her singular genius in lavish recitals--despite (or maybe because of) her astonishing lack of any musical ability.

Baltimore's Centerstage has just announced that Souvenir will be running from April 24 to May 24, 2009, starring Judy Kaye as FFJ and Donald Corren as Cosme McMoon aka Edwin McArthur. Souvenir will definitely be a show to see for those in the Baltimore area.

More articles on Florence Foster Jenkins and Cosme McMoon:

An Interview With Cosme McMoon

Accompanist for Florence Foster Jenkins, a Poem by Darren Morris

Originally from The Collaborative Piano Blog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 05:12 AM | Comments (0)

ESSENTIAL REPERTOIRE: Tristan Perich and Ensemble Pamplemousse

Sunday October 26, 2008 at 8:00pm
Issue Project Room
232 3rd Street
Brooklyn, New York 11215

Website: http://darmstadtnewmusic.org
Price: $10 advance/ $15 door
DARMSTADT "ESSENTIAL REPERTOIRE"
Sunday, October 26 at 8:00 pm

New Electro-Acoustic Practices: Tristan Perich and Ensemble Pamplemousse

Tristan Perich: new compositions for nine strings and nine-channel 1-bit music

In 2004, Tristan Perich began work on 1-Bit Music, combining simple, rhythm-based compositions with primitive, hand-programmed electronics that investigate the foundations of digital sound. The Village Voice, BOMB Magazine, BPM Magazine, Res Magazine, Wired News, Cool Hunting, and Spin Magazine covered the release. Surface Magazine called the boxes "profound throwbacks to the traditional album, a response to the intangibility of iTunes and mp3s in the form hand-held artwork." Since then, Perich's compositions have connected his electronic impulses with acoustic instruments in the context of more traditional chamber music forms. Collaborations with Bang on a Can (2008 People's Commissioning Fund), counter)induction, Calder Quartet, New York Miniaturist Ensemble, Due East, Y Trio and Ensemble Pamplemousse have been performed recently at venues including the Whitney Museum, PS1 and Mass MoCA. His experimental electronic music group, the Loud Objects, has performed in Germany, Japan, Italy (Screen Music 2), Norway (Piksel), England (Evolution) and the USA (including at the NIME festival). He has spoken twice at Dorkbot. Perich studied math, music and computer science at Columbia University after attending Philips Academy, Andover. More recently, he studied art, music and electronics at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at Tisch School of the Arts, NYU.

http://www.1bitmusic.com/

Scott Wollschleger: Secret Machines (2008)
Natacha Diels: butterfly effect (2008)
Chiyoko Szlavnics: Autonomous Gardens (2008)
Andrew Greenwald: Valve 2.0 (2008)

Ensemble Pamplemousse
Natacha Diels - flute, electronics
Kiku Enomoto - violin
Jessie Marino - cello
Andrew Greenwald - percussion
David Broome - piano

Founded in 2002 as a musical exploration vehicle, Pamplemousse presents concerts of extraordinary focus and clarity. Comprised of virtuosic musicians trained in classical, electronic and improvisational realms, the group consistently delivers fresh, exhilarating new concepts in sound. The members’ eagerness for aural discovery has allowed for ample experimentation processes, where boundaries are non-existent, and from which a strong dialogue has emerged. Among the group’s vernacular resides formerly unfathomable sound landscapes formed by the acute relationships the performers have forged with each other, and with the composers who are an intrinsic part of the ensemble. The product, uncompromising and resolutely beautiful, is created by incredibly innovative, yet-to-be-named approaches to performance and composition.

http://www.ensemblepamplemousse.org/

DARMSTADT "ESSENTIAL REPERTOIRE"
October 22 - 26
ISSUE Project Room
in the (OA) Can Factory
232 3rd Street (at 3rd Ave), Brooklyn
performances at 8pm unless noted otherwise
tickets: $10 advance (available at Other Music and online) / $15 at door
F, M, R to 9th Street-4th Ave

http://www.darmstadtnewmusic.org
http://www.issueprojectroom.org
http://www.othermusic.com

Originally from Latest Events - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 05:10 AM | Comments (0)

too much time

Originally posted by Matthew Lee Knowles from Cut & Splice: From the Seven Days, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 05:10 AM | Comments (0)

New Features at NetNewMusic

So, I've been thinking about adding some new features here and I'm curious about what might be helpful and interesting. For one thing, I've noticed it's kind of a pain to browse music outside of what's in that player on the home page. Would you gals/guys like a more elegant way to surf the 800+ tracks we have here?

Any other ideas? I've been getting some freelance work and have been learning some new libraries that might help us surf RSS more interestingly too.

One other thing I'd like to add is to more elegantly add the New Music reBlog articles into the site. Maybe with a scrollable large widget (already built thanks to a client). Anyways... just thinkin out loud!

Originally from Discussion Forum - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 02:12 AM | Comments (0)

New culture

Yesterday I was running errands in my car, and listening to Soundcheck, the really fine afternoon music talk show on WNYC (the public radio station in New York). They were marking a milestone in music video -- the cancellation of the only remaining show on MTV that still showed music videos.

So what was the state of music videos now? Here's what I learned. Music videos have largely migrated to YouTube. They aren't pushed to music fans by any central provider. Fans seek them out on their own.

And often the best and best-known videos aren't made by top-hit bands. They're made by far less popular indie bands. Often fans make videos on their own. Often bands make videos designed to be remixed, so to speak -- to have ttheir visuals altered -- by fans.

Just another day, in other words, in the ongoing life of Web 2.0, the current version of the Internet, which encourages participation by people who use it. As opposed to Web 1.0, the old way we did things, where information was pushed down to users from organizations with things to sell, or things they wanted us to know.

So where does classical music stand in all of this? Sorry to say, we're for the most part rooted back in Web 1.0. How do we ever think we'll attract younger people? And why, exactly, should they be interested in us? In a world that increasingly highlights individual creativity, what chance to be creative do we offer anyone?

Originally from Sandow, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 02:12 AM | Comments (0)

Armstrong to present Liederabend at Graham Chapel - Washington University Record

Armstrong to present Liederabend at Graham Chapel
Washington University Record, MO - 21 hours ago
Brahms based the cycle, which he dedicated to a friend, the baritone Julius Stockhausen, on the 1797 novella "Liebesgeschichte der schonen Magelone und des ...

Lyceum Series Features World-Renown New York Philharmonic Trombonist - Baylor University

Lyceum Series Features World-Renown New York Philharmonic Trombonist
Baylor University, TX - Oct 22, 2008
... of Music in New York City. He also has performed as guest principal trombonist with the London Symphony Orchestra in Carnegie Hall led by Pierre Boulez. ...

Harrison Birtwistle, "Nomos"

-- Liner Notes --

Through the 1960's Birtwistle had explored the conventions and rituals of Greek drama, and for a commission for the 1968 Promenade concerts he went back to the same rich source. In classical Greek the word nomos had two meanings; it signifed the law, the social and political order of the state, but it was also used to denote the melodic patterns for the playing of the reed pipe, the aulos, used to accompany dramatic recitations and to send troops into battle.

That abrasive wind sound seems to be evoked in Birtwistle's work by the quartet of amplified soloists - flute, clarinet, horn, bassoon. Throughout Nomos they unfold the work's basic musical formula, and the continuity of this remorselessly unfolding melody contrasts with the highly sectioned music for the rest of the large orchestra [without violins], in which the musical material is constantly recycled and reassessed. Overlaid on this musical discourse is a strikingly simple dramatic device: at the start of the work the wind quartet is barely audible, but grows steadily louder as the work progresses, until it obliterates and silences the orchestra altogether. The "law", Birtwistle's melodic formula, has finally asserted itself. -- Andrew Clements

Originally from ANABlog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 02:11 AM | Comments (0)

Take a Classical Vacation

Effective composition, like every other art form-lets use a female writer (to avoid the he/she shit) as our example-relies most heavily on the composer’s keen awareness of her surroundings.

A person attempting to write a novel is not best served by studying writing methods and a composer is not best served by studying composition methods. I put “best served” in bold for a reason and that is so I am hopefully not confused with throwing out knowledge pertaining to your art. I.e., a naturally gifted writer will write a better novel if free to probe the texture of society than the writer who is in a state of continual learning, unable to observe the commonplace of life.

Imagine placing a pedestal on the busiest sidewalk in the world. Now imagine that author standing atop the pedestal with her eyes wide open and information streamed to her through every possible source. That is the job of an author. That is the job of a composer.

So I have found that within the complex nature of art, sometimes it is best to free yourself of the outliers of your art world. Stop listening to “your influences” for a period of time. Listen to what you would consider to be your hypothetical influences of other arts you rarely visit, be that rock, jazz, country, whatever. Once you gain a solid grasp of the reflections of your taste, you will come back to composition with keener awareness of your artistic process.

Originally from Amaranth Arthouse Music, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 02:11 AM | Comments (0)

Please Note: Email Address Being Shut Off

Along with our move to a new domain name a couple of months ago, I noted that our email address for article submissions had changed to mike@avantmusicnews.com and that we’d eventually turn down amn@somnius.com.

That day has come. We’ll be shutting off amn@somnius.com within 24 hours.

If you haven’t already, please start sending emails to mike@avantmusicnews.com.

Thanks.

Originally posted by Mike from Avant Music News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 23, 2008 at 02:10 AM | Comments (0)

October 22, 2008

Levitation

permutation.

Originally posted by Neil Luck from Cut & Splice: From the Seven Days, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 11:10 PM | Comments (0)

Working for Virgil

When first we met, Virgil Thomson looked like a crazed space creature, sitting in his wing chair, plucking alternately at the squealing hearing aids in his ears and squinting at me like a swashbuckler as he quizzed me about my background. His belt was wrapped around what had to be his chest; his chin seemed to stop where his tummy began. He was shaped like the illustrations of Tik-tok in L. Frank Baum’s books. When, a few weeks earlier, Ned had told me that his teacher was looking for someone to do some orchestrating for him, I had pounced on the opportunity. ‘But you’ll have to submit to an interview,’ said Ned. ‘No promises.’

It was a humid August afternoon sometime during the eighties. I had come back by bus from the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, to interview for the job. I was hot and tired, broke and cocky. To the left of the front doors of the grand old Chelsea Hotel hung a plaque on which were listed the names of former residents – some of the greatest artists of the twenties and thirties. At the bottom of the plaque, someone had scratched ‘and Sid Vicious!’ with a knife.

‘So what’s it like being a young composer these days?’ he shrieked. ‘Where do you get your money?’ he continued, not waiting for me to answer. I leant forward in my chair, clasped my hands together in what I hoped was the picture of earnestness, and rolled out some sort of answer. I don’t think he heard me. The ear pieces started up again, this time on different pitches. He batted his ears. I winced. He turned his head just so and they were both silenced. ‘I know all about being a young composer,’ he shouted, triumphantly. ‘It’s all about optimizing your leisure time!’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘What’s that? Call me Mr. Thomson, or Virgil. Or boss,’ he finished. Now his eyes were twinkling.

‘Okay, boss.’

‘No, I don’t like that. Stick to Mr. Thomson.’

‘Okay!’ I shouted.

‘What was it like studying with Ned?’ he asked, suddenly in a normal tone of voice.

‘Wonderful,’ I shouted. ‘Great!’ I gave a ‘thumbs up.’

‘You don’t have to shout!’ he shouted. ‘I’m not deaf, you know! Okay. Right,’ he barreled on. ‘Look, I have some piano pieces I want you to orchestrate, and some orchestra pieces I want you to turn into piano pieces. Can you do that?’

