New Music reBlog: July 2009 Archives

« June 2009 | Main | August 2009 »

July 31, 2009

An Oasis Of New Music At The Cabrillo Festival - NPR

An Oasis Of New Music At The Cabrillo Festival
NPR
Over the life of the festival, we've hosted many of the greats, from Aaron Copland and John Cage to John Adams, Arvo Part and Elliott Carter. ...

Originally from lutoslawski OR xenakis OR boulez OR Dutilleux OR ligeti OR "elliott carter" OR stockhausen OR "steve reich" OR "tristan murail" AND music - Google News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 31, 2009 at 11:11 PM | Comments (0)

A group that brings shock tactics to opera - Financial Times

Financial Times

A group that brings shock tactics to opera
Financial Times
The Barcelona theatre group has joined forces with English National Opera to bring theatrical flair to György Ligeti's 1978 opera Le Grand Macabre, ...

Meet the Composer Announces the Results of its 'NEW MUSIC STIMULUS ... - Broadway World

Meet the Composer Announces the Results of its 'NEW MUSIC STIMULUS ...
Broadway World
The awardees are a distinguished group and range from avant-garde pioneers such as Steve Reich and Meredith Monk to young firebrands Nico Muhly and R. Luke ...

Summer Music West 2009: the first chamber music recital - Examiner.com

Examiner.com

Summer Music West 2009: the first chamber music recital
Examiner.com
In this case the music was the set of variations that Witold Lutoslawski composed on the same theme that Sergei Rachmaninoff had used for his Paganini ...

Wooster Collective: Catchin' Up With Club Animals [del.icio.us]

"my brand new project, the "candy crack delivery service", is a new thing where i personally hand deliver a 100 % sugar fake crack rock to people's houses in the brooklyn areas of williamsburg and greenpoint. i'm going to be doing it twice a month on the weekend. i make the crack from broken sugar cubes and then color and flavor them with snow cone syrup and then drop them in a little crack bag which goes for $1 per bag."

Originally posted by pbailey68 from paulbailey.us (beta), ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 31, 2009 at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

He says his stays here have provided him with an opportunity to ... - Vermont Public Radio

Vermont Public Radio

He says his stays here have provided him with an opportunity to ...
Vermont Public Radio
(Reich) "After wearing earplugs in my ears for thirty years (laughs) and also having rented in Vermont I realized I could write more music and as good or ...

60x60 Dance @ Galapagos, NYC (4/7/09) [Drake/Belman]

Number 4 from 10 Etudes for Balloon
Music: Aaron Drake
Dance: Rodger Belman

notes:
Aaron Drake is a composer based in Los Angeles, California. He began studying piano at age five and has a rounded repertoire of classical and modern music. Drake earned his BM in Composition from San Francisco State University and studied at the Staatliche Hochschule fur Musik in Trossingen, Germany. Drake also engages in interdisciplinary projects such as kinetic sculpture, sound installation and video. 10 Etudes for Balloon explores virtuosic balloon playing techniques. Like other Etudes, each balloon etude employs at least one technical or compositional gimmick. Etudes may be performed on any balloon, regardless of size or color.

Rodger Belman, choreographer, teacher, performer and reconstructor of Laura Deanâs masterworks; performed with Laura Dean Musicians and Dancers, Twyla Tharp, Joy Kellman, Freefall, Kristin Jackson among others; choreography recently seen at Kumble Theater, American Dance Festival (ADF), Peck Mainstage Theatre-Milwaukee and throughout North Carolina with NC Dance Festival Tour 2007; NYC area venues include Dixon Place, Dance Space (DNA), Solo Arts Group, Rose Gallery, Sony Plaza, McBurney Chelsea Center; restaged Laura Deanâs masterworks for universities throughout US and for ADF Past/Forward Program; Assistant Professor at Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus; faculty at ADF Six Week School; MFA-University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Dancers: Anjuli Bhattacharyya and Kate McCusker

Originally from 60x60, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 31, 2009 at 02:11 PM | Comments (0)

Get Electric with annual music festival - Collingwood Enterprise Bulletin

Get Electric with annual music festival
Collingwood Enterprise Bulletin
Other highlights include New York's Lukas Ligeti, Toronto vocalist Katie Stelmanis, and the Ambient-Goth- Industrial-Metal-Opera-Rock-Spoken- Word of ...

MTT Radio Update

Last week, we launched an experimental page called MTT Radio. Here’s an update:

Over 1,000 unique visitors this week.
and some unsolicited news coverage on CNET.
Some great songs have been uploaded!

Here are a few requests for contributors:

Please, please make sure you own and legally control any song you upload.
Please follow all the instructions carefully.
Please note the difference between categories (significant genres) and tags (relevant keywords).
Please add a Title to every post (Song Name by Artist Name). We will be showing this title soon.

Once again, some of the songs are excellent. It would be great to see some comments under some of the songs. It takes 30 seconds to register to leave a comment under a song.

Originally posted by Music Think Tank from Music Think Tank (primary) RSS, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 31, 2009 at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)

Who writes new music for the symphony nowadays?

Here at NNM, I'm curious if there are composers writing new music symphonies and what the reception has been like.

Originally from Discussion Forum - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 31, 2009 at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)

O' Tomorrow, O' Art Thou?

Art Thou ImprovFriday tomorrow? Yes. In that case make sure to plug in your cords and gather your gear into its proper place.

Next, make sure you record your improv. Finally, make sure you post it somewhere, but I highly recommend posting it here in this thread as well as last Friday Twitter tweetered out on us with a couple people (tech errors of late).

Also, remember, art thou, that I want ImprovFriday to have an open appeal and, hence, if art thou posts a work, participants should feel free to download and mix it up. Perhaps we will make some guidelines in the future, but lets see how it goes.

Lastly, please post any questions to this thread as I receive an email whenever a post lands here. Oh yeah, and make sure to post the work with the description of improvfriday. For example:

Twitter: JC is___ impro for #improvfriday
Facebook: JC is impro for ImprovFriday

That's how I find the works to link to my blog program with the audio links on Sat.

Originally from Discussion Forum - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 31, 2009 at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)

Beethoven Tweets

In today's Washington Post: The NSO Twitters Beethoven's "Pastoral" at Wolf Trap, by Anne Midgette. My basic argument in this piece is that the classical music field tends to fear so-called "new technology" even as it attempts to embrace it, because the field's general idea about "new technology" isn't actually very sophisticated: it usually equates it with video projections during concerts and/or anything related to the Internet. Whereas there are so many things that could be done with technology to enhance the concert experience in various ways; and some groups really are exploring that. (I've just given away the gist of the thing, but go ahead and read it anyway.) So here's the question: what is your view of the use of new media and new technologies in concert? Are you concerned that this kind of thing leads us down the slippery slope toward the pablum of the Classical Brits

Originally from The Classical Beat – Classical Music Forum – washingtonpost.com, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 31, 2009 at 12:30 PM | Comments (0)

Geffen to release album featuring Benedict XVI - The Associated Press

BBC News

Geffen to release album featuring Benedict XVI
The Associated Press
The pontiff's as-yet-untitled album also includes eight original pieces of contemporary classical music, Geffen/Universal said. The pope is accompanied by ...
Let it be: Benedict sings, speaks on new albumWZTV
Pope poised for Christmas chart battleBelfast Telegraph

all 228 news articles »

Originally from "contemporary classical" | "avant garde" music - Google News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 31, 2009 at 12:29 PM | Comments (0)

Lutoslawski on wheels

Julio Cortázar's novel Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, which tells the story of a road trip across France in a Volkswagen motor home, featured in my recent post On the road with Lutoslawski. And in a neat piece of synchronicity our recent road trip across France took us to a campsite where we found these two wonderful examples of Lutoslawski on wheels. A couple of years back we discovered Robert Schumann on wheels in Germany. While you can read aboout the Majic Bus here.

Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 31, 2009 at 08:12 AM | Comments (0)

Her advice? Take a 'huge breadth' - Boston Globe

Boston Globe

Her advice? Take a 'huge breadth'
Boston Globe
The weeklong sequence of concerts and discussions was devoted solely to the music of Elliott Carter, a series lovingly programmed by James Levine, ...

Ups and downs prevail as Round One ends at the 2009 Cleveland ... - The Plain Dealer - cleveland.com

The Plain Dealer - cleveland.com

Ups and downs prevail as Round One ends at the 2009 Cleveland ...
The Plain Dealer - cleveland.com
10, breathing inventively with the music, and braved the 12-tone jazziness of Milton Babbitt's brief "It Takes Twelve to Tango. ...

Chin: Rocaná; Violin Concerto - guardian.co.uk

guardian.co.uk

Chin: Rocaná; Violin Concerto
guardian.co.uk
Though full of the textural imagination and sleights of hand that have always linked Chin's music most closely with that of her teacher György Ligeti, ...

and more »

Unsuk Chin: Violin Concerto/Rocaná - Times Online

Unsuk Chin: Violin Concerto/Rocaná
Times Online
This very day you could sink into Chin's violin concerto, which in 2004 won her the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for music (lucrative, too: the prize money ...

and more »

John Woolrich: 'I want composers to be mavericks' - guardian.co.uk

John Woolrich: 'I want composers to be mavericks'
guardian.co.uk
... Boulez generation sometimes do. "In a lot of respects," Woolrich says, "the story of 20th-century music is the story of cottage-industry composition, ...

Classical Music/Opera Listings - New York Times

Classical Music/Opera Listings
New York Times
(Tommasini) ACME (Tuesday) The American Contemporary Music Ensemble performs Jefferson Friedman's song cycle “On in Love,” which blends elements of rock and ...

Phil Kline's Daze DVD from Starkland "Fascinates"

Our Phil Kline Around the World in a Daze DVD recently received a fine review at Sequenza21. Christian Carey writes that Daze "fascinates, engages, and, often, moves." He adds, "Kline's pieces transport the hearer from their listening space to imaginary vistas that envelope, even overwhelm."

Read the full review at Sequenza21.

July 30, 2009

Classical TV Launches - TransWorldNews (press release)

Classical TV Launches
TransWorldNews (press release)
Artists featured include Plácido Domingo, Renée Fleming, Anna Netrebko, Roberto Alagna, Martha Argerich, Pierre Boulez, Lionel Hampton and many more. ...

CMA Announces $253000 in Grants to Jazz Ensembles - All About Jazz

CMA Announces $253000 in Grants to Jazz Ensembles
All About Jazz
Joel Harrison Group (Brooklyn, NY) Harrison draws from the formal concepts of Charles Ives, John Adams, Oliver Messiaen, Gyrgy Ligeti, and Aarvo Prt to ...

Continuing Demand for the Watermelon

Apart from having two lunchtime recitals to gear up for, the past several days have verged upon madness, in assisting in the preparation of a Lux Nova imprint of a major score. Sunday morning, I had stopped by to visit Bill Goodwin, who kindly lent me a handheld audio recording device (one which he found at a discount, and a model which was recommended to him by a professional recording engineer in the Boston area). Thus, there are documents of the lunchtime recitals this week.

It was not absolutely the best I have ever played, but I played reasonably well, and it has been an irrecollectably long time since last I played in public two days in a row. That probably has not happened since I was in school; and the public this week was a more public public than the school public, then.

Peter and I got to the West End Branch library there about an hour ahead of the performance yesterday, but it was a while before we could get into the space.

We assembled our instruments, and decided which fish we each would station our chair on. There was a sort of play rug, a school of fish all various colors, and each bearing some number; and around the perimeter of the oval, there were parti-colored bubbles with the letters of the alphabet. Neither of us had ever performed above the images of fish ever before. Peter had brought his stand; I was counting on there being a stand or two, and there was one stand. Barely served for the purpose of spreading out the pages of Blue Shamrock, with the aid of a single paper clip. It worked, and that is all that matters. A desultory ambulance noised by on Cambridge Street just outside our window (Mass General Hospital is just a couple of blocks away).

For a microphone stand, I selected one of the stylish green preschooler chairs; grabbed three books from the book drop, and clipped the microphone to the back cover of (I do not recall the title exactly) Interviews for Dummies. As Peter and I sat down to quickly blow through a couple of pages of Heedless Watermelon, he remarks, “That is a book-drop, isn’t it?” And I was thinking what he was thinking. “They won’t drop books in the book drop while the library is open,” I said. “You speak as if with certainty,” Peter retorted. “They won’t drop books in the book drop while the library is open, will they?” I corrected.

Between the unusually strong turnout the day before at King’s Chapel, and the fact that neither of us knew at all what to expect at this new venue, we should have played with poise even for an audience of one. First two people to show up were long-standing fans of Peter’s . . . of the eight or nine listeners who turned up, we knew most of them by name, and it was all cozy.

It was an informal event, and I simply talked through the program before launching into Blue Shamrock.

For the final piece on the program (the duet), Peter & I sat down; or, I sat down first, and while Peter was gathering his flute, he asked me about the inspiration for Heedless Watermelon. After my appropriately elusive reply, we got somehow on the subject of the book-drop, when what should happen but, someone drops a book through the book-drop. Our host at the library is apologetic (nearly mortified, even) but I assure her that the timing was perfect: the drop was made between numbers, and the composer has no complaint.

As if on cue, more items drop, but Peter and I are having a great time. All contents having settled, we set the Heedless Watermelon a-rolling; I thank the audience for their kind attention, and there the program ends. Peter steps over to the book-drop and says, “Oh, the irony! What was it that was dropped? A compact disc! The competition!”

Gentleman in the audience, as he stood up after the program, said, “I hope you’ll play Heedless Watermelon again soon!” (A command performance!)

Originally from henningmusick, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 30, 2009 at 11:10 PM | Comments (0)

SF Mime Troupe's 'Too Big Too Fail' - Berkeley Daily Planet

SF Mime Troupe's 'Too Big Too Fail'
Berkeley Daily Planet
All shows are free and preceded by a 30-minute music set. The show was written by Michael Gene Sullivan—who first saw the Mime Troupe in Golden Gate Park as ...

and more »

Energetic conducting marks debut of summer's Mostly Mozart festival - The Star-Ledger - NJ.com

The Star-Ledger - NJ.com

Energetic conducting marks debut of summer's Mostly Mozart festival
The Star-Ledger - NJ.com
Other highlights include concerts and film centering on pianist Piotr Anderszewski, Pierre-Laurent Aimard mixing Ligeti and Stockhausen with Haydn and ...

and more »

Sounds And Silence - Sonic State

Sounds And Silence
Sonic State
ECM has been the home to Keith Jarrett, Paul Bley, Jan Garbarek, Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Steve Reich, Arvo Pärt and many ...