I was hired, and worked for Virgil for six or seven months. He wanted to supervise my work, he said; consequently, I was to bring my gear to the Chelsea and do all of the work at the table in his living room. I don’t recall that he ever asked to see what I had done, or that he ever demanded a single change, and I can’t honestly say that I remember a note of what I did. He was exceedingly kind to me, and treated me in a comradely fashion, like a younger colleague who, as he would say, was ‘on the make.’ Lineage means a lot to me, so I was proud that Ned had taken orchestration lessons from Virgil in the same room forty years earlier. There were three great things about the job: one, I got to listen as he conducted business on the telephone from his bed in the next room; two, I received a guided tour of his art collection; and three, I got to ask questions and to hear lots of terrific stories.

Originally from notes, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)

Moonlighting

Next door to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia stood the once magnificent, still dustily opulent Barclay Hotel, in whose lobby I had been for the past few days filling in for the usual fellow, playing cocktail piano in order to make some extra money. In a Herculean effort, despite her worsening cancer, Mother had had Father drive her out from Wisconsin to attend my debut, leading my fellow students in a program of my orchestral works. It was the fall of 1981, and the exquisite Sycamores in Rittenhouse Square were at their peak, filtering the sun in such a way that the light was as luminous as Florence, but somehow warmer, healthier. ‘If there are trees in heaven,’ I remember writing in my diary at the time, ‘then they must be Sycamores.’

Buildings then could not yet exceed in height the top of William Penn’s hat atop City Hall, so the town felt and was in fact smaller, more parochial. How passionately I loved Philadelphia – my first Big City – and how many hours I spent walking it! I was particularly fond of the narrow side streets flanked by cozy, colonial era townhouses. Moving to New York after graduation, while inevitable, was not something I really looked forward to.

Ned had made a date to meet my parents just before the concert for a seltzer in the Barclay Bar. I’d been describing my lessons to Mother on the telephone, and she had read Ned’s books. She was very keen to enjoy his company. How my mother’s face shone as she and Ned visited, as simpatico as two clasped hands.

A few nights later I pushed my last key in the Barclay lobby. Eugene Ormandy and his wife, who made their home in a penthouse there, were returning home after a Philadelphia Orchestra concert. He knew me by sight because I attended rehearsals; he also knew that I was a composition student at Curtis. He had not known, until that moment, that I had been covering show tunes in his lobby. I don’t remember what song I was playing the moment that he caught my eye, stopped, smiled sadly, and shook his head. I never had the nerve to ask whether it was because he disapproved of the song, my playing, or my moonlighting.

Originally from notes, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)

Composing Shining Brow

Paul Muldoon’s hair was born mad. He was tough, brilliant, and charming as hell. When incredulous, he would turn phlegmatic, and seem to listen twice as hard, like a lawyer waiting for a witness to say too much. I once saw him whisper something into a conductor’s ear that caused all the blood to drain out of his face. I’ve respected, admired and liked him from the moment we met. His prolificacy as a poet, but above all his seemingly absolute faith in himself and his talent, made him shine. Although we had met the previous summer at Yaddo, where I had read his Selected Poems with astonished delight and decided that, the first chance I got, I would set some of them to music, it wasn’t until the July of 1989 at the MacDowell Colony, where again our paths crossed, that I first did.

Paul is an amazingly gifted performer, the finest reader of his own work I have ever heard, live or recorded: Gian Carlo Menotti set part of the Philadelphia telephone book to music for a Curtis Christmas party and made it sound beautiful; Paul could do the same thing just by reading it.

He’s the only poet whose ordinary conversation I’ve analyzed in order to better internalize it’s natural cadence – the lifts, falls, inflections, pauses, eccentricities – and to thereby better capture his voice when setting his poetry to music. In time, I learned that the union of his words and my music worked best when I turned up the ‘emotional heat’ musically when Paul’s poetry was ‘emotionally cool,’ and vice-versa.

In two sittings, in July of ’89, I set the poems Bran and Thrush and knew that here was a poet whose linguistic brio really inspired me as a composer of serious vocal music. A few days after finishing them, I shared an evening presentation of work to our fellow artists with him in the Savage Library. He read some poems, I played a recording of something, and then we began a routine which served us well for four operas and nearly twenty years: he would read one of his poems, and then I would both sing and play my setting of it alone, or with a singer.

Before cell phones, Colony Hall at the MacDowell Colony served much more as a lifeline to the outside world. The hour or so before dinner, when people congregated there, hungry for companionship and food, was also the time when calls came in to the two phone booths on either side of the big, vaulted room that had a curious little catwalk limning it, sort of like a stage set for a saloon in an old western. Between them, arrayed on several couches reading the newspaper, or chatting, people would sit. That summer, the director taught me to shoot Cowboy Pool – a variety of billiards unique, as far as I know, to MacDowell.

Paul was reading the newspaper when I received a telephone call offering me a commission to write an opera about Frank Lloyd Wright. Who would you have in mind for a libretto, asked the caller? Without giving it any thought at all, but knowing Paul and his work, and especially how it inspired me, I leaned out of the booth and asked, ‘Say, Paul, how would you like to write an opera together?’ He said sure, why not? And we were off.

‘What comes first, the words or the music?’ an interviewer asks the lyricist character in Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along.

‘Generally,’ he replies tartly, the contract.’

Contract out of the way, Paul and I returned to our various other projects and duties, and read everything we could about Wright, reconvening, a few months later, at his home in Amherst, to write together a filmic treatment of our subject. After several days, we had one, which ran perhaps a dozen pages and determined what would happen in each scene. We decided to set it aside and see if we still liked what we had after a few months. We did.

I then planned out how long each scene would last, and the sort of musical form I thought would work best to underpin the action of that scene and gave my notes to Paul. I remember asking him to create a number of core images and literary motifs that I could then graft to musical ideas. I asked for some ‘parallel’ poems for related characters, so that when I shared their music, the words would be easier to adapt. At one point I needed a straightforward hymn. Paul’s absolute virtuosity as a writer has never ceased to amaze me: he can do anything he wants to with words.

Paul’s libretto in hand, over the course of about eight weeks at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts that winter, I composed the music for the first act of the opera. I began then the process I have happily adhered to ever since when I write opera: I retyped and reformatted the libretto to reflect what I intended to do to it musically, storyboarded it on the wall, and illuminated it with various colored pens and pencils – red for one character, blue for another, orange for another; musical / poetic themes and motives that I wanted to ‘track’ also got colors.

This is one of my favorite parts of writing an opera. Standing with a glass of wine and dreaming on the entire act is as close as I’m likely ever get to understanding how a painter must feel working on a mural. A real sense of the pallet of ideas at hand is literally rendered in the color pallet arrayed on the storyboard. It is a delicious part of the process, and it gives me profound satisfaction.

Then, in a sort of musical triage, I composed the most important bits first. I began with the last three minutes; then the music that would be associated with the four or five most important dramatic spots (the ‘emotional nuclear reactors’) in the act; after that, I wrote the connective sections, which could and should be the least musically interesting.

When I was done, I played and sang it for Paul, who then went off to compose the libretto for the second act. Here’s a page from my diary from that day:

Princeton
16 February, 1991

‘Long work day with Paul on the libretto for the second act of our opera Shining Brow. The characters in this story are all well-read, well-traveled, pre-television Midwesterners locked in a mesh of personal, historical and artistic events. Paul’s language is appropriately elaborate; my music is being held together by a web of interlocking tonal centers and musically-allusive melodic motives. So far, it seems to be working.

’We’ve made remarkably few changes to the shape of it since co-writing the treatment a few months ago, though I’ve asked him to add a barbershop quartet of journalists commenting on current events — a nod to the recurring choral episodes which ‘cause time to go by’ in Merrily We Roll Along — between scenes one and two. The final musical transition, in which I’ll superimpose a waltz from Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier (the world premiere of which Wright and his mistress Mamah Cheney attended) on my drunken reporters will result in a ‘hand of author’ moment, no question; but the audience will enjoy (need?) it and the newspapermen’s quips will give critically needed historical context to the ensuing scene.

’I’ll make the scene that follows, which spotlights a sequence of gossiping couples, a set of variations — everything said at the party is about Wright and how he affects others — on the waltz from Der Rosenkavalier introduced over the barbershop quartet by an onstage piano trio hired to entertain at the party. This will manifest several of the core themes of our opera (including the ‘borrowing’ versus ‘purloining’ argument & the union of the so-called ‘high’ culture of opera and the ‘low’ culture of barbershop) by musically ‘stealing’ from Strauss and doing variations on his theme, just as our Wright is building upon the achievements and ideas of his mentor, Sullivan; furthermore, Wright will be observed in the act of seducing someone else’s wife in front of his own mistress to the strains of this ‘stolen’ music.

’The staging I envision will manifest the almost mechanical drive of Wright’s personality by having him pursue a new mistress in a counter-clockwise direction, while the entire party dances to my variations on Strauss’ waltz in a clockwise direction; Mamah will remain paralyzed at the center, unable to do anything except to perform the role of gracious hostess while watching her lover almost ritualistically betray her....’

Second acts, I have found, are far tougher, and trickier, to pull off than first acts. Whereas the first act I had written entirely without guidance, the second act I wrote at home in New York and took several times to meetings with Bernstein. Our ritual never varied: a glass of scotch together, a round or two of Jotto (a word game based on anagrams), maybe the Times of London crossword (which he would do left to right, in rows, in the time it took him to write the letters), some light gossip about Ned and David, and then I would sit down at the piano and play for him one of his ‘Anniversaries,’ which I had memorized for the occasion. (I remember the day I played the one in memory of Natalia Koussevitzky: I was too nervous to look out of the corner of my eye while I played but, when I finished, I saw tears on his cheeks.) He would reminisce about the person to whom the piece I had played had been dedicated.

Then I would play and sing the scene from Brow that I was working on and he would become tough, all business, focused like a laser beam. Wow. I would finish and he would speed over to the bench, push me to the side, and start playing off of my manuscript, squinting, sort of wheeze-singing as he briskly double-checked parts he wanted to speak to.

‘Okay, baby,’ he would start. ‘Try this.’ And he would sing a few bars of what I had written and suddenly veer off in a new direction, improvising an entirely different line reading. Then he would stop, perhaps suck on his plastic cigarette holder, quickly page to a different part of my manuscript, find something, and say, ‘Or you could have used this from before, like this.’ He’d play a few bars. ‘No, that wouldn’t work.’ I would improvise a different line reading. ‘No, no, you can’t do that!’ he would laugh, ‘Marc did that in No for an Answer! Do you know that one?’ He would noodle a few bars. ‘No, that was Tender Land. Ugh. God.’ Then we would both laugh.

During Wright’s Act One, scene one pitch to his future mistress, I quoted the ‘New York, New York’ motive that Bernstein first used in Tahiti, and then in On the Town, on the word, ‘suburbia,’ ‘Nice lift,’ he said, ‘very Strauss. But you follow it up with this stuff that sounds like Ned’s little Frank O’Hara opera. Did I steal that from him for Tahiti or did he steal that from me? I can’t remember. I know you’re trying to talk about theft by putting stolen music in his mouth, but you should come up with something else, there.’ At some point he figured out that I had been modeling the character of Wright musically on him. He was flattered: ‘That’s ‘Maria,’ no, it’s the orchestral play-in to the first scene of Marc’s Regina,’ he thought out loud. ‘Well, yes, I stole it from Marc. But he stole it from Aaron!’

The visit over, I’d walk around Central Park for hours, thinking about everything that I had just learned, and trying to walk off the incredible creative energy surging through me. My God, those lessons were exhilarating.

In time I finished the second act and submitted it to the company. I remember that the night I played and sang it for them (as well as a number of the members of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, including my dear friend Richard Carney, who became a source of great friendship, support and advice for me during the next few years, as the piece was developed and staged), we paused at the end of the first act to gather around the radio to hear President George Herbert Walker Bush announce the first invasion of Iraq.

After the company accepted the opera, it was time to choose a stage director. A number of names came up; one was a young writer in New York named Stephen Wadsworth. His name was familiar to me because Bernstein, in my meetings with him while composing Brow, had mentioned that this young man had just helped him to flesh out and extend his one act opera, Trouble in Tahiti, into a two act, grand opera called A Quiet Place – a tricky, thankless job.

I asked the company to hire Stephen, and he masterminded a beautiful, heart-rending premiere production of Shining Brow which was as much a memorial to Lenny as a meditation on the career and life choices of a famous architect. It was only appropriate that we should ‘workshop’ the piece prior to the premiere at the Bernstein apartment at the Dakota. Lenny had just died. (I dedicated Brow to his memory when it was published.) As I moved through his family’s rooms during the workshop, touching books, pictures and piano keys for the last time, I am sure I felt him still there, looking on, sort of interested. Very Yaddo, I thought.

Six months of orchestrating. Production, which, even and especially at the professional level, is good for a delicious spate of stories, ensued. And then it went up, to the sort of reviews I could only have dreamed of receiving. Ned wrote, ‘I always knew you would arrive at the age of thirty. Welcome.’

I remember standing, the last night of the first run of the opera, at what is called ‘the rail’ of the house, behind the audience, where the authors traditionally are allowed to pace, fret, enjoy and suffer, any performance of their work. Paul had already flown back to the coast. I was standing with Stephen, and we were gaging the reaction of the audience to the tragic finale, during which Wright mourns the love of his life, looking out over the sea of heads turned towards the stage.

Stephen said, ‘Wow.’

‘Eh?’ I said.

‘Look at them,’ he said, sweeping a hand over the audience, who were experiencing the last few minutes of the opera. ‘They’re all weeping.’

‘Yes, that’s where we want them,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s where they want to be. You did that. I did that. Paul did it. Communion. We all did it. Together.’

Originally from notes, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)

The Post

‘The post!’ shrieked Frances, rushing out of the room. An expectant pause, a temporary truce. ‘Two for my mother, one for Sophie Bentinck with a sweet blue seal of cupid — no, it’s a goat with wings — and one for Di, franked. I can’t make out the frank. Who’s it from, Di?’ — Post Captain, Patrick O’Brian

First Letters. My father occasionally sent me letters from Chicago, where he worked, addressed to Master Daron Hagen, Esquire, when I was very young because he knew that, flipping down the door of the mailbox and — sacred joy! — finding a letter there addressed to me, never failed to send me over the moon.

Returned Letters. A letter returned, unopened, is a poignant thing; one hardly knows what to make of correspondence returned in its entirety a decade or two after delivery. It has happened to me twice. During my first two years of college, I wrote a letter (sometimes two) every day to my high school sweetheart. (It helped that my student job was as a campus mailman for the University of Wisconsin, so I could frank the letters for free.) Years ago, she sent them all back to me. I’ve never opened the box, and probably never will; but they are safely stowed among my papers. Strangely, a few months before he died, my father sent me the two decades’ worth of the letters I had written to him and to my mother. I meant never to open that box either, but, just before placing it in the attic Upstate, I did; peered in, drew out at random four or five. Of course we scarcely see ourselves as others see us, or as we portray ourselves to our loved ones in prose, but the embarrassed, painful shock of recognition when I caught a whiff of the plucky, I’m-gonna-make-it tone, the rat-tat-tat enumeration of fleeting achievements, the callow attitudinizing, the ‘insider’ airs, was still as unexpected as it was acute. I quickly re-sealed the box and, shuddering, put it away.

Dead Letters. Every couple of days, the letter carrier puts in our box mail intended for the previous, now deceased, inhabitant of our apartment. Would it be more appropriate for me to write ‘Moved. Left no forwarding address’ on the envelopes (rather than the admittedly unsentimental ‘DEAD’ I customarily write in large, block letters) before placing them carefully atop the mailboxes for the carrier to take god-knows-where?

Colony Letters. How many times have I over the decades walked wistfully past the mail table in the linoleum room at Yaddo, pining for a letter? Who has not left a letter with a luminary’s return address on it sitting there for a few extra hours before retrieving it, hoping that the other guests will notice it? Or carried mail for others? (Once in Florida, Ned gave me a sheaf of letters to put into a mailbox just as we were about to drive somewhere, saying, 'In case we are killed on the road, these shall have been my last thoughts.' Summer after summer, at MacDowell and at Yaddo, charged by the deliciously acerbic Louise Talma with making sure that her letters went directly to the post office: ‘I don’t want people snooping into my affairs!’ she would grumble, Pall Mall dangling down from the side of her mouth.) That priceless epistolary commodity: a gossipy letter received while in residence from someone currently in residence at another colony.

Sung Letters. No wonder that opera composers, when looking for words of unimpeachable authenticity, first-person and emotionally-fraught, decidedly not meant for posterity, so often turn to letters: a clatch come to mind — Tatanya’s letter to Onegin; Baby Doe singing of her love for Horace; the letter aria in Tobias Picker’s Emmeline; Schoen’s letter to his fiancée in Lulu; the letter scene from Werther. I am not immune: my opera Amelia climaxes with the reading of a dead naval aviator’s ‘final letter’ to his daughter.

Lost Letters. Re-read so many times that it disintegrated in my hands, the most precious letter of my youth now exists only in memory. I’d loved her since the age of eight and had finally summoned the courage to tell her. I held her reply in my sweaty, ten-year-old fist. I turned the note over on its back, peeled it open, and read it, experienced for the first time how the entire universe can be transformed by three little words, written in the loopy handwriting of an eleven-year-old girl, I love you.

Originally from notes, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)

That's Alright, Baby

‘That’s alright, baby,’ she purred with that famous ‘just put your lips together and blow’ voice as I tripped on the stairs and fell to my knees at her feet. ‘Oh my, I’m sorry!’ I said, looking up at her. Chuckling, she asked, ‘Are you on your way to Lenny’s?’ My vocal chords no longer worked. ‘Rglksh,’ I croaked. She smiled and patted me on the arm as she passed. ‘Have fun,’ she said, rounding the corner.

It was a hot autumn day in 1987. As if being on my way to my first private lesson with Leonard Bernstein weren’t nerve-wracking enough, I had literally run into one of my all-time favorite screen goddesses on the stairs. I hadn’t bargained on that when I had drummed up the nerve to make the call, schedule the time with his assistant, thereby taking the maestro up on the invitation to study composition and conducting privately with him that he had extended a few weeks earlier at Tanglewood.

Nine years previously my mother, not knowing what to do with her son, who was composing up a storm, playing the piano all hours, singing, and conducting with a single-mindedness that was just plain unnerving (not to mention disappointing to my trigonometry and physics teachers, among others), wrote a mother’s plea for advice to Leonard Bernstein’s personal secretary, with a score and cassette tape of one of my orchestra pieces enclosed.

Mother never showed me the letter that she wrote in 1979. It must have been persuasive though, because Ms. Coates passed the materials on to her boss, who (in an example of his extraordinary generosity of spirit) replied enthusiastically. I was allowed to read his reply after my mother, who looked slightly stunned, had finished. ‘Yes,’ I read, astonished and trembling in our rural Wisconsin kitchen, ‘your son is the Real Thing, a born composer. I think he should come to New York and study at Juilliard with my friend David Diamond.’

A letter was sent to Diamond, of whom we had never heard; he wrote back that it was too late in the season for me to come to Juilliard. Instead, I went to Madison, where for the next year I wrote poetry, composed, practiced, and enjoyed being a Midwestern undergraduate at a Big Ten school. When it came time to audition at Juilliard, I sent in my scores, flew to New York, and presented myself for an interview with the school's distinguished composition faculty. 'Mr. Hagen,' Diamond delivered the committee's funereal verdict through gray pursed lips, 'I think you should go back to Wisconsin and develop your technique.'

Sweating, clad in a green leisure suit with a round-trip Milwaukee-New York-Milwaukee train ticket in the pocket, I thanked the gentlemen who had just passed judgment on me, excused myself, went to the nearest bathroom, and violently threw up. After I had collected myself, I headed home and spent another year in Madison. When it came time to audition for Juilliard again I applied instead to Curtis, and was accepted. After three years in Philadelphia, I returned to Juilliard as a scholarship recipient, and concluded at last my formal education as a student of David's.

My years in Madison, at Curtis and at Juilliard behind me, and now my brush with Bacall behind me, I reached the second floor of the Dakota and knocked on Bernstein’s door.

Originally from notes, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)

Ghost Light

Standing in the Piazza San Marco very early in the morning on a December day in 1989, bathed in that insalubrious, marrow-chilling, surgically gray mist that seems to simultaneously rise from and fall into the canals, I thought about a morning a few months earlier back in Manhattan when I'd risen and descended to the Korean deli in my bathrobe carrying a coffee mug in order to buy a Times and a scone, only to be tackled by a handsome young coked-out Captain America-type arbitrageur looking behind him waving a hundred dollar bill at his aggravated cabdriver and thanked God I was here, here instead on this island where I thought I'd live forever.

I’d arrived at the Santa Lucia Station on the first train of the day from Paris, having spent the past few months in Cassis, first at the Camargo Foundation, and then on my own when the fellowship ran out, busing tables for meals and living cheaply in a room above a restaurant on the harbor. The carabinieris goose-stepped ceremonially up to the flagpole in front of the basilica and raised Il Tricolore; there were no lights on in Caffé Florian, which wouldn’t open for hours; a pale, pretty woman in a red dress only partly concealed beneath a royal blue pea coat sped with her head down against the rain past the Campanile towards the aquamarine sea.

The moon burnt like a ghost light over the silent city; the rising sun looked like a blood clot suspended in olive oil beside the Chiesa di San Giorgio. I was twenty-eight, and entirely susceptible to what Mann called Venice’s “somniferous eroticism.” It seemed to my overheated imagination then to have become over the centuries solipsistic by design, to not exist except as a manifestation of what I (and legions of tourists, though I was determined to stay) imagined it to be, an empty stage in a closed theater; dead, but fecund because of all the things that had died there.

I’ve since returned many times to the Bride of the Sea, my favorite city on the planet, the Island of No Regret, La Serenissima. I know that my memories are not unique. Like countless others, I’ve sobbed in La Fenice, filled journals with true lies about myself, returned faithfully to my favorite pensione and observed the innkeeper's children growing up, welcomed the New Year by drinking too much champagne in Harry’s, fallen asleep in churches after dancing all night during Carnival, performed there over the decades the real-life, unmasked roles of innamorato, pedrolino and vecchio, read Ruskin while tracing his steps, shrugged when I didn't get it at the Biennale, experienced Stendhal's syndrome when I thought that I did, spontaneously bought flowers for a mother with her little boy on the Fondamente Nuove one sunny summer Sunday morning, then spent the rest of the day with them in the cemetery on the Isola di San Michele, surprised myself there by discovering tears on my cheeks while standing at the foot of the grave of Stravinsky. I've walked Lorenzetti’s walks, and missed everything because I was reading about it in his book; I've spent a hundred days happily losing myself and being lost, lost and not caring; avoided the old tourist traps, fallen into new ones; been given horns.