Vancouver makes music in a summer blockbuster of sounds - Vancouver Sun

Vancouver makes music in a summer blockbuster of sounds
Vancouver Sun
11, with shows at 6:45 and 9:00 pm Vancouver audiences are hearing more and more of the music of the late Hungarian master Gyorgy Ligeti, and a solo piano ...

and more »

The Vagabond Life

I'm looking forward to being home for nearly eight months—without a doubt the longest I've managed to stay put since I was enrolled in school.

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 30, 2009 at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)

The Infamous $pider Drawing | Emails From Crazy People [del.icio.us]

Read on, as expert befuddler David Thorne attempts to pay a bill online with this drawing

Originally posted by pbailey68 from paulbailey.us (beta), ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 30, 2009 at 08:10 PM | Comments (0)

Story with a familiar ring

Valery Gergiev's London Ring isn't exactly resounding. Don't say you weren't warned.

Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 30, 2009 at 05:12 PM | Comments (0)

musicfest Vancouver's piano series spans the romantic and frantic - Georgia Straight

musicfest Vancouver's piano series spans the romantic and frantic
Georgia Straight
... Sebastian] Bach through to romantic music and then to [György] Ligeti,” says acting program director Annie Saumier of the Piano Afternoons Series. ...

Glass on guitar

Philip Glass is seen above with the Dublin Guitar Quartet in St. Patrick's, Dundalk in July 2008. The quartet performed Brian Bolger's transcriptions of two of the composer's string quartets with the man himself present. Downloads of Philip Glass introducing the concert and excerpts from the performance can be heard on the quartet's MySpace site. In response to my recent Gorecki on guitar post Brian Bolger asked me to tell readers about the availability of the Philip Glass files, and also pointed out that the Dublin Guitar Quartets Deleted Pieces CD being is not deleted (go figure!). It is available via iTunes, the quartets MySpace site, from Road Records and from several portal download sites.

Paths intersect here. Louth Contemporary Music Society's gorgeous CD A Place Between, which includes two works by Valentin Silvestrov, led me to the Dublin Guitar Quartet. From the LCMS' website I notice they have commissioned Silvestrov to write Five Sacred Songs for choir. The world premiere of the commission will be given St. Peter’s Church of Ireland, Drogheda on 24 September 2009.

A week later on October 1, the Hilliard Ensemble give a concert in St Patrick's, Dundalk which includes several traditional Armenian hymns. There was a lot of interest in my recent path about discovering a CD of sacred Armenian music. The Hilliards have already recorded the music of contemporary Armenian composer Tigran Mansurian for ECM - Mansurian's Ragtime can be heard here. Will the rich traditional music of Armenia be the Hilliard's next recording project? Is lean forward County Louth, Ireland, the new world capital of contemporary music? How many holes does it take to fill the Albert Hall?

If there is one constant On An Overgrown Path it is the music of Bach. Transcriptions of his music for guitar are quite common, but today I am featuring two more unusual arrangements. Above is my 1985 LP of the Amsterdam Guitar Trio's arrangements of Brandenburg Concertos no. 2, 3, 5, 6. This wonderfully exuberant and satisfying disc did make it briefly into RCA's CD catalogue with a nasty out-of-focus ECM style cover. That version has now disappeared, but an on-demand CD with the original artwork is available from ArchivMusic. Which is good news as the performance and sound from the Alt Katholische Kirche in Utrecht are both excellent. The transcription of the fifth Brandenburg retains the Ligeti-like harpsichord part. This is played by Tini Mathot, who also is credited with recording supervision, and who is also Mrs. Ton Koopman.

Below is an unusual arrangement of Bach's Four Suites for Orchestra BWV 1066~1069 made by the Brazilian Guitar Quartet. This disc, which was recorded in the First Congregational Church, Los Angeles for Delos, is still in the catalogue. Worth hunting out, although it lacks the sheer vitality of the Amsterdam Trio's Bach. At the time of the recording Paul Galbraith was a member of the Brazilian Quartet. His CD of Haydn keyboard sonatas arranged for 8-string guitar, also on Delius, is another transcription disc worth hunting out. But, be warned. If Glenn Gould's humming annoys you, Paul Galbraith's snuffling on the Haydn disc will drive you up the wall. Noises off? Plenty of those when John Cage is transcribed for guitar. And it's only a short path from Glass on guitar to Xenakis on glass.

Image credit, Dublin Guitar Quartet MySpace site. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 30, 2009 at 02:11 PM | Comments (0)

Gergiev's Covent Garden Ring is a primary school travesty, so I ... - Telegraph.co.uk

Telegraph.co.uk

Gergiev's Covent Garden Ring is a primary school travesty, so I ...
Telegraph.co.uk
I knew the Mariinsky's Ring Cycle had shocking reviews when it was staged in Cardiff, ...

and more »

60x60 Dance @ Galapagos, NYC (4/7/09) [Pluta/Fotheringham]

Jonty's Acousmatic Tube Ride
Music: Sam Pluta
Dance: Julie Fotheringham

notes:
Sam Pluta is a composer and performer of electronic, improvised, and notated musics. His works have been performed and commissioned by Dave Eggar, Wet Ink Ensemble, Prism Quartet, Teresa McCollough, and the Allsar Quartet. As a laptop musician he has composed improvised works for his bands Glissando Bin Laden, exclusiveOr, and Prince of Neckebeards as well as works for solo performance and large ensembles. Sam holds a MA from the University of Texas at Austin and is pursuing his DMA from Columbia University. Sam's music is available on Quiet Design, and SEAMUS labels. Jonty's Acousmatic Tube Ride, a riff on plastic straws, is written in honor of BEAST leader Jonty Harrison.

Julie Fotheringham performed as a dancer/acrobat in Cirque du Soleil before coming to New York to make her own work. Here she has shown her contemporary dance/performance art solos is various venues including Dance New Amsterdam, The Living Theatre, and Monkeytown. She also brings her work to unsuspecting audiences with her uninvited guerrilla improvisations in public spaces.

Originally from 60x60, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 30, 2009 at 02:11 PM | Comments (0)

A little more on the Rufus Wainwright opera

La Cieca, the indomitable voice of the entertaining, ever-so-bitchy blog Parterre Box, makes an astute comment about Prima Donna, the first opera by moody-voiced singer/songwriter Rufus Wainwright:

A piece like 'Prima Donna' is exactly the sort of thing (or at least one sort of thing) that the New York City Opera ought to be offering. It would sell like crazy, foster the most intense debate both online and in the meat universe, and just generally be scandalous.

That the leading role seems to have ...

Originally from Clef Notes, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 30, 2009 at 12:02 PM | Comments (0)

How Not to Win Friends and Influence People

(Excerpts from a letter written to David Robertson on June 20th 1997)

Dear David Robertson,

yesterday I received the program for the "saison musicale 97/98" of your ensemble.

Programming is an art: please change several programs with my works!

March 23rd: Klavierstuck VI will die in your program. I have heard this work recently twice: the first good interpretations (played by Ellen Cover). In your program the only possible order for listening to Klavierstuck VI would be

Klavierstuck VI
Refrain
--Intermission--
Zeitmasze
Klavierstuck VII [NOT the other way around!]

I send you a copy of my performance score of Refrain: please show it to the musicians: there are a lot of corrections, changes in this score. They should read the booklet of CD 6.

April 2nd, etc. Gruppen etc.: It would have been infinitely spiritually better to program Klavierstuck IX instead of X between the two Gruppen-performances. I know what I am talking about: X is much too long for being played before the 2nd performance of Gruppen (X lasts usually 26 minutes), and the end of X has reached in a good performance a spiritual state which is in another, higher world. One should never lead back to the vital world of Gruppen. So, please replace X by IX.
----------------
Perhaps pgrogram 39 can end with X in case the two Solo-Versions are not too long. What are their durations?

April 23rd: Who is the pianist? Is the intermission after the first version of Klavierstuck XI? If one wants to compare two 'versions', nothing should come in between, which means:

Klavierstuck XIV - Aries - Klavierstuck XI
-intermission-
Klavierstuck XI - In Freundschaft!!

The vocal part of XIV is not easy, the sound projection difficult!
Attention: I send you a new score of XIV with corrections. Do you have the new score and parts of Zeitmasze with the new performance instructions?

April 24nd: This is causing my whole being to protest: Please change forever this terrible program:

a) after Kontakte nothing should be performed in the same program! Once should leave, after this celestial ending in outer space, the hall, go to sleep and dream of a lighter world!!

b) Therefore: you could either make a program as I have tried out several hundred times:

Zyklus (15')
Klavierstucke I-V (13')
Refrain (12')
-intermission-
Kontakte

Or: I give an introduction to Kontakte with musical examples played by the performers or only tape, but this should be rehearsed 2 hours!!!

c) Klavierstuck XII belongs to a completely different sound wolr.d
First of all it is a reduction of a work for tenor, trumpet, dancer, piano, basset-horn (soprano, bass ad libitium), tape. As your ensemble seems to be unable to perform this original version of Examen, Klavierstuck XII belongs into a context of Michaels-Gruss, Halt or Mission und Himmelfahrt, Mondeva, Drachenkampf, Vision (all works which could be performed by your ensemble).
These are formula compositions: you should teach our listeners, not make them sick!

d) Klavierstuck XII I have heard twice in concerts during the last few weeks, played by Majella St. and Ellen Corver, and we have recorded it for a CD with Ellen Corver (both excellent!): This work needs a very charming performer with Schumannesque technique and style, a good vocal formation and talent of acting. It also needs a perfect sound projection (transmitter-microphone, 3 microphones inside the piano, experienced sound projectionist).

e) So, Klavierstuck XII does not fit together with Kontakte - never.
I had dinner with you in Baden-Baden: you were very careful in composing your meal. Therefore I wonder why you can make such fundamental mistakes in programming.

f) Herve Boutry asked me yesterday if I could come to a rehearsal and performance of Kontakte:
...I would like very much to help in rehearsing Kontakte. Boutry proposed Marco Stroppa as sound projectionist. I don't know Stroppa, but I have done the sound projection of Kontakte circa 600 times and I made many mistakes! I don't know where Stroppa studied (practicing!) the sound projection of Kontakte.

Dealing with electro-acoustic music in general does not mean that one is able to take over the sound projection of works which one has not learned!

Therefore I would very much like to assist in at least 2x3 hours of rehearsals of Kontakte plus general rehearsal...

g) Do you - do the musicians - have the new score of Kontakte?

h) Do you have the new 8-channel tape for Tascam DA 88 digital play back of Kontakte (I made a completely new mix with time code!). Scores and new tape are available at Stockhausen-Verlage, also CDs 3 Kontakte without instruments (cue numbers as in the new score) and CD 6 with instruments (also with cue numbers). The CDs are necessary for rehearsals.

i) In case you need advice for the right percussion instruments, lighting etc., you should ask the percussionist Andreas Boettger who has performed it many times together with me.

Please be so kind and answer this letter soon -- I am really worried about your programming.

Friendly and hopeful yours
Stockhausen
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This letter was distributed in a packet of materials with the sound projection class at this year's courses. It summarizes Stockhausen's personality fairly well: there's the extreme generosity (sending scores, a detailed reaction to an artist's interest in his music), the exacting discipline, the devotion to his personal vision, as well as the condescension and the direct personal insults.

It's astonishing that he was able to maintain as many professional relationships as he did with such a tendency towards nastiness. There are a dozen other ways to make the points in this letter without resorting to the language Stockhausen employs.

Originally from ANABlog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 30, 2009 at 11:55 AM | Comments (0)

All-day rock concert to help build skate park in memory of Dormont ... - Pittsburgh Post Gazette

All-day rock concert to help build skate park in memory of Dormont ...
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
She said she came across Adalie's music on MySpace and asked the Van's Warped Tour veterans to play at the festival. Glenn Stockhausen, 25, a music promoter ...

21st century notated music

found this encouraging categorization on a blog

plus a great resource:

Eric Glider's chronology of music (until 1983)

Is there available a similar chronology of the works written in the last 3 decades?

Originally from Discussion Forum - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 30, 2009 at 11:44 AM | Comments (0)

Infrared

Mel Shapiro

I’m doing the music to a short film by Mel Shapiro called INFRARED. Mel, as you may remember, wrote the book and lyrics to HOMER IN CYBERSPACE — a musical we premiered last years. I’m playing all the parts myself using Logic 9 (just arrived yesterday). It’s the smokiest, jazziest music I’ve composed to date, but somehow the material seems to call for it. The orchestration so far is piano, pizz acoustic bass, brush light drums, and sustained strings. I’ve got a muted trumpet obbligato line in each cue if we need it — I’m leaving it out because it interferes with the dialog, but by itself, the chord progression is screaming for a melody. So, I’ll probably string together a piece made from cues from INFRARED and if we end up using the trumpet melodies, I’ll get a REAL trumpeter to play that line.

[I have some advice for electronic musicians in emulating monophonic instruments (i.e. instruments that can only play one note at a time) on a keyboard: don't let notes overlap; use ONE FINGER to play the melody whenever possible. You'll find this works surprisingly well, especially for brass. This won't work for fast passagework, of course.]

The “hit” song from the 38 minute film is called “Terrible” which is a very infectious Vaudevillian-type song that I know people will like.

Originally posted by Roger Bourland from rogerbourland.com, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 30, 2009 at 11:44 AM | Comments (0)

Asphalt Orchestra: Not Your Father's Marching Band - PlaybillArts

PlaybillArts

Asphalt Orchestra: Not Your Father's Marching Band
PlaybillArts
Asphalt Orchestra is actually the newest group from Bang on a Can, the pioneering contemporary music organization known for its innovative new music ...

Originally from "wolfgang rihm" OR "joan tower" OR "philip glass" OR "john adams" OR "conlon nancarrow" OR "tristan murail" AND music - Google News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 30, 2009 at 11:43 AM | Comments (0)

Chad Batka for The New York Times - New York Times

New York Times

Chad Batka for The New York Times
New York Times
What has been a stretch in recent seasons is the inclusion of a living, breathing composer in residence: this year, the American John Adams, ...

and more »

Blurt: Christina Courtin Finds Common Ground in Music from ... - Nonesuch Records

Blurt: Christina Courtin Finds Common Ground in Music from ...
Nonesuch Records
... disparate strains of music, offering Wilco's Glenn Kotche as one example of an artist who excels in creating both pop and contemporary classical music. ...