Venice has given me one memory that is unique and entirely my own, though: laughing in a stiff wind and the crisp Adriatic rain on the Zattere al Gesuiti, I experienced on an autumn afternoon in 2004 Venice's magical 'think-by-feeling-what-is-there-to-know' ability to transmute Life into Art in the arms of my wife, the love of my life.

Originally from notes, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)

The First Few Bars of Billy Budd

When I was fourteen, my older brother played for me his LP’s of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd. I remember being paralyzed like a mongoose by a cobra by the first ten seconds of music. For the next two hours, and for many, many hours afterwards as the piece worked its way into my heart, I stared at those slightly warped vinyl discs as they undulated on the turntable like surf at precisely 33 1/3 revolutions per minute.

In the first fifteen measures of the Prologue to Billy Budd, Britten evokes an entire universe — certainly he evokes Melville's 'infinite sea.' Mist, exquisite tonal ambiguity, the sense of being lost or torn between two worlds, two keys, Good and Evil, Right and Wrong, the Secular and the Divine, B flat major and B minor diads slipping against one another like waves against a 'fragment of earth.' Strings begin, ethereal, flautando, evaporate to reveal — momentarily — winds and brass in a held bi-tonal chord that shines bleakly like a harbor light (or is it a connective passage between the Now and the Hereafter?) telling us straight out that the argument’s afoot. The trumpet and horns enter on an A flat. Is that an A flat in (dark) B flat major, or is that a G sharp in (radiant) E major? Our ears don’t know yet. There is a martial stutter, a dotted rhythm, in the trumpet and horn: we’re told that this A flat / G sharp is going to be a battleground. The mists return, there is another clearing, and the brass settles onto the unexpectedly plush dominant (dry land?) of B flat major. Captain Vere’s home key has been established, the mists are revealed also to be those of memory as he begins to tell us his story. The motives begin piling on (Billy’s ‘flaw’ in the winds, the sequence of chords that accompanies Billy and Vere's offstage communion, the trill of prevarication) and, by the time Scene One begins forty-seven measures later, the fact that it begins in B major seems as inevitable as the outcome of the story.

Of course everything I've 'revealed' in the previous graph is common knowledge to most literate musicians. But that in no way diminishes the intense pleasure I've taken in working through this remarkable score (along with its partner, Peter Grimes) countless times over the past thirty years with family, friends, colleagues, students, singers, each time discovered something new. Each felicity emerges not like a gem in the mud, but like an overlooked cell in an organism.

Britten adheres scrupulously to this dialectic. There’s not a bar that seems somehow askew; there can’t be, since the entire musical argument of the opera is about the accommodation of opposing concepts. Ambiguity is made powerful because even the lay person can intuit that there are powerful tonal forces in competition with one another and that ambiguity itself, while possibly our lot, is not the most desirable destination.

The creation of opera of this caliber requires an array of skills and experiences that exceed in breadth and depth those of a composer who survives on gee-whiz enthusiasm, or pleasant tunes, or trendy exoticism, or savvy subcontracting, or a neophytic winning willingness to be told what to do by collaborators who know more about drama and opera than he does. The intellectual genius (too often taken for granted as facility or craft, because of his gift for concealing his craft) of Britten, like any truly great opera composer, is made manifest by his having created and sustained, and with such seeming ease (both in his head during the creation of the score and in the opera house, when it is brought to life by his colleagues), that necessary constellation of motives, gestures, key relationships, and philosophical concepts coupled with their musical manifestations for the entirety of the story in a way that paralyzes the complete newcomer and connoisseur alike.

Originally from notes, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)

Interlude: Knuckles and Digits

This morning I awoke with the first few bars of Beethoven’s Opus 49, Number 1 in my head. Morning coffee made and carried into the music room, I pulled out the well-thumbed second volume of complete sonatas and placed it on the rack, turning, for the first time in twenty-eight years, to page 355.

It is said that this humble (some say even insignificant) sonata, probably the easiest of them all to play, was written to be learned by students, and that its publication was an accident — that Beethoven’s accountant took it upon himself to publish it during one of Beethoven’s periods of financial distress. No matter, there before me sat the first page of my old friend; for like so many fledgling pianists before me learn it I did. The music was covered with fingerings and lesson notes, even an oily discoloration in the lower right hand corner of the page from having been so often turned.

When I placed my hands on the keys, I felt first the flush of familiar pleasure as my thumb played the upbeat to the first bar. Then a rush of motor memories, life memories, and admonitions from my beloved teacher, Ms. Ross came to me as my pinky began the second bar. The row of descending thirds in the left hand that enters next provoked rueful gratitude for the weeks spent practicing fingered thirds I was assigned when it emerged that I had never practiced them before.

And then, in the third bar, the crossed out fingerings (this was the Schenker edition) and the Schnabel fingerings that my teacher preferred I learn. ‘Why Schnabel’s?’ I asked. ‘Because he studied with Leschetitzky, who studied with Czerny, who studied with Beethoven,’ she answered.

The familiar outward rotation of the right hand in the second movement once carefully rehearsed as a teenager to serve as a moment of relaxation prior to a difficult passage triggered not just the thought ‘relax here’ but also a warm, clear memory of being stopped at that point during a lesson and being asked how much sleep I had had. I confessed that I had been for the past thirty-six hours copying the parts to a new orchestra piece. ‘Then, my dear,’ my teacher sighed, ‘go home, get some sleep, and come back tomorrow, because you can’t possibly expect your hands to do what your head and heart tell them to in this state. Not just the lack of sleep but the gripping of the pen for all that time has clearly short-circuited your coordination.’

Double bar reached, I closed the volume and placed if back on the shelf, thinking that there is still romance for me in the knowledge that my fingers had just traced pretty much the same patterns Beethoven’s did two centuries ago. Musicians all know that muscles remember, that motor memory is fashioned over time through the repetition of a given collection of motor skills and the ability of the brain to internalize it such that they become automatic; that once muscle memory is created and retained, there is no longer need to actively think about the movement and capacity is freed up for interpretation and expressivity.

This is the place I love the best — where the mystery of talent unfolds, knuckles and digits are forgotten, the poetic memory runs free, and the exhilarating music ‘sans commencement, sans fin,’ which this morning sounded to me like the Opus 49, Number 1, fills the the air.

Originally from notes, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)

Don't Let Gravity Win

'Fugue subjects,' said David Diamond, expertly sketching one on the sheet of music paper on the piano rack in front of us, 'are like snakes.' Over his shoulder I could see snowflakes whirling outside through a tall sliver of window. 'Every one of them has a head, a body, and a tail.' Chop, he slashed a line between the head and the body; chop, he slashed another between the body and the tail.

'Or like people,' I replied, 'with a head, a body, and a tale.' He laughed pleasantly. January of 1986 — the Regency Theater just around the corner was in the middle of its three week Truffaut retrospective; Marc Blitzstein’s Piano Concerto had just received its first performance in fifty years; I was one of David’s students, having a lesson at Juilliard.

'Or a Life,' he frowned, 'with a memorable Beginning, a Middle ripe for development, and an End….' He stopped writing. 'Now sketch a counter-subject.' I took the pencil from him and began adding my squiggles to the line above his. He pursed his lips. A sharp intake of breath: 'Something memorable,' he said, 'not ... mechanical.' I tried again, but all I could think was that Life, like 'a Pretty Girl, is like a Melody.' I giggled nervously.

'What’s so funny?' he asked.

'If Life is a Melody, then Energy must be the human compulsion to organize sound into Song,' I rallied, half-serious.

'And Force is the application of creative energy,' he smiled.

'And composition is Birth?' I asked.

'And pulse is Gravity,' he answered. 'Which makes entropy, or the lack of pulse, Death,' he said, taking the pencil. 'Look,' he circled the head of my counter-subject, 'this is memorable, but why not just take the tail of the subject, invert it, and use that as the head of the counter-subject?'

Chop, I thought: the snake devouring its tail. Chop. 'In my beginning is my end. Eliot,' I risked.

He chuckled. 'Right. The Ouroborus. My end is my beginning. Mary, Queen of the Scots. Earlier. Better,' he replied with finality as through the door the three light knocks of his next student indicated that my lesson was nearly up.

I carefully placed the enormous pages of my manuscript into the elephant portfolio in which I had brought it.

'Mr. Hagen,' he said, gravely, as I reached for the doorknob. I froze. 'Don’t let gravity win.'

Originally from notes, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)

Pushing Notes Around

Theme: Learning With My Students
In September of 1988 I took on for the first time the role of teacher when I accepted a job teaching music composition, ear-training and theory for two days each week at a liberal arts school several hours north of New York City called Bard College. To my surprise, I ended up serving on the faculty there for nine years — at least four years longer than I expected to. In retrospect, it is altogether possible — since during that time I never considered myself an Academic and had no interest in a career as one — that I may have learned during those years more about myself by teaching music than my students learned about music by studying with me.

Semester-long guest stints at other institutions over the ensuing years were a real blessing: they helped pay the bills and enabled me to decline situations and commissions that weren't right. These occasional positions also helped me to track the evolution of my feelings about teaching composition; they led me to conclude that, for many of my students, acquiring the practical skills of creating and notating music was a MacGuffin. What they really wanted to do was to Work Out Their Stuff. Talk. A composition teacher is not a therapist. I stopped accepting this sort of student.

Since then, I have continued to teach privately, maintained a small atelier of three or four adults. I've come to understand that a composition teacher who through self-absorption — however sincere and unwitting the self-love that fuels it — inspires his students to behave even in jest as acolytes is misapprehending his role. In other words, over time I have grown less interested in giving Life Lessons and more interested in the joys of simply teaching Craft.

Out in the Real World and dealing with the Remorseless Truths and Ceaseless Challenges of Life After Graduation, the fiercely dedicated young composers I have come to love working with most arrive at their lessons prepared to work like dogs, prepared if necessary to wrest from me the practical skills they need to survive. These determined ones, bursting with questions, demanding to be heard in the ear-splitting musical din of contemporary Manhattan, are as disinterested in projecting their father/big-brother/competitor-figure issues on to me as I am in working out my own issues on them. These students are an inspiration.

Variation One: Is Counterpoint Taught in Heaven?
Of all the subjects I've taught, my favorite is Counterpoint. The Process of studying and teaching Counterpoint is a perfect, pure metaphor for the Process that is living the Examined Life. It all begins with the cantus firmus — the Song of the Earth, the Life Song, the New Song, first taught us by example, then created on our own by grafting inspiration to memory, training and common sense.

The study of Counterpoint develops the skills required to pursue the painfully exquisite, life-long process of linking the ear and the heart and the intellect together to compose melodic lines to join that Deep Song. One's striving for the effortless-sounding Perfect Solution; the Inevitability of one's failure to find it; the requisite picking of oneself up and trying again; the sudden, unexpected discovery of a Way Forward; the coming to terms with Compromise; the search for Climax; the elegance of the interplay between melody's horizontal demands and harmony's vertical demands; the acceptance that melody generates harmony and not the other way around; the unavoidable conventional mundanity of the Final Cadence.

A composer knowingly, willfully chooses dissonance over consonance. If consonance is perceived as a state of Grace, then dissonance must be something else, and fourth species must be something which originates somewhere to the east of Eden. The Creation Story is hashed over again and again as counterpoint grows increasingly florid, dissonance is prolonged, tonality itself grows tenuous; the entire history of western music is reenacted by drawing notes on a staff.

Variation Two: Cast Thy Notes Upon the Waters
Although composers are just doing their job when they decide that a scrap of music needs to exist, it does require courage (or temerity, lack of self-awareness, or a benign form of narcissism) to write something down and then pass it to one's brothers and sisters with the expectation of a performance. A composer who creates pieces he wants carefully listened to has asked for the privilege of spending other peoples' time; if he spends that time with a certain degree of sensitivity not just to his own but also to his listener's needs, then he accumulates authority and sometimes even a reputation for authenticity.

Oh, so you are a composer my daughter plays the flute. I haven't heard of you or your music. I thought all composers were dead. You compose music that's sweet what do you do for a living? How much money do you make? So you write symphonies like Paul McCartney? That's nice honey but when are you going to get a job? Oh, so you write ... tonal music, how quaint ... do serious people still do that?

Meanwhile, we all look at the little clutch of notes on the piece of paper or computer screen in front of us and reach for everything we've learned, everything we've read, everything we've heard, everything we know we don't know and / or understand yet to quietly (or not), respectfully (or not) — write, erase, erase some more, and write something different — 'push the notes around' until we feel the subtle electric thrill that comes with the realization that the notes are finally just so and ready to sound and fade on their own merits.

Coda: Because Sometimes You Lead, Sometimes You Follow
My favorite cantus firmuses include a really tricky one by Fux, a feisty one by Mozart, a puzzling one by Bach, and one by Ockeghem to which I doubt I'll ever manage a decent solution. I bought a small sketch book that I still carry with me; on airplanes, in taxis, on buses, in hotel rooms, I've given these and countless other exercises a go. Every time I try, Music and I begin our dance anew: there are familiar strains, useful shortcuts, unpleasant surprises, trends, old habits, new moves, strategies, failures. These solutions are to their cantus firmuses what music is to my life.

Every note I've ever written derives somehow from something I've heard before; every one of my counterpoint solutions has probably flowed at some time from the pen of a musician in Vienna or Beijing, Los Angeles or Tokyo, London or Johannesburg, Moscow or Managua. Over the years, a handful of notes or a gesture from one of Ned's pieces may have ended up in one of mine; a slew of my notes have ended up in my students' works — some intentionally suggested by me for the sake of argument. I am aware that every opinion I've just written has been tendered by someone sometime somewhere else. So why go on?

Because I have never reached this particular solution before. I have never said these things in this way. Nobody else has said them exactly as I have. Many people can sing my songs. They can be sung in many ways. Everyone hears them differently. Because only I can compose my songs.

Originally from notes, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)

Moving On

We’re in the process of being uprooted and transplanted. There is dust everywhere. The grand piano will be moved Uptown today; the rest — still half-packed — surrounds us in dozens of heavy boxes that will be moved tomorrow.

Hundreds of books: The unexpected discovery behind and under books of precious artifacts long thought lost: a lucky composing pencil magically rematerializes after five years from behind the collected poems of Seamus Heaney; an unlucky Vegas poker chip turns up after a decade beneath a stack of Patrick O’brien novels; a small medallion of Saint Mark from the Basilica di San Marco in Venice twenty years ago falls out of a book documenting the work of Eva Hesse.

And scores: dozens of enormous, heavy, over-sized and floppy ozalid prints — still reeking of ammonia — of orchestra pieces composed and meticulously copied in india ink on vellum during the eighties that I can’t bring myself to throw out; hundreds of pocket scores, the paper falling to bits, covered in cues and marginalia; autographed scores; several scores borrowed twenty years ago from the library and accidentally unreturned; dozens of scores composed by former students under my tutelage; forgotten complimentary copies sent by my own publishers of works when they went into print; all those marvelous, inexpensive Dover reprints of the standard repertoire; a prized signed copy of Berio’s Sinfonia that I thought stolen a decade ago.

And files, discs, art: probably forty feet of personal and professional correspondence; another twenty of files containing contracts and work notes for every piece written since the seventies; thousands of archival compact discs and cassettes of performances; G’s numerous artworks; my mother’s sculptures; thirty years’ worth of art acquired from colleagues at colonies.

I'll most miss running around my adored reservoir, the pleasing exactitude and physical satisfaction of accomplishing 3.2 miles each day, the periodic small-talk with Albert Arroyo, the Mayor of Central Park, while stretching, the ritual of saying a little prayer while rounding the northeast corner followed by the perennial exhilaration of greeting Gotham by looking south over my left shoulder towards Midtown over the glittering water and chuffing loudly, season in and out, as above the trees sough and whisper.

I’ve been rooted in this neighborhood for nearly two decades. I scratched my initials into wet concrete twelve years ago just up the block; this morning I was surprised to find that they will still be there after I have moved on. The tender sapling that was planted across the street the year I first settled here has grown, like me, into a respectful, stubborn survivor.

Originally from notes, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)

Felice Eurydice

‘Ahi, caso acerbo! Ahi, fat’empio crudele!’ he implored, face livid with passion: ‘You’ve got to feel the music! Do you have any idea what these words mean? You’ve got to make them real!’ The six of us were crammed into a tiny practice room with our junior high school choir director, Wallace Tomchek. He was terrifying and inspiring, possibly mad. We sang some more, and disappointed him again. ‘Monteverdi lives. He is right here with us. This isn’t just music. This is something more. If you can’t understand that, I don’t want to hear you!’ Frustrated, he flew out of the room, swept to his office, slammed the door, and left us in silence.

Thirty years later, sequestered in rural Virginia, and working on my new opera, Amelia, the invitation to attend a concert performance at the Wintergreen Summer Music Festival of Monteverdi’s Orfeo in the version orchestrated by Respighi for La Scala in the early thirties was simply too good to pass up. As the Nymphs and Shepherds sang ‘Ahi, stele ingiuriose! Ahi, cielo avaro!’ I thought of that extraordinary teacher, his rages, and his silences.

As the soloists sang ‘Non si fidi uom mortale dib en caduco e frale…’ and the orchestra and audience listened, we sang the same words as children in my memory: ‘Let not mortal man trust in fleeting and frail happiness, for soon it flies away…’ It occured to me as I listened that it is in the hundreds of pages of manuscript paper sitting on the piano back in my studio that I put my trust.

As the second act ended, I couldn't help admiring the enormous love Respighi showed Monteverdi by limning Monteverdi’s original intentions with his own in the way composers traditionally have for learning and demonstrating their regard for each other’s work.

‘Art,’ Wally would rail to a roomful of adolescents craving acceptance, ‘is not a popularity contest!’ ‘…che tosto fugge, e spesso a gran salita il precipizio è presso.’ ‘… and often the precipice is close to the highest summit.’

My father brought Wally (who I had not seen for two decades) to Chicago to attend a revival there of my Shining Brow during the nineties and we visited beforehand — I snapped his portrait (left) as we had tea at the Hilton. I’ll forever treasure hugging him afterwards at the stage door, both of us weeping, and his words, ‘I am so proud of you.’ He swept away into eternal silence shortly thereafter, but I think about him every time I compose a few measures of music that remind me of Norman Dello Joio’s lovely 1948 art song There is a Lady Sweet and Kind, which he taught me in 1974, introducing me for the first time to a world in which poetry and music are inextricably intertwined.

And I thought of him with profound gratitude this afternoon, as the seed of understanding and love of opera that he planted in me thirty years ago blossomed on a Blue Ridge mountaintop, a decade after his death, and exactly four hundred years after Monteverdi composed it.

Originally from notes, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)

Eight Good Seconds

When a line of music and text is sung well by a gifted singer, the intricate interplay of training and technique, and the physical and emotional risk of live performance combine to shine a light on why all music must somehow arise from the composer's compulsion to sing.

The other evening I worked with some excellent young Chicago Conservatory musicians who were rehearsing "The Picture Graved Into My Heart," a song from my 1990 cycle Dear Youth, which is based on letters and diary entries written during the American civil war. I coached the final line ("Oh, the wondrous manly beauty") of it as follows:

The line should start low and soft as the singer sings the word "oh" in a normal voice. She shouldn't try to project the low C# — it's a pillow-talk intimacy. She should only add volume as she pushes the voice into the chest while sliding upwards through the minor ninth in a moaning portamento to the fermata-lengthened D.

A full-voiced throb should enter the voice then, when the singer can feel the diaphragm beginning to tug because her air is running out. We should feel some risk there: the audience intuits that she's running out of air as she shifts the voice into her head with the last of her breath; her body and the audience's bodies share not just the reflexive response to the human moan, but the terror of running out of air.

The flute should enter just at that moment, matching the timbre of the singer's voice. The wail should pass without fuss, normal voice and diction taking over as a breath is taken and the words "the wondrous manly" are clearly enunciated ("wondrous" is a word that speaks for itself; it doesn't need any help from the composer or the singer); there should be a slight stress, a little vibrato on the word "beauty," like the woody, thick vibrato you get high on the violin's G string, even a sob, before the last of the singer's air is gone and the line ends, not tapered off, but snuffed out.

Just as much and more is happening in eight good seconds of any well-wrought, well-performed piece of music.

Originally from notes, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)

Running Northwards

Running northwards along the shore of Lake Michigan in Grant Park, the sun just beginning to rise, the city of Chicago on my left, I flash on running alongside the Pacific Ocean in Nicaragua towards Casares eight months ago, and then on the deep rush of pleasure I have always felt, year in and out, upon rounding the northeast corner of the track encircling the Central Park reservoir.

My father walked these streets when I was a child; he would leave Milwaukee on Monday mornings and return home on Friday nights, each week slightly more unraveled from the fabric of our family’s life than the last. Sometime during the late sixties, my parents — while I, for whom they couldn’t find a sitter, waited in the car — went from one Loop hotel to the next for hours one awful night, looking for a beloved relative, a suicide.

Flying into O'Hare a few days ago, I read the section of Gore Vidal’s novel Hollywood — in which he so brilliantly braided together the narratives of his fictional characters with the historical narratives of Presidents Wilson and Taft — set in the Congress Hotel, where, over a century later, I am currently lodged. Usually I stay at the Hilton, in whose sitting room looking out on Michigan Avenue I always enjoy a cup of tea when I check in and think of Wallace Tomchek and my father; I laid eyes on both for the last time over tea in the same spot exactly a decade ago. Both are now gone.

I stop running and stand, panting, by the Belvedere Fountain, and remember the night in 1977 when I sat, dazzled, having just heard the Chicago Symphony perform Mahler live in Symphony Hall for the first time. And I remember the night in August of 1997, when Shining Brow was being revived at the Blackstone Theater a few blocks away: that night I stood in this same spot and looked up into the windows of the Cliff Dwellers Club and wept with relief that the previous decade of my life was over.

I've come here to serve for a semester as visiting composer at the Music Conservatory of the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University, which is housed in what was in the 1890’s the Auditorium Hotel. Yesterday, I worked with my students in a little studio in the Tower section (it can be seen on the far left in the picture), a floor or two below where Louis Sullivan’s office once perched, like an aerie above the lakefront, and where once he mentored a young apprentice named Frank Lloyd Wright.

Turning to look out over the lake, I suddenly recall standing in Denoon Lake in Wisconsin as a very, very young child. I looked back to the beach and watched my mother doing the Saturday Review acrostic, having spent a perfect summer day collecting interesting stones from the lake bottom and piling them on the dock for her to admire.

Clapping my hands together, stamping, loving life, and letting out a gentle whoop of joy, I continue running northwards.