Originally from "contemporary classical" | "avant garde" music - Google News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 30, 2009 at 11:42 AM | Comments (0)

Nonfiction Reviews - Publishers Weekly

Nonfiction Reviews
Publishers Weekly
For example, the music scene of the Lower East Side was a direct product of the area's thriving movements in poetry, filmmaking, avant-garde music and ...

and more »

Originally from "contemporary classical" | "avant garde" music - Google News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 30, 2009 at 11:42 AM | Comments (0)

Sounds and silence from ECM

July 20 , 2009 - “sounds and silence” at Locarno

Over a period of five years, Swiss filmmakers Norbert Wiedmer and Peter Guyer followed producer Manfred Eicher and the artists of ECM around the world. In footage from Estonia, Tunisia, Germany, France, Denmark, Greece, Argentina and elsewhere, their documentary movie “Sounds and Silence”, captures aspects of the music-making process at ECM, and gives glimpses of unique players and composers at work. Amongst them: Arvo Pärt, Eleni Karaindrou, Dino Saluzzi and Anja Lechner, Anouar Brahem, Gianluigi Trovesi, Marilyn Mazur, Nik Bärtsch, Kim Kashkashian, Jan Garbarek and many others.

“sounds and silence” has been selected for the Locarno International Film Festival, and will have its world premiere at Locarno’s Piazza Grande on Saturday, August 8, 2009.

/www.ecmrecords.com/News/Diary/245_sounds_and_silence_locarno.php?lvredir=733&catid=0&rubchooser=202&mainrubchooser=2">ECM website. Horizons touched by ECM here.

Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 30, 2009 at 11:12 AM | Comments (0)

Barbara Rose Shuler: Tickets still available for final three days ... - Monterey County Herald

Barbara Rose Shuler: Tickets still available for final three days ...
Monterey County Herald
Stacy has performed as soloist with the orchestra more than 65 times under conductors Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, Sir Colin Davis, Andre Previn, ...

College News - TheDoings-ClarendonHills.com

College News
TheDoings-ClarendonHills.com
Berklee College of Music, Boston, announced Ellen Angelico of Western Springs, Evan Berry and Andrew Picha of Elmhurst, and Ardeshir Farhadieh of Oak Brook ...

Micromix 21

Greetings from Baltimore.
This micromix is dedicated to Jeff in Vancouver who made me an awesome Micromix that we have been playing a lot in the van.

1. Rev. Johnny L. Jones - Walk With Me / Anonymous - We Shall Overcome
2. Es - Säteet Sun Sielusta
3. Pescado Rabioso - Superchería
4. Juana Molina - Martin Fierro
5. The Particles - Apricot's Dream
6. Neil Young - Bad Fog Of Loneliness
7. Anonymous - We Shall Overcome
8. Atlas Sound - Coffin Trick (Second Version)
9. Townes Van Zandt - Pancho & Lefty
10. Pescado Rabioso - Las Habladurías Del Mundo

DOWNLOAD MICROMIX 21

Originally from deerhunter / atlas sound / lotus plaza, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 30, 2009 at 11:11 AM | Comments (0)

A Very Good Comment

…by Chris Becker appeared re: yesterday’s post:

I think it’s important for composers to consistently push themselves out of their comfort zones – and that can include your borough. With that in mind, the “scene” as described by Amanda seems strangely narrow to me. No mention of musicians around John Zorn and the Stone. No mention of Harlem or the Bronx or any African American artists. No description of the forward thinking jazz and world ensembles you find at Barbes and other small clubs.

I mean…I get it – she’s not trying to throw a net over a zeitgeist. But she certainly doesn’t mirror my experiences here in NYC (going on 12 years now…) creating music.

Someone many years from now will rewrite history and break it down for us.

And this is so interesting, because when I was writing that blog post, the Stone literally didn’t even occur to me. This is odd because the Stone in general and John Zorn specifically has been hugely supportive to many friends of mine. Nadia and Caleb and Paola and Judd have all had very successful concerts there. I think the reason it didn’t occur to me is because the last six times I have been to the stone, I am overcome with an insane guilt derived from the following two thoughts:

1 – It is such a great thing, like, Such a Great Thing – to have a venue downtown that is small, intimate, cheap, with a piano in it. It’s basically perfection. The policy about programming is good, the policy about money is great. The size is great, the piano is nice to the touch, it’s close to Il Posto Accanto where I can get those Oxtail Ravioli.

2 – I have never once had an okay time there. One time, it was so hot, I got delirious and almost stopped the concert to ask for the A/C to be turned on. I was getting the neck sweat, the back sweat, the pussy & the crack sweat. It was horrible. Another time, during Caleb’s show, it was literally a six-man jackhammer crew outside, going to town, at 10 PM on a Tuesday or something. It was Not the Composer’s Intent, either. The composer looked mortified.

Now, I know that a lot of this discomfort is not the venue’s fault, and I know that morally we are all better people for presenting our work in alternative venues at low prices, but if you asked me what I remember from Caleb’s concert, the only thing I can remember is a song cycle with prog-rock lyrics (?) fully drowned out by the jackhammers, and if you ask me about Nadia’s show, or maybe that was Judd’s show, I have a flashback like Agatha Christie in Ur or whatever, fanning myself with a program and wishing for death. Moral of story: I feel like the stone occupies the same place in my mental mapping of my relationship to the New York Scene as “that one family vacation where everything went wrong.”

I also feel like I have an especial liberty to say these things about, like, The Stone, and to a lesser extent, Jody Redhage’s Album, for the very reason that it is so close to home. I wouldn’t go to another country and start yammering on about how I had a bad time in a left-of-center venue or how I heard a CD I didn’t like: I criticise because I want “my” scene to really feel like my home team. I want to have the same fervency that people have about the Red Sox about Music in New York. Even my friends who live in Berlin, Tóróntó, Reykjavík: they all have a fierce mama-bear relationship with the(ir perceptions of the) scene(s) they proudly inhabit.

I wanted to also add as a side moment: I feel like I witnessed one of the more interesting emulsification and scatterings of a scene a few years ago. It was at the Bowery Ballroom in, let’s say, 2006 or 2007. CocoRosie were opening for Antony who was opening for Joanna Newsom who was opening for Devendra Banhart. I might be conflating, but if that wasn’t the lineup, it was something like that, and it was enormously, powerfully exciting. I can see how easy it would be, if you were a music historian, to quickly identify that as a Scene, capital-S. But inasmuch as that might have been true for those few hours, those people are coming, as the saying goes, from very different places, and their itineraries are very different. I remember thinking at the time, “oh, is this It? Did we just witness It?”

In other emulsification news: I have a whole post about this upcoming, but a week ago, at the very last minute, I was called upon to make an aïoli for twelve people, as well as some green sauce (I used some Faroese ingredients and imported capers to work through the one from St John in London). Look here at the aigs:

Originally posted by Nico from Nico Muhly, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 30, 2009 at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)

Music review: Spohr and Ligeti at Menlo - San Francisco Chronicle

Music review: Spohr and Ligeti at Menlo
San Francisco Chronicle
It happened Monday night during a largely first-rate concert at the Music@Menlo Festival, given at the Menlo School in Atherton. This summer's festival is ...

and more »

Review: Magical performance at Music@Menlo of a rarely heard work ... - San Jose Mercury News

Review: Magical performance at Music@Menlo of a rarely heard work ...
San Jose Mercury News
These brief and difficult pieces, re-arrangements of earlier works for piano by Ligeti, were performed by Wincenc, McGill, Bennett, bassoonist Dennis ...

and more »

Bang on a Can Festival at MASS MoCA Celebrates Steve Reich - Nonesuch Records

Bang on a Can Festival at MASS MoCA Celebrates Steve Reich
Nonesuch Records
"I realized I could write more music and as good or better music in Vermont than I can in New York City," Reich tells VPR reporter Steve Zind, ...

and more »

July 29, 2009

Michael Steinberg, 1928-2009 - The Phoenix

The Phoenix

Michael Steinberg, 1928-2009
The Phoenix
One could regret that he never completed a long-planned book on Elliott Carter or a collection of ETA Hoffmann translations. But what a generously full and ...

En-tomed

Originally from 'notes' a composer's life by daron hagen, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 29, 2009 at 11:10 PM | Comments (0)

I know you can hear my thoughts, too, boy

Schonberg op. 11—performed entirely by cats. An approximation distilled from 170 YouTube videos and mapped onto Glenn Gould's recording. If that doesn't make your day, go back to bed. (Via.)

Originally from Soho the Dog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 29, 2009 at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)

Marielle and Katia Labeque interview for BBC Proms 2009 - Telegraph.co.uk

Telegraph.co.uk

Marielle and Katia Labeque interview for BBC Proms 2009
Telegraph.co.uk
Successful sibling partnerships in music are rare. The stress of rehearsing and being constantly on the road together tests family affection ...

VT Edition: Composer Steve Reich - Vermont Public Radio

Vermont Public Radio

VT Edition: Composer Steve Reich
Vermont Public Radio
Since the 1960s Reich has helped define modern music and he's influenced a generation of jazz and classical musicians. For much of that time Reich has been ...

Did PercaDu play a practical joke at the Hollywood Bowl? | Culture Monster | Los Angeles Times [del.icio.us]

There was a genuine "what just happened?" moment at the Hollywood Bowl last night -- one that left audiences and some high-ranking L.A. Philharmonic officers scratching their heads. The Israeli percussion duo PercaDu had just finished playing Avner Dorman's "Spices, Perfumes, Toxins!" and announced that they were going to perform a Bach cantata as an encore. Less than a minute into the piece, one of the musicians, Tomer Yariv, stopped and indicated to his partner that he had messed up. The duo looked embarrassed and slightly flustered.

Originally posted by pbailey68 from paulbailey.us (beta), ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 29, 2009 at 08:10 PM | Comments (0)

A Knack for Mediation

If nature is not enthusiastic about explanation, why should Tschaikowsky be?
- Ives, Essays Before a Sonata

I suppose I shouldn't be so enthusiastic about explanation. It's a reaction to frustrations of my youth, in which there was so much information I couldn't get access to: all those years of knowing the names La Monte Young and Charlemagne Palestine, and not being able to hear their music, all those hints of how Le marteau was written in Boulez's On Music Today, but the final key withheld. Composers like Boulez build up a mystique by keeping their methods secret, and I suppose it's a smart strategy, but I swore early on I would never do it, even to my own detriment. I may only be flattering myself in so imagining, but there might be a young composer out there curious to figure out how I did what I did in my new piece Solitaire, and I'd rather empower him or her to do something similar than pose as some unapproachable magus.

Solitaire (14:05 in duration) is a piece in which I extremely limited my materials, and vowed not to deviate beyond what happens in the first few measures. My sonic idea was a continuum between perfectly familiar chord progressions and perfectly strange ones. So I started with ii, IV, V, and vi chords in the key of E-flat. (I never use the tonic chord, of course.) I added a major seventh chord on flat III, because it filled out the scale nicely. The other chords are seventh or ninth chords on the 7th, 11th, and 13th harmonics and the 7th subharmonic. For maximum short-circuiting of aural understanding, I mostly go back and forth between the Roman-numeral chords and those based on harmonics, but I occasionally relax into a normal IV-V-vi progression which, I hope, takes the ear as much by surprise as a bizarre outburst would in a more conventional piece. The 29-note scale, for people who can read musical ratios, is as follows:

1/1, 65/64, 33/32, 15/14, 35/32, 10/9, 9/8, 8/7, 6/5, 39/32, 5/4, 9/7, 21/16, 4/3, 11/8, 10/7, 35/24, 3/2, 99/64, 13/8, 5/3, 27/16, 12/7, 7/4, 9/5, 117/64, 15/8, 40/21, 63/32

Nine chords gave me 72 possible progressions from one chord to another. I made up a chart of all 72, and, listening over and over, subjectively characterized each one by quality: "weak," "piquant," "subtle," "strongly cadential," "save for special moments," and only one "wonderful," the progression from the 13th to the 11th harmonic (last chord change in the piece). About a fourth of the progressions I prohibited as ineffective. In short, I was merely replicating for this set of chords what hundreds of years have done for the conventional tonal system, learning that IV-ii is much stronger than ii-IV, that IV-I and V-I have different effects, and so on. Then, using those characterizations, I began composing chord progressions into phrases, and still found that whether a chord progression worked or not depended on context and voice-leading, and wasn't entirely predictable.

The abundant computations I put into making a microtonal scale lead some people to conclude that I compose according to some quasi-serial, left-brain, precompositional scheme, but nothing could be further from the truth. Once I had the chords in place, I had to improvise my way through the piece by trial and error, constantly correcting by ear things that my brain had mistakenly thought might work. I had no idea where the piece was going, except that I was trying to keep it from going anywhere.

To that end I severely limited my materials, giving leeway only to the melodic patterns in the piano, and adjusting the sustained oboe/flute line at a few places where the piano paralleled it too closely. One of my favorite quotations is Kierkegaard's "Purity of heart is to will one thing." I wanted, as I often do, to write a piece that was nothing more than one sustained idea. I'm proud of the fact that the piece has no climax, though various parameters hit their extremes at different points; the highest note comes at about six minutes out of 14, and is not an emphasized moment. The piece settles more and more into mid-register as it progresses. I'm even prouder of the fact that, to keep the piece going, I kept coming up with new things I could do that didn't violate my initial restrictions; the piece's inventiveness kept moving inward, toward the center. I also like that what form there is is global rather than linear. There is absolutely no logic as to why the piano does this and now that, though overall there are things in the second half that balance things in the first half; the same rhythm or microtonal effect will happen in the treble here and the bass there, or with one pitch here and two pitches there. I aimed for a "vessel of the eternal present," though certain connections become evident in hindsight.

Clearly, I have a strong affinity for the kind of intense, immobile textural focus one finds in Phill Niblock, John Luther Adams, or Michael Gordon; but if I try to imagine my music as just harmony, rhythm, and texture, and can't hear the melody in there, the tune, it just doesn't sound to me recognizably like my music. The impulse that prevents me from retreating behind the objectivity of pure process is the same impulse that prevents me from magisterially keeping my methods secret. I have to have the melodic, the communicative, the human element in there, and it's not even an ideological decision: I'm not as good at process as those other composers, but I think I have a real talent for the melodic, the personal. In short, there's something essentially in-between about me. A passage from the Upanishads reminds me of my composing:

In dark night live those for whom
The world without alone is real; in night
Darker still, for whom the world within
Alone is real. The first leads to a life
Of action, the second to a life of meditation.
But those who combine action with meditation
Cross the sea of death through action
And enter into immortality
Through the practice of meditation.
So we have heard from the wise.

I get my compositional kick by mediating between the objective and the subjective, the public and private, left-brain and right. It's not enough for me to know secrets of postclassical music, I have to communicate and contextualize them. Similarly, that piano is bringing you (clarifying) the secrets contained in the harmonic structure.

Another conundrum: all my life I've been trying to rewrite Harris's Third Symphony, and I think this is as close as I've gotten. If you can hear the connection between that piece and this one (and if it's impossible I can hardly blame you), my entire life will have just flashed before your eyes. The piece is dedicated to Bob Ashley, for whatever that tells you.