Originally from notes, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)

The Heightened Awareness of Possibility

I.
Festival of San Sebastián, Diriamba, Nicaragua, 2005. We were privileged to be able to view the Mass from the choir loft above the front door of the basilica. Over three thousand singing people stood hip to hip inside, another three thousand shoulder to shoulder in the plaza outside. The statues of the saints covered in ribbons and silver Milagros were carried down the central aisle, preceded by elaborately costumed dancers cutting intricate steps, huge colorful flags waved by proud, immaculately dressed young men, deafening drummers, and pipers. The air trembled, despite the amazing heat and humidity. The hair on my neck and arms rose and stayed that way as, sixty feet above us, the bells began to peal. Below, the procession passed through the doors. I was permitted to help ring the bells. Ecstatically clutching the rope, flying a dozen feet up and down, I looked first one way to see waves of people reaching up to touch the saints as they passed in the plaza, then another to see the huge clappers inside the bells, and then another to see the old bullet holes pocking the belfry’s inner walls.

II.
December night, Philadelphia, 1981. Complete Quaker silence within the little empty diner at the corner of Eleventh and Spruce and in the weather-stilled city without. I sat at a table alone by the plate glass window, looking out at the enormous snowflakes falling straight down, holding open in my left hand a copy of Le Père Goriot and cupping a mug of hot coffee in my right. At midnight, a pre-war electric trolley skimmed soundlessly by on its tracks, windows steamed up by the passengers, giving them the color and texture of Hopper Nighthawks. A spray of sparks erupted from the point at which the wires above met the contact arm. In this silence I heard my own voice. If mother’s cancer had been diagnosed, I didn’t yet know it; the whole world was opening before me, and I did know that.

Originally from notes, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)

The Biggest Electric Train Set a Boy Ever Had

On the first page of my copy of Nicolai Rimsky Korsakov's Principles of Orchestration manual is carefully inscribed, in my ten-year-old's handwriting, my name and the date I bought the book. I found it at the Brookfield Square mall Walden Books around the same time that adolescence found me. A few days after buying it, I first encountered another important companion of my youth — one from whom I remained inseparable from the day I scooped him up like a little ball of orange sherbet in my palm at a yard sale in 1971 until the day I moved to Philadelphia in 1981, compelled to leave him with my mother on account of his declining health. I named him Rimsky, because I imagined at the time that the man who had written the book I had taken to keeping with me at all times like a key to a secret world would have looked — had he himself been a cat — like my new pet. Rimsky grew to become an enormously fat, foul-tempered, fiercely possessive carrot-colored tabby who hated everyone except me. (In 1982, the wonderful Philadelphia composer Kile Smith presented me with a kitten so tiny that she was barely there; I named her Clara (Schumann), and she lived with me for an amazing twenty-two years.)

Leaning against the elm tree at the northeast corner of the intersection of Meadow Lane and Elm Grove Road during the winter of 1971, waiting for the school bus alone, poring over the Korsakov, I could feel the pull of the secret world of Musicians. In retrospect, its allure was a combination of things: its contents seemed to offer a path toward beginning to understand the unfathomable language of music; it served, as an object in itself, as a talisman or icon from the world of music, helping to make real to me a world that was still out of my reach, but might one day welcome me; finally, simply handling the book made me feel special. Had the scriptures affected me as viscerally at that age, I'd have become a minister like my namesake Dorn instead of a composer.

That Halloween my sixth grade teacher Mr. Cummings allowed me to recreate live over the school's public address system Orson Welles' 1938 Mercury Theater production of War of the Worlds. I admired Welles' chutzpah and drive, his fearlessness, his hyper-kinetic creativity. (Had I known at the time that he had grown up only a few miles away in Kenosha I'd have been even more smitten.) If the passion for music came first, drama followed quickly and came with greater ease. Combining the two — becoming an opera composer — seems now to have been something of an inevitability. Several years later, conducting Suite for a Lonely City — my first publicly performed orchestra piece, in 1978 — with a local youth orchestra, I identified entirely with a comment made by Welles during production of his Heart of Darkness at RKO: 'This is the biggest electric train set a boy ever had!'

I still consult Korsakov's book. I have carefully annotated it for over thirty years; every time I've learned a new scoring trick, an interesting bit of hardware or repertoire trivia, a lovely doubling, I've made a note of it, along with the date and the title of the piece on which I was working. The book has become more than an icon or a key; it has become a document of my ongoing education as an instrumental composer, one I still use when composing, and when passing along information to the next generation of young composers. Some marginalia —

'Flügelhorn and solo cello in unison — the slice of the cello high on the A string and the warmth of the flügelhorn — sounds like soprano sax & perfect for when an oboe will not do'
'Tuba piano! doubled by low bassoon staccato sounds like pizzicato'
'Bass clarinet and violas, plus muted horn, when in crescendo, change color like a baritone executing voix mix; done high enough, it can sound like falsetto'
'Low marimba with yarn mallets, pianissimo, doubled with staccato alto flute, fortissimo — the air of the flute attacks, plus the slice of the mallet, sounds like pizzicato'
'Violins playing harmonics pianissimo, muted, flautando, doubled two octaves lower by solo flute, mezzo forte — astonishing overtones'

A magnificent electric train set, indeed.

Originally from notes, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)

Copying Music

'I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me.’ — Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi.

David Diamond had given me the impression that student composers at Juilliard were forbidden to take lessons with anyone except our principle teacher; so, meeting with Vincent Persichetti felt sort of illicit, dangerous – especially because of the way he leaned forward over the desk that separated us on which the full score of my first symphony was spread. It was the spring of 1985, and near the end of what had been a delightfully instructive lesson. His piercing, bird-like eyes shone as spoke, his sentences came out in short, conspiratorial bursts; his cigarette smoldered, forgotten, between his fingers, the long, drooping ash hanging from the business end was on the verge of falling off.

‘Golly,’ he said, you’ve got a handsome hand there,’ Vincent said, paging through my score one last time. He got to the point. ‘Arnie tells me you won’t take his class.’

Arnold Arnstein, appreciated and respected with quiet ferocity by an entire generation of American composers, including Bernstein, Diamond, Harris, Schuman, Barber, Piston, Persichetti, and Diamond, among others, was generally believed to be the finest living American music copyist. And he really was. Years of the work had destroyed his eyes, which were reamed in red and watery, hugely enlarged by the thick glasses he wore. He taught a class in music copying at Juilliard that all of us composers were required to take. I had been working already for five years as a professional copyist, and had some pretty heavy clients, including Diamond (a somewhat sadistic employer), Elliot Carter (whose wife Helen would telephone me very, very early in the morning to ask how the work was coming along), Ned (an excellent, patient employer who customarily paid other copyists more than me), and others, and so I had figured, with casual ignorance, that I should be exempted from attendance.

‘We’ve got to figure out some sort of way to work this out, Daron,’ said Vincent. ‘Arnie’s a great copyist, y’know; he could teach you a lot.’ He shot me a quick look. ‘But, but,’ he not so much stuttered as took quick gulps of air, ‘y’know, if you weren’t so talented, I’d say, uh, sure, y’know, go ahead, take these copying jobs. But, I think you’ve gotta not do that. Um, do anything, uh, be a garbage man; just stop copying other people’s music for them.’

‘But I need the money,’ I replied. The cigarette ash fell on my score, just as I had feared it would.

‘Yeah, I know. Oops,’ he said, brushing off the ash, ‘Sorry.’ A quick, sweet smile, ‘Plus, you get half the money up front and all that; then you have to work it off,’ he sighed, looked at the floor. ‘Well. Maybe I could ask Arnie to put you on his crew for this Menotti opera he’s copying right now. I hear it’s pretty wildly behind schedule and he needs extra guys. Then you could learn from him, y’see, and get paid at the same time, and not have to take his class. How about that?’

I remembered my first 'copying job' — extracting a piano solo part for the Yellow River Concerto in blue ballpoint pen for John David Anello and the Milwaukee Symphony during the seventies while I was still in high school. And then, my astonishment upon winning a job as a music copyist a few years later at the Fleisher Collection of Orchestral Music in Philadelphia when Sam Dennison, the curator, pulled from the shelves the same Yellow River part I had copied in Milwaukee. And then, working at Fleisher while a student at Curtis, spending hours in the stacks, combing through the collection of scores by South American composers copied by hard-working WPA chaps during the Depression — all exquisitely done, many in three or four colors, most never looked at again, let alone performed.

One of my work study jobs at the Curtis had been to copy parts for the school’s orchestra when necessary, to transfer bowings into them from the Philadelphia Orchestra string parts that Clint Newig – their coolly capable orchestra librarian – would send over. Another was to help Edwin Heilakka, the gentle, fascinating man who ran the Institute’s orchestra library, to organize Leopold Stokowski’s papers and scores – the maestro had just died and his widow had gifted them to the school. I remember opening some scores and having bread and butter letters from Aaron Copland, Bernard Herrmann, Samuel Barber, Ned, others slip out from where he had left them. My fingers practically tingled as I drew out of one of the boxes Stokowski’s full score of The Rite of Spring, which contained not just his clever orchestration changes in one color, but Stravinsky’s own modifications for performance specifically in the Academy of Music in another.

Twain: ‘Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!'

Computer software ‘engraving programs’ such as Score, Finale, and Sibelius have rendered mine the last generation of American concert music and opera composers who shall have had the opportunity to serve our musical apprenticeships in the ancient, traditional, and I think honorable manner of extracting, by hand, using quills, India ink, and vellum, the individual parts (which are all presented together in the conductor’s full score), from whence the musicians play the single lines the composer has crafted for them. We music copyists were like monks, running into one another at Associated Music just south of Columbus Circle when we stuck our heads out to pick up supplies, meet with our clients, share with our colleagues ‘secret saves’ and anecdotes from the trenches of our drawing boards.

I never took Arnie’s class, but I know that I should have. Despite Vincent’s advice I went on to serve as a copyist, proofreader, or editor on hundreds of projects over the next fifteen years. Sometimes I hear a piece of music on the radio I’ve never ‘heard’ before and realize that I copied the original set of parts for it during my salad days; it is even stranger to attend a rehearsal of one of my pieces and see yellowed, dog-eared, old rental library parts on the players’ stands next to mine for someone else’s piece that I don’t even remember having copied.

The money was pretty good, the work was always interesting; and there is absolutely no substitute for learning a piece by another composer from the inside out by extracting all the parts by hand. Every musician should do it once. It is possible to copy music mechanically, without really engaging intellectually – sort of like driving while having a conversation. Sometimes I did marathon jobs during which I would listen to every Mahler symphony in order, go back, and begin again. But, if one is really engaged during the process of copying another composer’s parts, one is actually ‘playing’ the composer’s process the way a pianist ‘plays’ a composer pianist’s piece – your brain and fingers are going through the same motions that the composer’s did when he wrote it. Several composers’ styles and methods grew so familiar to me over the years that I blush to admit that I could probably compose something in their style that would be pretty hard to single out as a forgery.

Twain, again: ‘Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a 'break' that ripples above some deadly disease? Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn't he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?’

My worst experience as a copyist was working for David Diamond: he had written a concerto for a soloist who, while in every other way professional, urbane, and musically sublime, hadn’t looked at his part very carefully before the first rehearsal; the conductor was frustrated by the fact that three or four errors had eluded my proofreader’s eye, but had only come to light piecemeal because not every player had attended every rehearsal. I recall the conductor spinning around and facing me from the podium at one point, shrieking, ‘Copyist! I thought you had corrected these parts!’ Everything turned out just fine. Correct them, I did: David had me change every one of the seventy or so printed parts by hand, using an electric eraser, over the course of the next few weeks to teach me, I suppose, a lesson. As far as I know, the piece hasn’t been performed since.