Originally from PostClassic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 29, 2009 at 08:10 PM | Comments (0)

Diva: Camille O'Sullivan offers a unique cabaret - Telegraph.co.uk

Telegraph.co.uk

Diva: Camille O'Sullivan offers a unique cabaret
Telegraph.co.uk
Franz Ferdinand, Kaiser Chiefs and the Pixies have all closed the music strand at previous festivals so it is fitting that this year, ...

Tell Me Who's Watching

One of the best perks of being a Twitterer is that occasionally someone will screw up and type 140 or fewer characters that he didn't mean to.

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 29, 2009 at 05:11 PM | Comments (0)

Making Sense of the Perfume of Hearing

Back in 1990, Diane Ackerman came up with a definition of music which is still making my head spin: "Music is the perfume of hearing."

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 29, 2009 at 05:11 PM | Comments (0)

Scene but not Heard

This is part of a co-blogging exercise (the second, in fact — link here to the first) with Amanda Ameer at Life’s a Pitch. Amanda is a classical music publicist (although not my publicist; I don’t have a publicist but I would probably hire Amanda if I hired anybody; she plays the harp) so dealing with the perception of musical scenes seems more her department than mine. With any luck, she and I can tease out some good questions. Check her post out here, and then come back to mine.

A lot of times when I’m abroad and people get wind that I’m a musician who lives in New York, they inevitably ask me, “what’s the scene like in New York?” It’s one of those difficult questions to answer, because I know what they’re asking, and I know how I’m meant to respond (or at least, I think I understand the expectation). I get confused, though, because I feel like I don’t really know how Scenes, such as they are, function in New York, or, for that matter, anywhere.

Part of my resistance is rooted in my deep-seeded, gut-level resistance to precisely that form of classification of musicians. In my experience, composers who announce themselves to be part of a specific scene (Uptown, Midtown, Downtown, Crosstown, Chinatown, Crazytown, Post-Modern, Post-Minimal, Pre-Labor, Post-Industrial) write the grimmest music which constantly and desperately attempts to situate itself in its stylistic vessel like a dog in a moving car. In my fantasy world, Scenes are, in fact, just quick polaroids of who happens to be in a certain place at a certain time. In Absinthe-Ducros-Fils-110KB school, we’re taught that fin-de-siècle Paris was a very specific scene: we fantasize about Picasso and Stravinsky and Ravel and Debussy sitting around a table, drinking Absinthe and smoking skinny cigarettes. Maybe that even happened one day! Maybe it happened every week! But to what extent, I wonder, does that make sense only when viewed a century later, and, to what extent are we New York musicians involved in producing (or resisting) our fantasy versions of the past?

peej One of the New York musicians I respect the most is Philip Glass — not just because of his music, but also because of how he behaves as a citizen of the community he inhabits. By self-publishing, he employs a small staff of four. Until recently, he owned a medium-sized recording studio, employing about six full-time and maybe six more part-time. His ensemble consists of musicians who, despite the fact that they each have many other gigs as players, teachers, and composers, rely on touring and recording. The end result is a small, instant community revolving entirely around one man’s music. It’s a fascinating thing: a composer employing others, but in turn, making himself responsible to his community — he can’t take nine months off and go to Rishikesh in a loincloth: people are depending on his output to make a living.

All of this is a long way of asking: is that model a sort of modern scene of sorts? Is that not a more intimate musical connection than the imagined scene that connects Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Terry Riley? Do they rely on each other for health care? Are they on the road together, drinking rider wine and eating backstage hummus?

I think that we’re meant to look back on Scenes from the Past with a great deal of reverence, but I have always been suspicious of how quickly those things dissolves into acrimony. I remember reading something once that Debussy said something nasty about Stravinsky and I was all, but you’re supposed to be FRIENDS! How can this happen! It was, like, personally offensive. Similarly, we’re meant to look back at the Fluxus Movement as a kind of idealized moment: was it? Where they at now? The last time I checked in on them, they were not returning Kyle Gann’s phone calls and being territorial about intellectual property.

(A side note: Kyle’s blog is hosted as part of the same umbrella organization as Amanda’s. Scene!? Scene!?)

A record label can also be an organizing model for a musical community. The label I’m on, Bedroom Community, is based explicitly on the idea that all of the artists on the label can (and do) work with each other in a free-flowing (read: not always paid) exchange. Loosely summarized, there’s a folk-singer, a goth-minimal Australian personality cult, me, a producer/composer of bright, organic electronic music: not necessarily the most stylistically coherent scene. And yet: it functions as something like a scene. We meet up six or seven times a year, talk about music, deal with each others’ families. One of their daughters is clinging to my leg as I write this paragraph; another’s son is waiting for me to drive him to the pool. We play each other our music constantly, and if we’re not in the same place, it happens over IM.

Having said all of this, the New Music Scene, as it exists in other people’s imaginations, is surprisingly incoherent. There is a weird six-degrees-of-separation to it, but the nature of the field, such as it is, has weird numbers working against it. Composers will naturally meet far more players than other composers; that’s just how it works. You write a string quartet and it’s one of you, and four of them. You write an orchestra piece, it’s one of you, one conductor, six or seven artistic/production administrators (don’t forget about them, by the way; they are as integral to the workings of music as oboists), and like sixty-eight players. So I could safely say that the Scene I inhabit consists of a bunch of ace musicians I work with on a pretty regular basis: violist Nadia Sirota, flautist Alex Sopp, Thomas Bartlett a.k.a. Doveman — etc. Then, naturally, there are other composers who work with them: Judd Greenstein being the best example of somebody who exists at a hub/crossroads of a community.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. New Amsterdam Records is, in a way, one of the best things to happen to new music in a long time. Their mission statement states,

New Amsterdam Records was formed as a haven for the young New York composers and performers whose music slips through the cracks between genres. The records we sell will paint a certain picture of that scene without a name, without trying to give it one.

They have a roster of a few dozen artists, a few dozen albums. It’s a much more inclusive label than Bedroom Community, which has been around twice as long and has a fraction as many releases. It’s recently begun promoting concert series (Amanda has more about this at her post). And, it has released many, many albums! Some of these albums have my music on them! Some of them feature Nadia! So there’s a natural connection, and I get asked about it a lot: What’s the New Amsterdam Scene Like? And here is the weird secret: I barely know half of the people on this label; some of them I haven’t met, others I literally don’t know if it’s a person or an idea or a disease or an ensemble; what is this Darcy James Argue? I feel like despite how close I am to it, I have almost no access to whatever Darcy James Argue might even be — I thought it was maybe some kind of litigation technique; it turns out it’s a human being — and it’s kind of shocking to me to be so intimately connected to things and yet not be marketed to about what it actually, factually Is. This is sort of where Amanda comes in: is it a good thing that the Scene, such as it is, has a take-it-or-leave-it attitude about marketing to its inner circle? or is it the case that somethings you can’t see the things that are closest to you?

To hear more about this stuff, by the way, check out me talking on the New Amsterdam Website about Nadia’s record here.

There is a danger of stylistic concerns being the basis for community organization. Just because we’re on the same label doesn’t mean we’re going to be a mutually compatible species. I’m sure it’s like this in the indie rock world: if you’re compared to somebody, it’s kind of infuriating and you end up disliking their music. Or worse yet, there is a guilt by association. I have a piece for a singing banjo player who also plays guitar and sometimes fiddle; we did it in London and somebody came up and said, oh, you must know this Jody Redhage, she’s on New Amsterdam! And I thought, margaret_cho_1 well, that’s strange, I totally don’t know her, let me investigate, I like the cello. Now. Beloveds. It may be executed well — that is, I think, outside of my ken and it pains me to even be mean, but when I heard this thing, mommy was shock. In terms of conceptual grounding, it lies so far from anything I can even understand — it scares me the same way that, I imagine, sensible Republicans are horrified by those Birthers running around on cable television. I guess what I’m getting at is, does the fact that this community (as loosely articulated as the New Amsterdam family) has supported something that I find to be Literally Appalling mean that I am not ever really able to be fully part of the community? or is this kind of fundamental disagreement exactly the kind of thing that keeps the community interesting? It does feel very Political.

In all fairness, the thing that makes me anxious about the Jody Redhage project is that there is an enormous stylistic overlap with one of the strangest, most difficult to listen to pieces that I just adore, namely, Michael Nyman’s The Kiss, which was written for Dagmar Krause and Omar Ebrahim; it’s Really Weird.. Anyway, check them both out below:

Michael Nyman The Kiss

Jody Redhage All Summer in a Day

You see what I mean? It’s like: so close, and yet so far. Redhage gets at the same weird and crunchy major-on-major violence that Nyman does. I also like her Meredith Monk trick. Also “Warning Song” is kind of cool; I’m not convinced that hers is the voice that should be singing it, but the cello playing sounds pretty hot. It’s not that I hate it, I don’t even hate it. It just makes me Very Nervous because it’s happening very close to my house.

I know that Amanda is touching on this in greater detail, but one of the most easy-to-identify scenes in New York is the Bang on a Can Scene, which I think bears a lot of the support systems of the Philip Glass model as well as some of the more problematic structures that come with something starting out spontaneous and ending up an institution. I wrote in detail about some of these issues here, and in re-reading what I wrote last year, I realized that my relationship to that scene is incredibly tangential — a few years ago it was kind of Jude the Obscurey, I was like, why Яn’t these people nice to me, even though David Lang is one of my favorite composers alive? I’ve never been to Banglewood, I think that I am the only sentient being on earth not to have written a piece for the People’s Commissioning Fund (the horse grazing outside my window is working on his set of bagatelles as we speak), Michael Gordon looks at me like I’m Brüno every time we meet. I think Julia might know who I am by sight. If the Marathon is the Superbowl (or just The Marathon?) of the New York Music Scene, I must be playing a different sport. Amanda is focusing on the various ways in which she, as somebody who is intimately involved in Some Kind Of Scene, is expected to be at certain concerts. It’s an important issue: you know how sometimes you know exactly whom you’re going to see at those concerts? Zankel Hall is kind of like that, I always feel like it’s the first scene from Beauty and the Beast, but with like, Derek Bermel. Bonjour! How is your fam’ly!?

batb_0074

Originally posted by Nico from Nico Muhly, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 29, 2009 at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

Here is one I bought earlier

Judging by the emails offering free CDs, the major classical labels have finally realised that people buy music after reading about it here and on other leading music blogs. Elsewhere BBC Radio 3 famously offer bloggers a little bit on the side from their inexhaustible expenses account to write about their programmes, while others have received this message from Amazon:

'As a top reviewer, we would like to invite you to join Amazon Vine. Open to a limited number of customers, Vine members receive pre-release and new products--free of charge--in exchange for customer reviews'.

I do not have a problem with free CDs, books or concert tickets per se and they sometimes feature here, although I do have a problem with the BBC's barely coded offer of accomodation and travel "in return for support". But would I be writing about Letting Go of the Glitz - the true story of one woman's struggle to live the simple life in Chelsea if Amazon Vine had not offered me a free copy? I think not, which is why bloggers and reviewers should tell their readers if they receive free merchandise, or, indeed, a free trip to Rome. It costs nothing to provide this information, and it does help the reader understand the context of the review. Which is why, for some time, I have been saying whether or not I paid for the CDs, books and concerts that appear here. All of which has nothing to do with having pots of money, as my bank manager will readily confirm.

If my idiosyncratic little blog has any model it is architect Richard Roger's 1976 Centre Pompidou in Paris, which, incidentally, is the home of IRCAM. The Centre Pompidou is a wonderfully functional building that has become a design icon. It achieved this by turning the traditional building inside out and putting all the services on the outside as a design feature, as can be seen from this photo.

Traditionally, the nasty bits of a building, like the power and communication cables and ventilation ducts seen above, were, and still are in many cases, hidden away behind a building's glossy public facade. Similarly, today's classical music media, with just a few exceptions, continues to present a glossy facade behind which are hidden the power sources, communication channels, and yes, the sewers, which actually drive the industry.

So welcome back to France, where my credit card took another dent recently buying the CD seen at the head and foot of this photo article. It was a chance find, together with two other very rewarding CDs, in a bookshop in La Roche-sur-Yon. Regular readers will already have seen my previous articles about the Moroccan born composer Maurice Ohana (1913-1992), and Erato's 4 CD box of his music gives an excellent overview. But, despite having a fair idea what to expect, I was quite blown away by French label Timpani's disc of his works for harpsichord.

Contemporary music champion Elisabeth Chojnacka (seen below), who also appears on the Erato recordings, is the constant on harpsichord for all the tracks. For the opening work, Miroir de Célestine, she is joined by Béatrice Daudin in a suite for harpsichord and percussion extracted from Ohana's 1987 opera Célestine. This is a real discovery, and from the evidence of the six movement suite the opera itself deserves reappraisal. In a disc that is full of delights the concluding seven minute Sarabande for harpshichord and orchestra is another revelatory discovery. The excellent accompaniment is provided by Timpani's house band of Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg under Arturo Tamayo - who conducted Stockhausen here.

Quite exceptional and vivid sound is captured in the Luxembourg Conservatoire in 2002 by the Timpani engineers. With the exception of the orchestral work the recording is quite closely miked, but there is just enough background rumble from the air-conditioning to set the music in a real space by making the services audible, if not visible. This CD is one of a series of five from Timpani of the music of Maurice Ohana. Timpani are a little-known label with some very interesting music. Their website says they will be re-packaging a 5 CD series of Xenakis' music in the autumn, also with Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg conducted by Arturo Tamayo.

With Iannis Xenakis' star in the ascendant (two works at the 2009 BBC Proms) it is difficult to understand why Maurice Ohana remains a very well kept secret. There are some parallels between the two composers and Elisabeth Chojnacka is a passionate advocate of both. While still uncompromisingly modern, Ohana's music is more accessible than Xenakis', possibly because Ohana's Sephardic Jewish background remained an influence throughout his career. This historical context gives his music the unique quality of looking both forward and back, and it may be this which makes it so approachable. For instance, the three minute So Tango on the Timpani disc is a tribute to the Argentinian master of that dance, Carlos Gardel.

So buying CDs, as opposed to accepting free review copies, does have its advantages. If I hadn't splashed out 19.70 euros on Maurice Ohana's works for harpsichord you would probably be reading just another article about Nonesuch's new release of John Adams' Doctor Atomic Symphony. Thanks Warner, but I will pass on the offer of a free Doctor Atomic CD. Watch this space instead for a piece on the Kronos Quartet's quite excepional new CD Floodplain, It's also from Warner, and was among the CDs I recently bought in France. Meanwhile, read about unlocking the music of Maurice Ohana here.

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 29, 2009 at 02:11 PM | Comments (0)

Sleep Whale - Little Brite EP - DOA

Sleep Whale - Little Brite EP
DOA
If this is indeed some sort of New Age music, it harkens back more succinctly to the music of Steve Reich or La Monte Young than it does Yanni or George ...

A young man on a baton charge to world acclaim - The Herald

A young man on a baton charge to world acclaim
The Herald
Who is reckoned to be on course for certain stardom, critical acclaim and, very probably, massive demand from the international music scene? ...

and more »

60x60 Dance @ Galapagos, NYC (4/7/09) [Leonard/Pride]

Ashi
Music: Cheryl Leonard
Dance: Erin Pride

notes:
Cheryl Leonard is a composer, performer and instrument builder. Her works explore quiet phenomena and the intricacies of sound. Recently she has focused on making music with found natural materials. Cheryl received her MA from Mills College and has been awarded grants from the American Composers Forum and Meet the Composer. Her work is featured in the documentary film Noisy People. Ashi is the Japanese word for foot, pace, or gait. All sounds were made by wobbling amplified pieces of granite and volcanic tuff. Stones were gently nudged into motion, then allowed to settle back to a state of rest.

EDP DANCE PROJECT (founded in 2008) Anchoring the professional portion of the 2008 festival was resident company EDP Dance Project, led by Artistic Director Erin Pride. The mission of the dance company mirrors that of the Silk City Arts Festival, to build interest in the arts in Paterson through exposure. EDP DANCE PROJECT prides itself on bringing the individual to the movement. In 2008 EDP was awarded a space grant from Art of Motion in Ridgewood, NJ. They also have a partnership with the Paterson YMCA. EDP Dance Project is currently housed at La Belle Epoque in Paterson NJ.
Dancers: Shannon Dooling, Erin Pride, Michelle Puskas, Nichole Vuono

Originally from 60x60, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 29, 2009 at 02:11 PM | Comments (0)

Melon Slice

Sneak mp3 listen to the (a bit rougher than might have been, but what the heck) premiere of Heedless Watermelon yesterday:

[ recording ]

logger-post-footer">

Originally from henningmusick, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 29, 2009 at 11:33 AM | Comments (0)

The Classical Music Network - ConcertoNet

The Classical Music Network
ConcertoNet
Leif Ove Andsnes is a dazzling pianist, and he can play the most challenging music—whether Kurtág or Lutosławski—as if it was child's play. ...

Opening day at the 2009 Cleveland International Piano Competition ... - The Plain Dealer - cleveland.com

The Plain Dealer - cleveland.com

Opening day at the 2009 Cleveland International Piano Competition ...
The Plain Dealer - cleveland.com
But she energized the darting figures and perpetual motion in Gyorgy Ligeti's Etude No. 10 to splendid effect. Hoang Pham, a 24-year-old Vietnamese-born ...

Esa-Pekka Salonen's Metropolitan Opera debut not coming to movie ... - Los Angeles Times

Esa-Pekka Salonen's Metropolitan Opera debut not coming to movie ...
Los Angeles Times
For the curious among you, Deutsche Grammophon has released a DVD of Chéreau's staging, featuring the Mahler Chamber orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulez. ...

New York Times Reviews Starkland's Phil Kline Daze DVD

The New York Times has reviewed Phil Kline's Around the World in a Daze DVD from Starkland. Writing in the Sunday July 26 issue, Allan Kozinn notes that "the electronic experimenter" Phil Kline "is hard at work." The review is not online, but you can read it here:

Visit Starkland.

Originally from Starkland, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 29, 2009 at 02:10 AM | Comments (0)

The Weekend Fix-It List

p. 22, m. 317 :: "straight mute" collides with double-barline (this was my fault earlier from the conversion)

p. 23, m. 334 :: fonts don't match (I wound up creating separate objects for the two lines of text, last night, but they don't have to be, of course)

pp. 26, 27 :: there are a couple of locos that don't make sense, because I failed completely to correct the lack of ottava bassa lines in the tuba.

mm. 378-380: D is where it needs to sound; in the Finale score, I had notated it an octave higher w/ 8va bassa

mm. 384-390: G and F, ditto.

p. 35, m. 504 :: Not crucial, but in the source score I had signs above the measure indicating to the conductor the measure's subdivision (2 + 3)

p. 37, m. 541 :: Missing cresc. hairpins in the brass.

p. 38, m. 544 :: Ditto.

End of score :: I should like to add:

Boston, Massachusetts
10 July 2006

Will take another look later.

p. 1, system 1

A Sx, m. 7 :: slur crowds tie
T Sx, m. 3 :: f crowds beam (?)
Tn I & II, B Tn, m. 3 :: f crowds bottom line of staff (?)

p. 1, system 2

Cl I, m. 14 :: slur crowds second-ledger-line C
A Sx, m. 8 :: slur crowds tie

p. 3, system 3

Cl I, mm. 29 & 33 :: slur crowds G and first-ledger-line A (?)

p. 4, system 2

Bar Sx, m. 50 :: flip stem of flagged eighth-note B

p. 5, system 1

T Sx, mm. 60-61 :: eighth-note E should be tied to following half-note

p. 6, system 1

Cl I, m. 76 :: hairpin crowds slur betw. S Sx & A Sx, m. 76 :: slurs & hairpin crowded
A Sx, m. 77 :: slur crowds tie at end of m.
T Sx, m. 77 :: slur crowds first-ledger-line A
Bar Sx, mm. 73-75 :: slur collides w/ T Sx staff
Tn II, m. 77 :: slur crowds tie at end of m.

p. 6, system 2

A Sx, m. 78 :: slur crowds tie
A Sx, m. 82 :: quarter-note C# tied to quarter-note, should be half-note C#
A Sx, m. 83 :: slur crowds tie at end of m.
T Sx, m. 82 :: slur crowds first-ledger-line A
Bar Sx, m. 80 :: slur crowds third-ledger-line E
Tn I, m. 83 :: slur crowds tie at end of m.

p. 7, system 1

S Sax, m. 87 :: staccato mark should be below notehead
S Sax, m. 89 :: slur crowds tie at end of m. (?)
T Sx, m. 87 :: slur crowds first-ledger-line A
Bar Sx, mm. 88-89 :: slur collides w/ T Sx staff

p. 7, system 2

S Sax, m. 90 :: slur crowds tie at beginning of m.
S Sax, m. 94 :: slur crowds stem of A
A Sax, m. 90 :: slur crowds # sign (?)
A Sax, m. 92 :: slur crowds E (?)
T Sax, m. 90 :: slur crowds G (?)
T Sax, m. 91 :: slur crowds A (?)

p. 8, system 1

A Sx, m. 101 :: # crowds barline
Saxes, m. 101 :: nudge p closer to respective staff (?)

p. 8, system 2

Cl II, m. 105 :: slur crowds A &c.
A Sx, m. 106 :: # crowds barline

p. 9, system 1

Cl I, m. 117 :: mp & hairpin crowd tie (?)
A Sx, m. 113 :: # crowds barline
betw. Bar Sx & Tn I :: correct crowding

p. 9, system 2

Cl I, m. 119 :: reverse hairpin crowds Cl II (?)
betw. Bar Sx & Tn I :: correct crowding

p. 13, system 1

A Sx, m. 173 :: # crowds barline
Tn II, m. 175 :: hairpin crowds Tn II tie

p. 13, system 2

brass, m. 187 :: extend hairpin through m. 188

p. 14, system 2

Ta, mm. 201-202 :: hairpins collide w/ or crowd ties

p. 15, system 1

Betw. S Sx & A Sx, m. 205 :: slurs crowded
A Sx, mm. 209-210 :: slur a bit dodgy
Ta, mm. 209-210 :: hairpins crowd ties

p. 15, system 2

A Sx, m. 212 :: slur a bit dodgy

p. 16, system 1

Cl I, m. 223 :: slur crowds second-ledger-line A
Cl I, m. 225 :: slur crowds second-ledger-line A
Ta, mm. 220-221 :: hairpins collide w/ or crowd ties
brass, m. 223 :: manage placement of fzp

p. 16, system 2

Betw. S Sx & A Sx, mm. 228-229 :: hairpin & reverse, crowding
Ta, mm. 227-229 :: hairpins collide w/ or crowd ties

p. 16, system 3

Betw. B Cl & Bar Sx :: bit more space perhaps

p. 17, systems 1, 2, 3

Betw. B Cl & Bar Sx :: bit more space perhaps

p. 18, system 2

Cl I, mm. 279-280 :: nudge hairpin closer to Cl I staff
T Sx, m. 276 :: correct beam on beat 2 (just a mess)
T Sx, m. 277 :: add accent to first A-flat
T Sx, m. 280 :: slur collides with cautionary accidental
Tn I & B Tn, m. 281 :: mf & hairpin crowd tie

p. 19, system 1

S Sx, m. 282 :: move staccato marks to noteheads
S Sx, mm. 283, 285 :: move accents to noteheads
A Sx, mm. 284, 285, 287 :: figures on first beat of respective measures need stem direction reversed
T Sx, m. 285 :: figure on first beat of measure needs stem direction reversed
Bar Sx, m. 282 :: eighth-notes should be staccato
Bar Sx, m. 283 :: eighth-notes on first beat should be staccato

p. 19, system 2

A Sx, m. 292 :: figure on second beat of measure needs stem direction reversed
T Sx, m. 289 :: figure on first beat of measure needs stem direction reversed
T Sx, m. 292 :: tie at end of measure needs to be flipped
Bar Sx, m. 290 :: tie in middle of measure needs to be flipped

p. 20, system 1

S Sx, mm. 293-294 :: move staccato marks to noteheads
S Sx, mm. 295, 297 :: move accents to noteheads
T Sx, m. 296 :: figures need stem direction reversed

p. 20, system 2

S Sx, mm. 299-301 :: move staccato marks to noteheads
Bar Sx, m. 302 :: tie at end of measure needs to be flipped

p. 21, system 1

B Cl, m. 305 :: add accent to B-natural
S Sx, mm. 303, 305-307 :: move staccato marks to noteheads
S Sx, m. 305 :: move accent to notehead
A Sx, m. 306 :: figure on first beat of measure needs stem direction reversed

p. 21, system 2

B Cl, m. 314 :: f crowds stem (?)

p. 22, system 1

Saxes, mm. 317-318 :: hairpins crowded (?)
Betw. Tn I & Tn II, mm. 318-319 :: hairpin crowds tie

p. 22, system 2

Ta, m. 328 :: hairpin crowds tie

p. 24, system 1

B Cl, m. 348 :: duplicate instrument change marks (artifact from my work Friday night)

p. 24, system 2

S Sx, m. 356 :: beginning of slur crowds third-space C (?)
S Sx, m. 357 :: slur crowds tie
T Sx, m. 355 :: beginning of slur crowds third-space C (?)

p. 25, system 1

Cl I, m. 360 :: beginning of slur crowds noteheads (?)
S Sx, mm. 360-362 :: reverse stem direction on third-space C figures
A Sx, m. 362 :: reverse stem direction on beat 2 figure
T Sx, m. 359 :: reverse stem direction on beat 2 figure

p. 25, system 2

S Sx, m. 370 :: reverse stem direction on flagged eighth-note C
A Sx, m. 367 :: reverse stem direction on third-line B figure

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

HOLY COW HUGE ERROR ON MY PART

Bass Cl does not change back to Cl II until m. 367

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

p. 26, system 1

Cl I, m. 375 :: beginning of slur crowds noteheads (?)
S Sx, mm. 374 :: reverse stem direction on beat 2 figure
T Sx, mm. 372 :: reverse stem direction on beat 1 figure

p. 26, system 2

Cl I, m. 380 :: slur crowds second-ledger-line C
Cl II, m. 378 :: slur crowds second-ledger-line C
A Sx, m. 378 :: reverse stem direction on third-line B figure

p. 27, system 1

Cl I, m. 391 :: slur crowds third-ledger-space D and second-ledger-line C
A Sx, m. 385 :: reverse stem direction on third-line B figure
Ta, mm. 403-407 (system 2) :: pitch sounds as notated, only change to employ ottava bassa

p. 27, system 2

Cl I, m. 392 :: slur crowds first-ledger-line A
S Sx, m. 393 :: reverse stem direction on flagged eighth-note C

p. 28, system 1

S Sx, m. 393 :: reverse stem direction on quarter-note C

p. 28, system 2

Cl I, m. 407 :: beam eighth-notes across rest on beat 2
Cl I, m. 408 :: beam eighth-notes across rest on beat 1
Cl I,I m. 407 :: beam eighth-notes across rest on beat 1

p. 29, system 1

T Sx, m. 417 :: reverse stem direction on half-note E
Bar Sx, m. 411 :: reverse stem direction on flagged eighth-note B

p. 29, system 2

T Sx, m. 419 :: reverse stem direction on B's
Bar Sx, m. 418 :: reverse stem direction on beat 2 eighth-note figure

p. 30, system 1

T Sx, m. 425 :: reverse stem direction on dotted-quarter B

p. 30, system 2

A Sx, m. 434 :: reverse stem direction on beat 2 eighth-note figure
T Sx, m. 432 :: tie at start of measure is dodgy

p. 31, system 1

Bar Sx, m. 446 :: sharp crowds barline
Bar Sx, m. 447 :: slur collides with tie

p. 31, system 2

Cl I, m. 449 :: hairpin crowds slur
S Sop, m. 449 :: fix hairpin & slur
A Sx, m. 449 :: hairpin collides w/ T Sx slur
T Sx, m. 448 :: sharp collides w/ slur
T Sx, m. 449 :: nudge hairpin closer to staff
T Sx, m. 453 :: slur crowds tie
Bar Sx, m. 448 :: tie collides w/ slur
Bar Sx, m. 453 :: slur crowds third-ledger-line E, tie

p. 32, system 1

Cl I, m. 449 :: sharp crowds barline
S Sax, m. 456 :: move staccato mark to notehead
T Sax, m. 454 :: slur crowds tie
T Sax, m. 455 :: slur crowds first-ledger-line A
Tn I, m. 456 :: slur crowds tie
Tn II, m. 458 :: slur crowds tie

p. 32, system 2

Cl I, m. 460 :: slur crowds tie
S Sx, m. 465 :: slur crowds tie
T Sax, m. 460 :: slur crowds first-ledger-line A
T Sax, m. 464 :: slur crowds first-ledger-line A
Bar Sax, m. 460 :: slur crowds #

p. 33, system 1

Cl I, mm. 471-472 :: reverse stem of B's
S Sax, m. 471 :: move staccato mark to notehead
Tn I, m. 466 :: p collides w/ Tn II tie

p. 33, system 2

Cl I, m. 473 :: reverse stem of B
Bar Sx, m. 477 :: # crowds barline
Brass, m. 477 :: some of the hairpins looks scrawny; slightly expand

p. 34, system 1

A Sx, m. 483 :: # crowds barline

p. 34, system 2

Cl I, m. 490 :: reverse stems of beat 1 figure
Cl I, m. 495 :: slur a bit dodgy
Betw. Cl II & S Sax :: a bit more space
T Sax, m. 491 :: hairpin crowds tie

p. 35, system 1

Cl II, m. 497 :: reverse stems of beat 2 figure

p. 35, system 3

Cl I, m. 512 :: tie a bit dodgy (?)

p. 36, system 1

Cl I, m. 515 :: slur collides w/ third-ledger-space D
A Sax, mm. 519-521 :: #'s crowd barlines (?)

p. 36, system 2

Cl I, mm. 522-524 :: reverse stem direction of B's
A Sx, mm. 522-524 :: reverse stem direction of B's

p. 37, system 2

A Sx, mm. 540 :: reverse stem direction of beat 1 figure

p. 38, system 1

Cl I, m. 549 :: # crowds barline (?)
A Sx, m. 547 :: # crowds barline

p. 38, system 2

Cl I, m. 555 :: # crowds barline
T Sx, m. 553 :: # crowds barline

p. 39, system 2

S Sax, m. 567 :: # crowds barline
A Sax, m. 568 :: # crowds barline
T Sax, m. 569 :: # crowds barline

p. 40, system 2

Ta, m. 584 :: hairpin crowds tie

p. 41, system 2

Cl I, mm. 603 :: reverse stem direction of B
Ta, m. 600 :: p collides with loco

p. 42, system 1

S Sx, mm. 606-607 :: check tie?

p. 42, system 2

S Sx, mm. 614-615 :: check tie?

p. 43

Generally dynamics and hairpins in cls are in danger of collision

Originally from henningmusick, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 29, 2009 at 02:10 AM | Comments (0)

July 28, 2009

The statue got me high

Reviewing the Tanglewood Music Center's Don Giovanni.
Boston Globe, July 29, 2009.