My loveliest experience as a copyist came one afternoon at the Fleisher Collection sometime in the early eighties: Karen Campbell, Kile Smith, Norman Stumpf, and I were all copying the parts to Louis Gruenberg’s enormous cantata Song of Faith, when I began softly humming the song ‘Another You.’ Norman picked up the tune, louder; Karen, who I could hear, but not see, began improvising on it an octave higher. Soon, the composer Romulus Franchescini joined in, and the saxophone-player copyist Bill (who actually preferred to be called Art but nobody knew that until twenty years after he retired) Daniels, and then Sam, growling in the bass, and finally, Kile, pattering a soft beat with a pen in one hand tapping a water glass and the other tapping his desk. After a little while, it died away naturally and we went back to work. It was such a moment of perfect grace that nobody ever mentioned it again.

Originally from notes, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)

Mock-musicological mouthfuls are hard to swallow - guardian.co.uk

Mock-musicological mouthfuls are hard to swallow
guardian.co.uk, UK - 3 hours ago
... third-rate sub-Boulez rip-off with a spot of "intervallic valency", and more damagingly, because you occlude the impact of really necessary new music ...

Bang on a Can All-Stars Seek Pianist

Here's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a pianist in the NYC area to get on board with one of the top new music ensembles on the planet: the Bang on a Can All-Stars are looking for a new pianist. Sequenza21/ has the complete job listing posted and applications are due November 14.

Below is a video of the Bang on a Can All-Stars with Thurston Moore (of Sonic Youth fame) playing Moore's Stroking Piece:

dburner.com/~a/TheCollaborativePianoBlog?a=Hiu83Q">

Originally from The Collaborative Piano Blog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)

Queyras and Tharaud Together Again

Debussy / Poulenc, Sonatas, Jean-Guihen Queyras, Alexandre Tharaud (released October 14, 2008) Harmonia Mundi HMC 902012 Online scores: Debussy -- Cello sonata, La plus que lenteTwo leading performers of the young generation of French classical musicians, cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras and pianist Alexandre Tharaud, will be playing in Washington in the coming week. In nearly back-to-back concerts

Originally from Ionarts, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

Palin … Ablinger

Spot the difference:

‘Palin song’ on Youtube

A Letter from Schoenberg by Peter Ablinger (video link).

(thanks to colint)

Originally from The Rambler, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

noise

a new relationship - 3 minutes

Originally posted by Neil Luck from Cut & Splice: From the Seven Days, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

"An earthy, jolly, quick-witted bear of a man..."

My profile of Larry Polansky is now out in the November/December Chamber Music magazine. The cover story is on Ned Rorem.

Originally from PostClassic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

My Back Yard in Autumn

One of the more anti-American parts of the country:

Originally from PostClassic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

20 Questions

Judging from several blog postings over the last month, the 2008/09 edition of thirteen ways could well be subtitled “8bb warts and all.” This entry is no exception….

Albert Imperato at our NY-based publicists, 21C Media Group, sent me a “20 questions” form for 8bb folks to fill out for a special feature on the Playbill Arts website. This Q&A will also appear at its own blogspot address. Three classical musicians have been featured so far: pianist David Greilsammer and composers Ricky Ian Gordon and Jake Heggie.

Below, the questions and our answers (in “score order”):

ang="EN-US">20 QUESTIONS WITH…EIGHTH BLACKBIRD

1. A few works of classical music that you adore:

TIM: Gosh. Current obsessions: Sibelius symphonies and tone poems; Bach cantatas and passions; Mozart operas; Bruckner symphonies

MICHAEL: Mahler Fifth Symphony; Beethoven Sixth Symphony; Rite of Spring

MATT: Shostakovich Fifth Symphony; Mahler Sixth Symphony; Bach Sonata in C Major for solo violin

NICK: Rite of Spring; any Mahler symphony; Mendelssohn chamber music, John Adams A Flowering Tree

MATTHEW: “Goldberg” Variations. It’s possible that I adore the piece as a direct result of Glenn Gould’s performance on his 1955 recording. See #2.

LISA: Mozart Piano Concerto No. 21 in C Major, K. 467; Bartok, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste

2. Classical music recordings that you treasure:

TIM: Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Handel Arias. There is no close second.

MICHAEL: Harold Wright and the Boston Chamber Players: Mozart and Brahms quintets

MATT: Emerson Quartet playing Bartok

NICK: Sibelius Second Symphony (Bernard Haitink, Concertgebouw); Emerson Quartet playing Bartok String Quartets; Kronos Caravan; Randall Avers Vistas

MATTHEW: “Goldberg” Variations (Glenn Gould, 1955)

LISA: Barber piano sonata (Vladimir Horowitz); “Goldberg” Variations (Glenn Gould, both early and late recordings)

3. Favorite non-classical musicians and/or recordings:

TIM: Andrew Bird, Beirut, New Pornographers, Neutral Milk Hotel

MICHAEL: Sara Evans, Julie Andrews

MATT: Eddie from Ohio, Looking Out the Fishbowl

NICK: Q-Tip, James Brown, Nelly, Curtis Mayfield, Snoop Dogg, Tribe Called Quest, Missy Elliott, Bill Evans, Ella Fitzgerald, Brad Mehldau, Chick Corea, Luciana Souza, Prince, Red Hot Chili Peppers

MATTHEW: I’ve thought about this for three days, and it’s way too overwhelming a question. Do you have any idea how much music there is out there?

LISA: Elliott Smith, self-titled album; Peter Gabriel, us; Radiohead, KidA; The Beatles, White Album

4. Music that makes you cry – any genre:

TIM: Mahler and Bruckner slow movements; anything by Beirut or Andrew Bird

MICHAEL: Gustavo Santaolalla: Brokeback Mountain soundtrack

MATT: Gustavo Santaolalla: Brokeback Mountain soundtrack

NICK: Sibelius Second Symphony; Mahler Second Symphony; Mahler Sixth Symphony, some Brazilian tunes

MATTHEW: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Helplessly Hoping

LISA: Peter Gabriel, The washing of the water; The Beatles, Blackbird

5. Definitely underrated work(s) or composer (s):

TIM: Any and all new classical music.

MICHAEL: Leoš Janáček

MATT: Stephen Hartke

NICK: Arnold Schoenberg (esp. Pierrot Lunaire), Felix Mendelssohn, Aaron Kernis, Stephen Hartke

MATTHEW: Stephen Hartke

LISA: Almost all living composers are underrated.

6. Possibly overrated work(s) or composer (s):

TIM: Rimsky-Korsakov, Sheherazade

MICHAEL: Schumann. Definitely Schumann.

MATT: Bruckner

NICK: Orff, Grofe, Schumann

MATTHEW: Beethoven Ninth Symphony (a remarkable work of genius, but shouldn’t be heard EVERY holiday season…c’mon already!)

LISA: Mussorgsky, Pictures at an Exhibition (orch. Ravel)

7. Live music performance (s) you attended – any genre – that you’ll never forget:

TIM: Philip Glass Satyagraha at the Met, 2008. I cried like a baby.

MICHAEL: I have forgotten.

MATT: Minnesota Orchestra, Sibelius Sixth Symphony, June 2008

NICK: Andor Toth Sr. (violin) and Andor Toth Jr. (cello) in a duo recital at Oberlin, OH, in the mid-1990s

MATTHEW: Ella Fitzgerald in an outdoor amphitheater. It started raining, so she improvised a transition into Singing in the rain and her combo followed her lead; then it rained harder. It was pure magic.

LISA: Bob Dylan in the tiny main piazza in Lucca, Italy, July 1998; Bob Spano conducting the Oberlin Chamber Orchestra in Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, October 1992

8. A few relatively recent films you love:

TIM: No Country for Old Men; Man on Wire; Persepolis

MICHAEL: “Films”? I watch “movies.” I LOVE sci-fi: The Matrix (only the first one); 2001: A Space Odyssey

MATT: Brokeback Mountain; Wall-E; Michael Clayton

NICK: Persepolis; Letters from Iwo Jima; Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay

MATTHEW: From the Earth to the Moon (produced by Tom Hanks). In our current political climate, it’s nice to be reminded that it’s possible for a government to accomplish something truly remarkable.

LISA: No Country for Old Men; Ne le dit a personne; The Lives of Others; Talk to Her

9. A few films you consider classics:

TIM: The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover; Psycho; Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf

MICHAEL: 2001: A Space Odyssey

MATT: Babe; The American President; Aliens

NICK: Pulp Fiction; Amadeus; The Godfather; It’s a Wonderful Life, Princess Bride; The Wizard of Oz

MATTHEW: Almost Famous (too recent to be a classic?); Raiders of the Lost Ark

LISA: To Kill A Mockingbird; Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

10. A few books that are important to you (and why):

TIM: Galapogus, Kurt Vonnegut (it works like my mind does); Radical Chic, Tom Wolfe (journalism gone wild)

MICHAEL: The Singularity is Near, Ray Kurzweil (It’s terrifying and exciting. Kurzweil has been a fairly accurate predictor of the future of humans and technology which fascinates me.)

MATT: Consider the Lobster (loved the McCain and 9/11 essays); The Time Traveler’s Wife (identified with the characters so deeply)

NICK: Jitterbug Perfume (Tom Robbins’ use of language convinced me in my teens that a book could be funny, titillating, and masterful all at the same time); Lolita (also for the language. Arguably the best novel in English, and written by a guy for whom it was his second language. Unbelievable.)

MATTHEW: When I Grow Up I Want To Be Me, Sandra Magsamen (read this to your daughter and you’ll understand)

LISA: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer; Upon the Head of a Goat, Aranka Siegel; The History of Love, Nicole Krauss

11. Thing(s) about yourself that you’re most proud of:

TIM: My curiosity and my job

MICHAEL: I own my own home and don’t own a car.

MATT: Dependability

NICK: My marriage and my career

MATTHEW: My kids

LISA: my chutzpah; my forthrightness

12. Thing(s) about yourself that you’re embarrassed by:

TIM: The fact that I am very disorganized.

MICHAEL: I don’t read for pleasure.

MATT: tendency to obsess, inability to dance

NICK: My indecisiveness, my occasional shyness and/or mousyness, and that I don’t have as much energy as I’d like

MATTHEW: I turn up the volume when I hear a song by Avril Lavigne.

LISA: Hmmmmm…there’s not much that embarrasses me…

13. Three things you can’t live without:

TIM: Bach, love, NPR

MICHAEL: My computer, beer, ear plugs.

MATT: Schedules, ice cream, Spore

NICK: My wife, my career, and beer

MATTHEW: [Earnest:] My wife (yes, I realize that’s only one thing); [Funny, but true:] My truck, sleeping pills, meat.

LISA: My family; music; good food

14. “When I want to get away from it all I…”

TIM: …grab my iPod and go for a long jog.

MICHAEL: …lock the door and play World of Warcraft and/or watch HGTV.

MATT: …play video games.

NICK: …take a trip with my wife, to Thailand, Japan, Puerto Rico, or anywhere that isn’t the US.

MATTHEW: …don’t check email.

LISA: …shut off my cell phone, stop wearing my watch and go immerse myself in nature.

15. “People are surprised to find out that I…”

TIM: …watched two whole seasons of The Bachelor

MICHAEL: …like camping.

MATT: …play video games

NICK: …am actually LESS messy than my wife

MATTHEW: …ever check email

LISA: …have climbed to the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

16. “My favorite cities are…”

TIM: …Melbourne, New York, London, Chicago.

MICHAEL: …Chicago, Portland, Vancouver.