Originally from Soho the Dog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 28, 2009 at 11:13 PM | Comments (0)

Lincoln Center's Great Performers Series Opens With The Return Of ... - Broadway World

Lincoln Center's Great Performers Series Opens With The Return Of ...
Broadway World
Highlighting the fall season of Great Performers is a trio of events in New Visions, which explores music's unique relationship to visual art and language. ...

George Russell (1923-2009)

Composer, arranger, pianist, and educator George Russell died in Boston at age 86 on July 27, 2009.

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 28, 2009 at 11:12 PM | Comments (0)

Yellow Barn Music Festival Presents Founders' Concert - Commons

Yellow Barn Music Festival Presents Founders' Concert
Commons
... will take place Friday, July 31, honoring David and Janet Wells of Putney, with a program of works by Kodaly, Beethoven, Elliott Carter and Schumann. ...

A young man on a baton charge to world acclaim - The Herald

A young man on a baton charge to world acclaim
The Herald
They can do everything: they can do Berlioz, they can do Ligeti and Kurtag; they can do the classics and Rameau. They can do Mahler. They're a chameleon, ...

top 10 reasons

Originally posted by admin from paulbailey.us (beta), ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 28, 2009 at 08:10 PM | Comments (0)

A mazurka in jazz

Composer, arranger, and guru of the Lydian scale George Russell has died at the age of 86.

Originally from Soho the Dog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 28, 2009 at 05:13 PM | Comments (0)

What counts in a life

'Ce qui compte dans une vie, c'est l'intensité d'une vie, pas la dureé d'une vie.'

>The photo shows what Jacques Brel meant when he said 'What counts in a life is its intensity, not its duration'. It comes from the sleeve of the CD compilation /em>. 2009 is the 80th anniversary of Jacques Brel's birth. He died in 1978 aged 49, and is buried on the French Polynesian island of Hiva Oa close to the grave of Paul Gauguin.

Jacques Brel's songs have been performed by an astonishing range of artists from Dave van Ronk through Frank Sinatra and The Kingston Trio to contemporary rock band Beirut. There is even a CD titled Classic French Songs that puts him alongside Debussy, Duparc, and Fauré and the lesser known but very interesting Jean Ferrat. More on Jacques Brel here.

Brel infinement was bought from Leclerc in St Gilles-Croix-de-Vie, France. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 28, 2009 at 05:12 PM | Comments (0)

New Classical Tracks: Going Downtown with Shostakovich - Minnesota Public Radio

New Classical Tracks: Going Downtown with Shostakovich
Minnesota Public Radio
"They can do it all, from Vivaldi to Elliott Carter." That kind of versatility is important when it comes to Shostakovich. The First Cello Concerto is one ...

Review: Intermezzo hijinks and high art - Salt Lake Tribune

Review: Intermezzo hijinks and high art
Salt Lake Tribune
(Tribune file photo) No one needs to remind the people behind the Intermezzo Chamber Music Series that music is supposed to be fun. ...

What's Good for the Goose

Every composer has his champions, and I'm always happy to see people leap to a favorite composer's defense. It gives me a warm feeling inside, actually, even if I don't much care for the composer's music myself, because I think, "Someday that could be my music someone like that is defending." A friend whose tastes otherwise often parallel mine recently admitted that Feldman's music drove him up a wall, which I find amusing, rather than threatening. I have lived all my life with musicians around me putting down my favorite music. One of my professors told me that Cage was a charlatan and minimalism was bunk. Another met Cage, and said afterward, "I wouldn't have that man at my house." My favorite professor got denied tenure for bringing minimalism to class. I've listened to famous composers dismiss most of the new music I love as not being music at all. I've been told Robert Ashley isn't a composer. I've eaten dinner with composers who regaled each other with Philip Glass jokes. I have spent my life analyzing and championing music that is despised and marginalized by the classical music world.

And so, listen: If I listen to Piston's Seventh Symphony and don't like it, you can bloody well put up with it. There's no reason to pour vitriol on me. I've taken shit all my life for the kind of music I like, and I'll be damned if I'm going to also take it for the music I don't like. I'm especially not going to take it from establishment classical musicians, who tend to be the type who routinely damn and dismiss the music I love. I'm not in charge of Piston's reputation. I am not in a position to do him any harm, nor would I if I could. I've been interested in Piston since I was in junior high school, and The Incredible Flutist was the only recording you could find. So I don't like a piece you like. Feel that, multiply it by 20,000,000, and you'll start to feel what my entire life among classical musicians has been like. And then you can back off and suck it up.

Originally from PostClassic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 28, 2009 at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

Recent Listening: Kuhn, Alexander, Griffin, Assadullahi - All About Jazz

Recent Listening: Kuhn, Alexander, Griffin, Assadullahi
All About Jazz
His grasp of the nature, or natures, of Coltrane's music is evident throughout. His keyboard touch, his fluidity, the flow and density of his harmonies, ...

60x60 Dance @ Galapagos, NYC (4/7/09) [Gottschalk/Denis]

Phase 59
Music: Arthur Gottschalk
Dance: Alberto Denis

notes:
Arthur Gottschalk attended the University of Michigan, studying with Ross Lee Finney, Leslie Bassett, and William Bolcom. He is professor and chair of the Department of Music Theory and Composition at The Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. He has received the Charles Ives Prize of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and his book, Functional Hearing, is published by Scarecrow Press, a division of Rowman & Littlefield. Gottschalk created Phase 59 as a companion to Phase 58, using samples from his analog composition Strange Loops, and an out-take from a recording of his flute piece Contrary Variants. In Phase 59 he strives to evoke a soundscape never before heard and yet... strangely familiar.

Alberto Denisrecently created the Queens Academy of Arts & Dance = [QuAAD]. He has performed for Arthur Aviles for the past five years and independently for Palissimo Dance Theater, Dixie Fun Dance Theater, Doug Elkinsâ ãFraulein Mariaä, Heidi Latsky Dance, Lawrence Goldhuber, Luis Lara Malvacias, Marta Renzi, and Christopher Williamsâ ãGolden Legendä at DTW in May 2009. His choreography has been produced at Danspace Projectâs Food For Thought, Dixon Placeâs Body Blend and Moving Men, BAAD!âs Boogie Down Dance Series and Out Like That Festival and Kinetics Dance Theater, Baltimore MD. Heâs created sound designs for Alexandra Beller, Richard Rivera, Nathan Trice, Arthur Aviles and Karl Anderson.
Dancer: Alberto Denis

Originally from 60x60, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 28, 2009 at 02:11 PM | Comments (0)

Pneumershonic - The Mark of the Beast (video)

This is a shortened web version of Mark Jasper's documentary The Mark of the Beast about outsider musician Pneumershonic, grabbed from YouTube. You can read more about Pneumershonic and download his album Frequencies of the Beast, in this earlier post...

Originally from WFMU's Beware of the Blog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 28, 2009 at 11:54 AM | Comments (0)

Is it live, or is it VSL?

I'd like some help/advice on what the state of the art is in sample libraries. Especially: what's the best upgrade to use with Sibelius (from low-end-but-acceptable up to top-end) Right now, it seems Vienna Symphonic Library (http://vsl.co.at/) is the best out there (other opinions???) -- but how easy is it to use with Sibelius??

(I was blown away by Jay Bacal's virtual instruments performance of the Stravinsky Rite using VSL ... http://vsl.co.at/en/65/71/1590/1242.vsl)

Originally from Discussion Forum - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 28, 2009 at 11:53 AM | Comments (0)

Bye, Merce

"Merce Cunningham, a giant figure in the world of modern dance, died Sunday night at his home. He was 90."

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/merce-cunningham-dies/

Originally from Discussion Forum - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 28, 2009 at 11:53 AM | Comments (0)

Choreographers show works in progress - Los Angeles Times

Choreographers show works in progress
Los Angeles Times
One man wanted an explanation for dance-maker Rick McCullough's choice of music: a full 15 minutes of air-raid-siren noise (by composer Michael Gordon). ...
New dance at Barclay is spare, stylishOCRegister

all 2 news articles »

Philip Glass Ensemble, LA Philharmonic Perform to "Koyaanisqatsi ... - Nonesuch Records

Philip Glass Ensemble, LA Philharmonic Perform to "Koyaanisqatsi ...
Nonesuch Records
The ensemble's music director and keyboardist, Michael Riesman, will conduct the orchestra. Featured on the program are a performance, by the ensemble, ...

What We Can Never Know by David Gamez - Philosophy Now (subscription) (subscription)

What We Can Never Know by David Gamez
Philosophy Now (subscription) (subscription)
David Braid, a composer of contemporary classical music, has researched the temporal perception of music and its effect on musical form. ...

Originally from "contemporary classical" | "avant garde" music - Google News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 28, 2009 at 11:53 AM | Comments (0)

Two by Four with the Ruhr, Lincoln Center Festival, New York - Financial Times

Two by Four with the Ruhr, Lincoln Center Festival, New York
Financial Times
Singing had little to do with Steve Reich's Piano Phase, which came next. A would-be hypnotic period-piece, anno 1967, it dribbled and droned with ...

Members of Bon Iver and Colonies of Collections of Bees form new group - Examiner.com

Members of Bon Iver and Colonies of Collections of Bees form new group
Examiner.com
... ranging from David Sylvian and Steve Reich to Mahalia Jackson and Tom Waits, it might be more accurate to say the group's influence is music itself. ...

and more »

July 27, 2009

Sounds Heard: James Mulcro Drew's Animating Degree Zero

Equally inspired by modernism, conceptualism, and a wide range of vernacular traditions, Drew has forged a compositional language that is completely his own and which is difficult to make generalizations about.

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 27, 2009 at 11:11 PM | Comments (0)

Program Notes, Supplementary for IIa & IIb

Heedless Watermelon :: At time of writing these program notes, the piece has not quite been finished, which must be a kind of Henning milestone. Still, I can assure you, Gentle Reader, that anything I write now will continue to hold true for the completed piece (when it is complete). Mary Jane Rupert, Paul Cienniwa, Peter Bloom & I played a recital on 24 June; and in the elated aftermath, I started composing, for my Muse bade me draw up a diverting duet for flute and clarinet. My method of composition can be quickly summarized: There is no method. No, that is not (cannot be) quite true; but doing something different I frequently find a reliable tack. After the extended musical canvases of my opp. 92-95 (about an hour and three-quarters of music total), I have lately trended to brevity. (I composed Marginalia for cello ensemble in the space of two days, while ‘powering down’ in Bethesda, Maryland.) Musically, this piece is an intuitive blend of fructose, sunshine, sans-souci and electricity. There’s even a canon on a modified Frank Zappa melody thrown in. Toujours de l’audace. Optional entertainment, forsooth.

Tropes on Parasha’s Aria :: This is one brief episode in the course of an extended scene in a ballet I have been writing, after Dostoyevsky’s novella “White Nights.” The narrator sits down to introduce himself properly, and in one paragraph, makes a variety of literary allusions (some of them exotic); musically, I took this as an occasion for a series of brief characteristic dances, in something of a miniaturized homage to Act II of The Nutcracker. One item the narrator mentions is Pushkin’s verse-comedy, The Little House in Kolomna, which itself was later the source of a one-act opera buffa composed by Igor Stravinsky. The aria which Stravinsky wrote for Parasha at the beginning of Mavra has a special sentimental significance for me; I heard Rostropovich play once in St Petersburg, and at the end of the program he played Parasha’s aria for an encore, introducing it simply as “an old Russian song (старая русская песня).” In between iterations of the original melody, I have interleaved quasi-improvisatory ‘glosses’.

Originally from henningmusick, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 27, 2009 at 11:10 PM | Comments (0)

The Composers Chair, Episode 5: Ann Southam

The Composers Chair, Episode 5: Ann Southam

From Podcast: Sounds New.

Originally posted by jeff from cacophonous.org, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 27, 2009 at 11:10 PM | Comments (0)

Crosswinds

This is piece I wrote in the spring of 2000. I think I synthesized the sounds in Cmix and then scripted them in RTCmix. I didn't use Csound back then; so I'm just learning it now. I will post Csound pieces soon.

J+

From Podcast: cSounds.com - .

Originally posted by jeff from cacophonous.org, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 27, 2009 at 11:10 PM | Comments (0)

Bush Frequent Presence At Shopping Mall - K.M. Breay - Open Salon [del.icio.us]

Every weekday at noon inside a North Dallas shopping mall, the 43rd president of the United States of America sits down at his usual table in the food court and settles in for lunch with a jumbo Mello Yello, two plates of magic fries and a grande chimichanga. “When he first starting showin’ up at the mall, people would always come over and ask for his autograph or whatever,” said Daryl Vanderveen, a 19-year-old cashier at Sbarro Pizza. “But now he’s here so much that nobody even looks up from their lunch.

Originally posted by pbailey68 from paulbailey.us (beta), ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 27, 2009 at 11:10 PM | Comments (0)

Let the lamp affix its beam

This is in memory of Merce Cunningham, Michael Steinberg, and Robert Hilferty, all of whom died over the weekend. The first two, grand old men of dance and music writing, will be widely eulogized in coming days. But I would...

Originally from Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 27, 2009 at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)

Chamber Music America Awards 12 Ensembles Through "New Jazz Works"

Chamber Music America (CMA) has awarded $253,000 in grants to 12 ensembles through "New Jazz Works: Commissioning and Ensemble Development." The recipients were chosen from 161 applicants by an independent panel of jazz professionals.

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 27, 2009 at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)

American Choreographer Merce Cunningham Dies at 90

American choreographer Merce Cunningham died Sunday night in Manhattan, reports the New York Times. He was 90.

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 27, 2009 at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)

7 Composers Selected For 2009 Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute

Seven up-and-coming composers have been selected from an applicant pool of 143 for the 2009 Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute, which will be held from November 17-22, 2009 in Minneapolis.

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 27, 2009 at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)

Merce Cunningham, 1919-2009

Why walk when one can leap?

Move as if you've forgotten everything you thought you evr knew about how to pass, kick, fall and run;

Break everything down into independent constituent parts, recombine, overlay (simultaneous unisons that are not in unisons, duos that are not together, etc.);

Prowling.

Count like a dancer, steps neither in clock-time nor in musical time;

The dance is distributed among the spines of the dancers, the dancers distributed throughout the entire available space, "front" is wherever in space each individual dancer faces;

Aquire movement everywhere: from animals, pedestrians, the computer, stepdance, ballet;

Torsos turn.

Events: constant interplay between practice, composition and repertoire;

Dancers, musicians, artists working simultaneously but not at the same thing;

When do you ever find time to breath?

Feet. Can't. Fail.

Originally from Renewable Music, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 27, 2009 at 08:10 PM | Comments (0)

Mixing music and politics

Second from right on the CD sleeve above is Helmut Schmidt, who was the Social Democratic chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982. He was the fourth pianist on a 1985 Deutsche Grammophon recording of J.S. Bach's Concerto in A minor BWV 1065. Christoph Eschenbach (a personal friend of Helmut Schmidt), Justus Franz and Gerhard Oppitz were the other pianists. It was not the German politician's first visit to the recording studio. In 1982, while still chancellor, he recorded Mozart's Concerto in F major for three pianos and orchestra, K242, also with Eschenbach and Franz, but with the London Philharmonic rather than the Hamburg orchestra, and for EMI instead of DG.

Then on course there is Condoleezza Rice. While secretary of state in the George W. Bush administration she practiced keyboard diplomacy in between hunting for weapons of mass destruction. Staying in America, when Leonard Bernstein tried to mix politics and music he more than met his match in the form of 'new journalism' pioneer Tom Wolfe, whose devastating Radical Chic article was published in New York Magazine in 1970. The following year British Conservative prime minister Edward Heath chose the Helmut Schmidt way, rather than Lennie way, of mixing music with politics, and recorded Elgar with the London Symphony Orchestra for EMI; but I am afraid that one did not make it into my record collection.

There is a story about Edward Heath, the conductor, which goes as follows. A professional orchestra agreed to be conducted by him in Salisbury Cathedral. Heath was never quite as good a conductor as he imagined himself to be. During rehearsals, the prime minister was growing more and more curt in his comments. Eventually, the leader of the orchestra, growing increasingly exasperated, butted in: "If you don't stop being so rude to us, Sir Edward," he said, "We may start obeying your instructions."

Ted Heath may not have been a great conductor. But he did stay in office as prime minister from 1970 to 1974. The Polish pianist and composer Ignacy Paderewski (1860-1941) had a somewhat shorter innings. Appointed prime minister of Poland in January 1919, he resigned in December of the same year and returned to his career as a musician.

The recordings by Helmut Schmidt and Edward Heath have long disapperared from the catalogue. But the newly released CD below contains a little known example of mixing music and politics.

Track 20 of Smithsonian Folkways' archive compilation of classic protest songs is Gone, Gone, Gone by a group called Red Shadow. The excellent documentation with the CD tells how on the original LP release of Gone, Gone, Gone the members of Red Shadow were unidentified, but were described as a group consisting of "three Ph.D. economists and their friends from M.I.T.-land". The Smithsonian notes then reveal that one of the members of Red Shadow was Ev Ehrlich, who went on to be under secretary of commerce during the Clinton administration.

The lyrics to Red Shadow's Gone, Gone, Gone, which is played to the tune of the Beach Boy's Fun, Fun, Fun, are interesting. Here is my transcription, remember they were written in 1973.

When the crisis rocks the system,
You can see them come to patch up the holes now,
They are always pushing policies that work out right for ruling class goals now,
When the panic comes to Wall Street you can hear them stress the need for controls now,
But they'll be gone, gone, gone, when the people take their power away.

inton administration Ev Ehrlich founded ESC Company, a Washington, D.C.-based consultancy advising on economic and business problems. He was also chief economist and head of strategic planning for IT giant Unisys Corporation, and is a member of the U.S. Census Monitoring Board.

Which must raise a smile, as the 1973 lyrics for Gone, Gone, Gone, continue with -

Working out of Washington they're drawing up a better old plan now,
Then it's off to Santa Monica to spend some time consulting for Rand now ...

.blogspot.com/_FPpiWNARTt4/Sm1nuvv6UEI/AAAAAAAAJpY/sfQc1SdKfIA/s1600-h/ClassicLaborSongs.jpg">

* I cannot recommend Smithsonian Folkways' Classic Protest Songs, and the companion volume Classic Labor Songs seen above, highly enough. Artists on the protest song disc include Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger, Peggy Seeger, Larry Estridge and Guy Carawan. Strange Fruit, as sung by Brother John Sellers, is one of the most convincing examples of the power of music to move that I have heard for a long time. Downloads of Smithsonian Folkways' CDs are available from their website. Individual tracks cost $0.99; download Strange Fruit and change your life - the fruit in question are the swinging bodies of lynched blacks, and download Gone, Gone, Gone and ask - when will they ever learn? Both CDs should be part of the citizenship curriculum for all schools. More examples of mixing music and politics are very welcome. Read about the first twelve tone protest song here.

Both discs were a chance discovery for me. I came across Classic Protest Songs in a wonderful book and music shop in La Roche-sur-Yonne, France and bought the CD for the penal price of 17 euros. But I was rewarded shortly after by finding Classic Labor Songs for just 2 euros in the bargain bin of a French supermarket. Help fund these CDs, at no cost to you, by clicking on the Goggle ads in the right-hand side-bar. I notice that I bought the Helmut Schmidt Bach CD for £9.95 in January 1985. That is a very vivid illustration of price deflation in the music market, that £9.95 must be the equivalent of more than £20 in today's money. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 27, 2009 at 05:12 PM | Comments (0)

Walkaround Time

The dance piece Walkaround Time was created by John Cage and Merce Cunningham in 1968. Merce Cunningham died on July 26 aged 90. Read about John Cage and Merce Cunningham at Black Mountain College here.

Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 27, 2009 at 05:12 PM | Comments (0)

60x60 Dance @ Galapagos, NYC (4/7/09) [Todd/Wynne]

De and Reconstruction
Music: Balie Todd
Dance: Rachel Wynne

notes:
Balie Todd graduated from MTSU with a recording degree in 2004. Afterward he sold shoes, got fired from a country club, and worked with an audio and engineering company for television and radio. He loves unmarketable music and looks for chances to put it to film, tv, and video games. De and Reconstruction began as ambience for a short film. Samples of low moans and growls were run through a spectral EQ, as though a door was opening into something new. The percussive jabber is a two minute long chorus sampled with sixteenth notes cut and played one after the other.

expandance is an Irish-American company, founded in Dublin in 2006, but whose members have been working together for almost a decade. We work simultaneously in Dublin, Ireland and New York City. The company combines the energies of Rachel Wynne, Laurie Schneider and Alicia Walshe, as well as the lovely people who join us on a project-to-project basis, to make honest, emotionally expansive work, designed to engage both dance and non-dance audiences. We consciously create from a place of presence, joy and integrity.
Dancers: Rachel Wynne and Christina Noel Reaves

Originally from 60x60, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 27, 2009 at 05:11 PM | Comments (0)

Unter Regie: Under Direction and Getting Out From Under It?

A day or two ago, the German novelist Daniel Kehlmann delivered a speech for the opening of the Salzburg Festival, where he is this year's poet in residence and director of the literature program. He decided, in an unusually personal way, to talk about contemporary theatre, in particular the established "director's theatre." The talk was personal because Kehlmann spoke of his father, the late director Michael Kehlmann, who he describes as "a man who, before all else, saw in the director a servant of the author," yet whose career ebbed from early successes in the face of a theatre world that increasingly expected the director to place his or her ever-larger own imprint upon productions. Kehlmann Sr. became "old fashioned" and had frustratingly fewer opportunities to do his work. (Kehlmann describes his own decision to keep a distance from the theatre and write novels as a choice for a career field in which no one could keep him from his work). Kelhmann's critique of the Regietheatre is rhetorically powerful because of the combination of this personal tone, especially when coming from an author who is not a reactionary, with the fact that he never explicitly names his target. But, all the same: Bullseye.

*****

Classical music has been under its own form of direction since sometime in the 19th century. There was conducting beforehand — we all know about Lully's fatal beat-pounding — but it was a modest and constrained task in which keeping measure was frequently shared between the primarius and the continuo players or any soloists. But in the 19th century, the profession of the conductor quickly moved from keeping a beat to directing more complext traffic patterns, cheering forces on, scolding, swearing, swooning, through something called interpretation, and now into the odd combination of tourism and administration. Technique for conducting has never been standardized in the way that technique for an instrument has been, and success as a conductor depends uniquely upon psychological factors, impossible to measure objectively (save, perhaps in box-office draw) and often up as "charisma". For almost any work of music requiring more than two handfuls of players, a director is now assumed to be required. The conductor, to the best of my knowledge, was a development unique to the West (unique at least until the advent of the pop music producer who plays a similar role in repertoire that exists primarily in recorded form). While there are indeed ensemble leaders in other musical traditions — for example the dance masters in numerous ensemble musics — they tend to make noises themselves rather than mime before their players, thus being more fully integrated into the ensemble as players themselves.

Increasingly the conductor became a recognized professional, someone who led musical proceedings and intervened in all parameters between the composer's instructions and the ensemble of players. The institution of the professional conductor happens, and not coincidentally, to date fairly exactly with the invention of what we now identify as the classical canon, and while conductors were and continue to be gatekeepers on the admission of new works to that repertoire, their prime responsibility has always been to the interpretation of canonical works. One now compares the performances of works under the batons of various conductors with the zeal of baseball fans comparing pitching records; heck, there are even some performances out there (take Carlos Kleiber's Fifth and Seventh, for example) for which one is tempted to retire the score altogether.

Closure of a canon — whether that of German theatre (in which a very limited number of "classical" works have now dominated the serious stage programs for generations), of "Classical Music," or literature (of which the most familiar examples, the holy writings of the three major monotheistic religions, have been closed to a frequently tragic effect), is inevitably a moment in which creative energies — those which would have otherwise gone into the synthesis of new works — are now chanelled into interpretation. I believe that the problem underlying the Director's Theatre is the same which classical (and, increasingly, pop) music have suffered: not interpretation, in and of itself, but the canonical closure which requires interpretation to impress a contemporary identity on either the plays or the music.

*****

My own response, as a composer, to the directorial culture has been akin to Kehlman's decision not to write for the theatre: by and large, I avoid writing for orchestra. There are some aesthetic reasons for this (I like a certain amount of detail that smaller ensembles can do better) and the practical (orchestal commissions, when costs of engraving and part extraction are added in, rarely pay off if the performance is only a one-off). But I don't want to give up on the attractions of the orchestra altogether. Some of my best musical experiences and certainly many of my dreams require the services of an orchestra. I have had some good experiences with the other obvious alternative: specifying orchestra without conductor, but that is often a hard sell for ensembles with limited rehearsal time and often for those in which the conductor is, her- or himself, deciding on repertoire and is uninterested in programming works in which she or he is visibly superfluous.

Fortunately, there continues to be a species of conductor for whom making music, and new music in particular, is a larger cause than their own ego, among them: Jonathan Nott, Roland Kluttig, Peter Rundel, David Robertson, Sian Edwards, Lucas Vis, and Peter Eötvös. Conductors of this quality have the ability to be faithful to the composer's text, yet coax orchestras in interpretations which bring out more than the sum of the score's qualities, surpress its weaknesses (yes, composers are fallable), and perhaps add something complementary of their own to the mix without the work losing its identity. We are under direction, but not yet lost to it.

Originally from Renewable Music, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 27, 2009 at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

So You're A 'Radical': What Visual Artists Do You Admire?

It's no secret who I admire:

Originally from Discussion Forum - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 27, 2009 at 12:48 PM | Comments (0)

Welcome to the 21st Century

Twitkarl7777 over at Twitter wondered what has been invented in the last 9 years after reading the "20th century debt thread." Hence this thread.

Continuing with the "what do we owe the 20th century" and with all the examples of neoclassical giants (Stravinsky, etc), Jazz, Modernism, twelve tone, blues, minimalism, rock & roll (not in order and note I left out C + W), what has been invented in the 21st century and what inventions might arise out of the murky waters? Considering history, we are on the edge of extraordinary music.

Also, do you think there might be genres/styles that will be classified as 21st century in the history books which were invented in late 20th century?

Originally from Discussion Forum - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 27, 2009 at 12:48 PM | Comments (0)

Nora, piano-playing cat inspires concerto - Baltimore Sun

Nora, piano-playing cat inspires concerto
Baltimore Sun
Yow! and Alexander meant simply to share the video with Alexander's students (she teaches piano in addition to her work in music composition and studio art) ...

SLSO scores with John Adams CD - SuburbanJournals

SLSO scores with John Adams CD
SuburbanJournals
It captures the music's strengths without indulging in its excesses. "Doctor Atomic" rings all the changes, with music ranging from the atmospheric to the ...

Michael Steinberg, eminent music critic, dead at 80 - Baltimore Sun

Baltimore Sun

Michael Steinberg, eminent music critic, dead at 80
Baltimore Sun
Michael Steinberg, one of the most astute writers about classical music during the past 50 years, died Sunday (July 26) from cancer at the age of 80. ...

and more »

Michael Steinberg remembered - Los Angeles Times

Baltimore Sun

Michael Steinberg remembered
Los Angeles Times
He became not only whom you wanted to read writing about Anton Bruckner and Milton Babbitt but also about Lou Harrison and John Adams. ...
Michael Steinberg, eminent music critic, dead at 80Baltimore Sun

all 5 news articles »

Constanten's 'long, strange trip' continues - South Bend Tribune

Constanten's 'long, strange trip' continues
South Bend Tribune
“I first read about (avant-garde music) in a magazine in the 1950s and I had the response, 'That's for me,' ” he says about his music studies. ...