MATT: …New York, San Francisco, Chicago.

NICK: …Madrid, Florence, Paris, Amsterdam, Seattle, Chicago, sometimes New York.

MATTHEW: …Passage Key, FL (its not so much a

city as it is a secret…)

LISA: …Florence, Italy; New York, NY.

17. “I have a secret crush on…”

TIM: …Juliane Banse, soprano.

MICHAEL: …a New York-based double reed player. Shh, don’t tell him.

MATT: …Rene Russo.

NICK: …Padma Lakshmi, the host of “Top Chef” on Bravo.

MATTHEW: …Anne Boleyn, as portrayed by Natalie Dormer in The Tudors. (This is really much more about my passion for historical fiction than it is about Ms. Dormer. No, really, I’m serious…)

LISA: …an old fling from high school.

18. “My most obvious guilty pleasure is…”

TIM: …buying CDs. Lots of CDs.

MICHAEL: …World of Warcraft.

MATT: …mint chip ice cream.

NICK: …watching The World Series of Poker on ESPN.

MATTHEW: …Rice Krispie Squares.

LISA: …a lovely pedicure.

19. “I’d really love to meet…”

TIM: …Ron Elving and Ken Rudin.

MICHAEL: …Ian McCartt.

MATT: …Roger Federer.

NICK: …Gautama Buddha, Jesus, Gustav Mahler, Salman Rushdie, Tom Robbins.

MATTHEW: …Lynn Davis.

LISA: …Rafael Nadal.

20. “I never understood why…”

TIM: …classical music became “old people music.”

MICHAEL: …things that taste so good need to be so bad for you.

MATT: …people say they’re going to do things and then don’t

NICK: …people voted for George Bush, especially the second time.

MATTHEW: …it’s possible to arrive somewhere before you departed when traveling internationally. Time zones are not rational. Just thinking about it makes my brain hurt.

ang="EN-US">LISA: …any half-way intelligent person could ever believe in Creationism.

Originally posted by Tim from thirteen ways, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 02:12 PM | Comments (0)

Richmond reviews

Our fifth year (how time flies!) as Ensemble-in-Residence at the University of Richmond began with a concert in which 8bb collaborated with New York/Berlin-based laptop artist and composer Dennis DeSantis.

Two reviews of the Wednesday night concert have appeared. Clarke Bustard, who was the Richmond Times-Dispatch classical music reviewer for almost four decades, has written a review on his Letter V blog. Here is an excerpt:

By his own reckoning, DeSantis was “unobtrusive” in his sonic additions to “Powerless,” a four-movement piece he wrote in 2001. The composer electronically enhanced echo effects in string and wind instruments’ responses to jazz-inflected piano figures, compounded the density of the piece’s second movement, “Eel,” and enhanced a cello drone in the third movement, “Egis.”

As the program progressed through a set of pieces from eighth blackbird’s Grammy Award-winning album “Strange Imaginary Animals,” DeSantis’ presence grew. He added subtle atmospherics to the already subtle “evanescence” of Gordon Fitzell (a 2004 adaptation of Fitzell’s 2001-vintage “Violence”), and enhanced resonation and underlined instrumental sound effects in Steven Mackey’s “Indigenous Instruments” (1989).

The Richmond Times-Dispatch today printed a very positive review by Walt Amacker. Some excerpts:

Seldom comes the time when a cello and a bass clarinet play accompanied duets one-half tone apart for extended periods without most listeners wanting to tear out their hair. The folks in the University of Richmond’s artists-in-residence sextet eighth blackbird can do it and make you want to hear more…

Pulling from its Grammy Award-winning CD, “strange imaginary animals,” 8bb gave all the tracks to DeSantis and asked him to use them to create a computerized version of the CD. It was remarkable, sounding almost like a dancetrack for something that a Philadanco or an Alvin Ailey could fiddle with. The piece was officially labeled “strange imaginary remix.”…

More worldwide stages graced, more commissions set forth, four CDs and their first Grammy. It hasn’t taken many years, but the hard work is fanatically obvious.

Originally posted by Tim from thirteen ways, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 02:12 PM | Comments (0)

Richmond remix

Above, Maestro DeSantis at work on his funny electronic gadgets.

This was the second time we had given the strange imaginary remix show a good rock-solid go. The first was in Chicago, at our second concert in the Harris Theater, and you can read about the sometimes stressful preparation for that show. Even on the night of that performance we had little idea of the quality of the show, but since the performance was very well received by critics and audiences at the time it seemed natural to bring it to our beloved second home, Richmond VA (where we are Ensemble-in-Residence).

Why do we love doing this show? First and foremost, working with Dennis is far too much fun: he is unfailingly polite, incredibly skilled and a very flexible collaborator. Also, the works on the program are of a consistently high quality (not something I can say about all of our concerts!) and adding electronics to the mix can draw in ears that are more comfortable with that sound-world than with the “old-fashioned” world of all-acoustic programs.

Below, the Alb mid-croon at the end of the Radiohead tune we cover for this program, Dollars and Cents. It’s fascinating to watch such an unfailingly intense performer mimic the somewhat alien world of the laid-back indie-rock moan.

We fought with feedback problems in Camp Concert Hall’s (gorgeous for acoustic instruments but problematic for electronics) acoustics, but the biggest hiccup came when Herr DeSantis, who is a very careful, controlled, organized person, found that his electrics were failing. “In case it all shuts down in the middle, are there any pieces that you can’t get through without me…?”

Below, my attempt at an unposed, caught-on-the-wing post-concert photo of the gang: (l to r) the Ing, the Duv, the Phot, the Alb, the Mac, the Kap and the DeSantis.

This was a positive week in another, more unexpected, way. Alexander Kordzaia, the Georgian-born conductor of the University of Richmond Orchestra, has done wonders with his charges since he began at U of R just one year ago. The ensemble still has plenty of problems, and relies on a few wind and brass “ringers” from other universities, but I can say with great pride that University of Richmond truly has a fully-functioning orchestra with great potential! They played a concert on Friday night, and the fact that I look forward to hearing the recording shows you how far they have come. Good onya Alexander, and let’s hope the best is yet to come!

Originally posted by Tim from thirteen ways, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 02:12 PM | Comments (0)

Aberdeen's centenary celebrations for French composer - Media Newswire (press release)

Aberdeen's centenary celebrations for French composer
Media Newswire (press release), NY - 17 minutes ago
... St Hedwig's Cathedral in Berlin, giving a recital of Messiaen's music in St Machar's at 7.30pm and in King's Chapel on Wednesday, October 22 at 5.15pm. ...

Can't tell the players without

Here's something to while away your entire day: while trying to track down a quotation source, I stumbled across the fact that Google Books includes, for some reason, three runs of Boston Symphony Orchestra programs from the 1910-11, 1917-18, and 1918-19 seasons. You could be diligent and read all the Philip Hale program notes, but me? I'm too busy perusing vintage ads. The Roland Hayes recital above (with special guest Harry T. Burleigh—I absolutely would have been in line for tickets to that one) dates from 1917. The two below come from the 1918-19 programs, amidst a plethora of ads pitching housewares to returning soldiers.

And here's a couple from the 1910 season—first, accessories for the well-dressed concertgoer:

And finally, commercial launderers and longtime BSO program-book advertisers Lewandos:

Yes, their corporate image is a cat scrubbing baby chicks in a washtub and then pinning them up by their wings to dry. Stare at that long enough, and the advent of Expressionism starts to make a lot more sense, doesn't it?

Originally from Soho the Dog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Oct 22, 2008 at 02:11 PM | Comments (0)

New Music reBlog

October 26, 2008

The Barbirolli experience

Copland will rock you

Noise: the ultra-pretentious edition

Political music

Come out of her

October 25, 2008

Herreweghe's Bruckner Edition

Me on Twitter

Harrison Birtwistle, "An Imaginary Landscape"

Trapped in the Chinese Internet

Fugwhump Presents “Blps & Frts CC”

Colin Currie/Nicolas Hodges - musicOMH.com

The "Intimate Art" of Chamber Music - Pasadena Now

Miguel Harth-Bedoya's 'Inca Trail' -- to where? -- in Chicago

Here is the full version of my Saturday, October 25, 2008 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com review of the Thursday, October 23, 2008 Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert conducted by Miguel Harth-Bedoya with Jennifer Warren-Acosta and Kenneth Olsen as soloists.

Baffling 'Inca Trail' veers off course

All About Jazz Reviews

Jazz Listings from the New York Times

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Lou Reed Goes Back to “Berlin”

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PSF Records New Releases

Avant Garde Project 123: US Electronic IV, Columbia-Princeton

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Music Lessons - New York Times

Guitar Hero, DDR, and Music Education

Zephyr Wind Ensemble at Dorset County Museum - this is hampshire.net

More Head Than Toes: Septime Webre's 'Genius2' - Washington Post

BSO ingeniously showcases new styles from French composers - Boston Globe

HALLELUJAH JUNCTION - New York Times

`Infinita' to be staged in Paris - Jakarta Post

10 Posts in 10 Hours #9: Freelancing Resources

10 Posts in 10 Hours #10: RCO Offers Free Downloads Until November 24

10 Posts in 10 Hours #6: Two Composers of New Canadian Art Song

10 Posts in 10 Hours #7: Canadian and American Orchestral Websites Compared

10 Posts in 10 Hours #8: Studio Policies Galore

All Nite Soul 2008

Sonic Conversations

Composers' Forum

Jason Silver Live in Hamilton

Violin Futura - Contemporary Solo Violin Project

October 24, 2008

Autumn cleaning - Alchymy CD-R sale.

Dance Listings - New York Times

10 Posts in 10 Hours #4: Koldofsky Benefit Memorial Recital

10 Posts in 10 Hours #5: Auditions Schmauditions

Steve Martin Meets Aaron Copland (And Encounters Black Thongs)

Principal products of Padania

The Op. 111 Club

Beethoven! Beethoven is IT, pure and simple, do you understand? - Macleans.ca

Jacobs School of Music given “treasure trove” of rare music - Indiana University

From Middle Earth to Place des Arts? - Barre Montpelier Times Argus

10 Posts in 10 Hours #3: Hive Call for Career Options Updates

10 Posts in 10 Hours #2: Guerrilla Musical Theatre Performance in London's Stansted Airport

10 Posts in 10 Hours #1: The 5 Browns Play Stravinsky--in the Desert

The Composers Chair, Episode 4: Veronika Krausas

Agusti Fernandez and Evan Parker in Tel Aviv

Musique Machine Reviews

The Squid’s Ear Reviews

Embryo riot ! Cambreling Messiaen Poemes pour Mi

Elgar and RVW conference

The Sixteen celebrate their 30th anniversary in 2009!

My Blog on the Huffington Post

What Part of 'Soderbergh's 3-D Rock 'n' Roll Cleopatra Movie' Don't You Understand?

Guns N' Roses — And Soda

New culture (2)

UNCSA Symphony Orchestra Concert on Oct. 25 to Celebrate Four ... - Kudzu Gazette

The show goes on - Buffalo News

Four-star quartet - ChronicleLive

Stockhausen Tribute Concert in LA

Ionarts at Large: Widmann World Premiere with Mariss Jansons and the BRSO

Success or Failure?

So Are We 'In' For The 'Long Haul'?/Are We Creating With Purpose?

Pianist captivates audience - Ripon Today

Experimental Piano Series’ Inaugural Concert - Jazz Police

KFJC Reviews

Eclectic Improvisers Release First Disc and Play Firehouse 12

Stockhausen Memorial Concert Saturday - LAist