Originally from "contemporary classical" | "avant garde" music - Google News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 27, 2009 at 12:47 PM | Comments (0)

Regular folks find fame on Twitter - San Francisco Chronicle

Regular folks find fame on Twitter
San Francisco Chronicle
The professional cellist, whose avant-garde music draws modest-size audiences, got a big break when Twitter's staff placed her on a list of suggested people ...

and more »

Originally from "contemporary classical" | "avant garde" music - Google News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 27, 2009 at 12:46 PM | Comments (0)

Minimalism played to the max - Boston Globe

Minimalism played to the max
Boston Globe
... of both the annual Bang on a Can music festival and a heady day celebrating the places where new music and modern art overlap, Steve Reich's towering ...

and more »

Bang On a Can meets Reich, more - Albany Times Union

Bang On a Can meets Reich, more
Albany Times Union
... Steve Reich Day at MASS MoCA. The highlight of the day was the evening performance of the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer's classic '76 piece "Music For ...

and more »

Jonathan Harvey: Works for piano; Works for flute and piano - Musical Criticism

Musical Criticism

Jonathan Harvey: Works for piano; Works for flute and piano
Musical Criticism
Time is stretched and cut, dealt with as subject to the trail taken by the music. Such warping of time suggests the formative influence of Stockhausen on ...

Goings On About Town Classical Music - New Yorker

Goings On About Town Classical Music
New Yorker
... the program features music by Piazzolla, Bozza, Ligeti, and Lalo Schifrin (“La Nouvelle Orleans”), along with Samuel Barber's inevitable “Summer Music. ...

Confessions of a Closet Midtowner

I live 50 miles from Tanglewood, but I've never been there until today. Not my kind of crowd - too much Mozart and Carter, not nearly enough Glenn Branca and Eliane Radigue. But I've also never heard Leonard Bernstein's "Age of Anxiety" Symphony live until today, and the temptation smashed my resistance. "Age of Anxiety" is kind of a piano concerto, and I worked on the piano solo part in high school because I loved it so much. My old friend, former student (from 20 years ago), and sometime employer Tony DeRitis got me a ticket for the Boston Symphony concert conducted by David Robertson with his pianist-wife Orli Shaham, and as soon as Tony read me the program I canceled my previous engagements and went. Also on the concert was Roy Harris's Third Symphony, one of the most important works in my life, which I had only heard live once in a desultory performance, as well as Virgil Thomson's quirky but dignified Five Blake Songs and three Barber songs. The Bernstein performance was splendid, especially the pianist; the Harris was a little fast and not savored sufficiently for my taste, but it had a propulsive sweep.

I've long wanted to blog about "Age of Anxiety." Not a perfect piece by any means, and the sentimental ending degrades into ersatz Copland, but the first half is both scintillatingly clever and moving, with a theme and variations that exemplifies Schoenberg's concept of "developing variations" better than any other piece I know, especially by Schoenberg. In its day it was dismissed by musical intellectuals on account of its stylistic heterogeneity: its splashes of Brahmsian romanticism and brainy jazz in an otherwise diatonically modernist idiom. For years I listened to it in private, score in hand, as a guilty pleasure. But then in the '80s that kind of pastiche became the orchestral establishment's new hip trend, and "Age of Anxiety" is way overdue its rehibilitation. After the concert I talked to many musicians, and found only one, composer and BSO program annotator Richard Rodda, who shared my enthusiasm for the Harris. I guess my relation to that piece is atypical for my generation (what else is new?), but I discovered it at 13, and it became my most fervently envied formal model. There are some low-profile themes in that piece that run through it unobtrusively, and score study helps you understand why it sounds so ineffably unified.

As I've said before, I leaped into Cage with both feet at 15, but before that I had already been indelibly imprinted by Gershwin, Ives, Copland, Bernstein, and Schuman, so while the Downtown repertoire left a thick veneer, the undercoating was pure American symphony. So sue me.

I've been thinking, all this year, about teaching a course on the American Symphony, and perhaps even writing a book. Last fall a friend bought me a score to Virgil Thomson's Symphony on a Hymn Tune, one of my favorite pieces in the entire world. About that time I was also writing a review of Joseph Polisi's new biography of William Schuman for Symphony magazine, which (the review) got bumped twice, but came out a month or so ago. The Thomson score made me realize that I could probably start finding scores I wanted on the internet, rather than buying merely what I happened to come across at now-defunct Patelson's in New York. So I started looking around, mostly at The Sheet Music Store, and ended up ordering the following symphonies: Harris 9, Schuman 3 and 6, Cowell 4, Piston 7, Persichetti 4, Hanson 2, and Glass "Low." I also found Thomson's Third and the St. Joan Symphony of Norman Dello Joio in a used book store in Hudson. (This was all back in October when it looked like my personal finances were going to be happily bypassed by the economic Fall of Civilization.) All of them arrived except the Hanson, which I'm still waiting for (and Hanson expert Carson Cooman tells me I should have gotten the First or Third instead). They weren't necessarily the symphonies I would have dreamed of, but they were ones I could find by composers who interest me.

And frankly, things don't look good for the class, let alone the book. More often than not, I was disappointed. Reading through a score usually changes my opinion of a piece a little for the better or worse, and most of these went through a negative reassessment. Most depressing was the Harris Ninth (1962), which is a terrific mess. It's as though Harris lost sight of everything that had been wonderful about his earlier music, all the broad themes and rhyhmic energy, and just started noodling randomly in what he considered "his style." After reading it through closely with the recording, no impression remained at all, just a morass of piquant polychords absent-mindedly distributed. Cowell's Fourth (1946) is a significantly more coherent piece, but similarly undistinguished - it could almost have been written by any mid-century minor pedant. Of course Cowell is one of my heros, but most of his symphonies were written after his unfortunate San Quentin experience, which turned him into what most people would have to consider a more conservative composer. I wished I could have found No. 16, the "Icelandic," which is a little more fun.

The one piece that didn't suffer at all was Schuman's Sixth (1948), a tough, trenchant, impressively polyphonic work that may be, as some have said it is, the peak of his output. I had always been a fan of his Third (1941), and still am, though on close inspection it struck me as a little wandering.

Persichetti's 4th (and I hate to say it with American Symphony expert Walter Simmons possibly reading) made very little impression on me after repeated hearings: expertly written, measure for measure, as he always is, but with no discernible throughline. The most disturbing score I found, though, was Piston's Seventh (1960): an absolutely joyless, dogged work, carefully crafted around unmemorable themes as in a grim determination to churn out another correct example of the genre. He proved that one didn't need 12-tone technique to suck all playfulness out of orchestral writing. A more interesting venture was the Dello Joio, which had the advantage of clearly outlined ideas. Thomson's Third, an orchestration of one of his string quartets, was also disappointingly uninspired. And while I love certain passages in Glass's "Low," it's a little watery, and even the stirring parts repeat until you start muttering, "OK, OK, I get it already."

The problem with a course or a book is that the great American symphonies, even by great American composers, are exceptions, not the rule. Symphony production swelled to emormous volume in the 1930s and '40s (I once did a survey course on symphonies and found 1946 as the climax year), and a kind of generic, upbeat symphonic style became the order of the day. Composers like Cowell and Thomson seemed to compromise most of their principles to get a monumental work out there, while obsessive craftsmen like Persichetti and Piston seemed to have no concept of epic sweep. The American symphonies I get tired of never teaching are all of Ives's; the Copland Third; the Harris Third, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh; The Thomson Hymn Tune; the Riegger Third; the "Age of Anxiety"; the Schuman Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth; the Rochberg Second; any interchangeable Sessions work, the Third would do nicely; and now I'd add Robert Carl's Third and Fourth. (I wouldn't be adverse to adding the Antheil "1942" and Bolcom 5; Wolpe's Symphony is one of his weakest works, though, and the Bernstein "Kaddish" is lush music wrapped in an embarrassing text.) Perhaps those are enough for a course, but the list seems a little cherry-picked, and while it would be nice to focus more on the pre-WWII search for a Great American Symphony, I'm afraid I would end up feeling too apologetic. An analysis class around Harris, Thomson, Schuman, and Bernstein sounds both peripheral to student interest and too ambitious. So I feel like the dream isn't ikely to come true in any forseeable future, but at least I can now say I heard Bernstein 2 and Harris 3 live, and drank in every note like nectar.

Originally from PostClassic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 27, 2009 at 05:10 AM | Comments (0)

Music Review | Dennis Russell Davies and Maki Namekawa - New York Times

New York Times

Music Review | Dennis Russell Davies and Maki Namekawa
New York Times
They ended the first half of their program with another, more recent oldie, Steve Reich's “Piano Phase” (1967), an early experiment in applying to ...

July 26, 2009

Review: Music@Menlo octet captures magic of Mendelssohn - San Jose Mercury News

Review: Music@Menlo octet captures magic of Mendelssohn
San Jose Mercury News
Formed in California in the mid-1990s, winner of a 2009 Grammy for its recordings of music by Elliott Carter, the Pacifica floated through Mendelssohn's ...

and more »

The Perfect Wagnerite

The qualities in him that specially appealed to youth were his irreverence for tradition and office, his indifference to vested interests and inflated reputations, his contempt for current morality, his championship of unpopular causes and persecuted people, his vitality and humour, and above all his inability to take solemn people seriously.

Hesketh Pearson on George Bernard Shaw (above), who was born on July 26, 1856. GBS trivia -he is the only person to have been awarded both the Nobel Prize for Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938). These were for his contributions to literature and for his work on the film Pygmalion, respectively. Shaw on Elgar here.

Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 26, 2009 at 05:11 PM | Comments (0)

60x60 Dance @ Galapagos, NYC (4/7/09) [Payne/Greenfield]

60X3
Music: Maggi Payne
Dance: Sara Greenfield

notes:
Maggi Payne is Co-Director of the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College where she teaches recording engineering, composition, and electronic music. Her works often include visual elements including video, installations, and dance. Her works are available on the Lovely Music, Ubuibi, Starkland, Music and Arts, Asphodel, and/OAR, CRI/New World, Centaur, MMC, Digital Narcis, Capstone, Mills, and Frog Peak labels. 60X3, stems from a coincidence. It is her third entry for the 60X60 project (:60 faucet for the first project and :60 Fizz for the second) and it uses three modified sources: a faulty valve in a sink's faucet, a tiny motor, and a floor furnace.

Sara Greenfield, a native of New Hampshire, has been living and dancing in New York for the past 5 years. She is the co-creator of the new company Greenfield & Bon, Purveyors of Fine Dance Theatre with Jessica Bonenfant.
Dancers: HŒvard Bj¿rnevold and Stine Moen

Originally from 60x60, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 26, 2009 at 05:11 PM | Comments (0)

Maybe You Can Still Get One There

Anybody know the musicological significance of this location?:

[UPDATE] Wow, I'm glad I didn't promise an easy handout for that one. I suppose Partch didn't get a free meal there himself, just copied an inscription from someone who had. All these famous addresses in Partch's Barstow: I wonder if any of the people living there have any idea. You click on that blue square and it opens an information panel that says that house (next door) just sold for $449,000! In this economy!

Originally from PostClassic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 26, 2009 at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

Weekend Extra: Larry Bunker's Dream - All About Jazz

Weekend Extra: Larry Bunker's Dream
All About Jazz
He worked with an array of artists that included Gerry Mulligan, Pierre Boulez, Peggy Lee, Judy Garland, Dizzy Gillespie, Gary Burton and Michael Tilson ...

The summer of lean forward festivals

If 1967 was the 'The Summer of Love', 2009 is turning into 'The Summer of Lean Forward Festivals'.

The lean forward further Les Orientales in France in June was a hard act to follow. But Contemporary Art Norwich 09 has picked up the theme magnificently with its mixture of visual and performance art. Last night we were at CAN 09's first (and free) UK showing of Argentian-born Mariano Pensotti's La Marea (The Tide) in Norwich, which is where all my photos were taken.

Linking threads through Mariano Pensotti's work are the expressive use of video as a narrative element, juxtaposed with live performances and site specific events. These work as urban interventions where fictional scenes are played in a real context.

La Marea is the ultimate street theatre. It takes place in a shopping street late in the evening. The performance consists of nine scenes, some inside shops and others directly on the street, as above. The scenes are played simultaneously and last ten minutes each, with a two minute pause in between. There is no particular order to watch them, you choose your own path.

Narratives for each scene are provided by text on a video screen. La Marea is a technical as well as creative tour de force, with the nine discrete scenes synchronised centrally. Projected surtitles are visible in most of my photos and can be seen projected onto a storefront in the photo above.

This part of Norwich city centre is normally deserted at 11.00pm on a Saturday night. Look at the crowds in my photo above, look at the faces, and look at the spread of ages. The summer of lean forward festivals is showing there is more than one way to reach new audiences. Read about lean forward music here. Capture the spirit of La Marea, as performed in Buenos Aires, in the video below.

">There is one more performance of La Marea tonight (July 26) at 9.00pm in Norwich. Well worth leaning forward to. All photos are (c) On An Overgrown Path 2009. Report errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 26, 2009 at 12:37 PM | Comments (0)

Cleveland piano competition adds new music to repertoire - The Plain Dealer - cleveland.com

Cleveland piano competition adds new music to repertoire
The Plain Dealer - cleveland.com
The list of new-music composers is intriguing. It contains five Americans, including centenarian Elliott Carter, and admired and obscure figures from (in ...

Agony Pays Off

Here's a preliminary version of my new piece, Solitaire (14:05). It's the piece I wrote about recently that I agonized over the tuning for for a week, 29 pitches to the octave. It's both a solitary piece and a private game. The recording needs a little finessing. More about it later.

Caveat: it has a bass line that I can't hear on my computer speakers at all, and trying to EQ it up to hell and back simply made the other parts softer and softer. If you listen to it on little computer speakers, you may miss 15 percent of the piece, and wonder about the seeming pauses where something's actually happening in the bass.

Originally from PostClassic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 26, 2009 at 02:10 AM | Comments (0)

July 25, 2009

60x60 Dance @ Galapagos, NYC (4/7/09) [Cook/Trainor]

Gamaka
Music: Christopher Cook
Dance: Caitlin Trainor

notes:
Christopher Cook's electronic and acoustic works have received several awards and honors including those from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University, ASCAP, and the Society for Electro-acoustic Music in the United States. Dr. Cook teaches composition and music technology at Christopher Newport University. Gamaka is largely comprised of samples from a voice, cello, and drum. The samples are woven into a raga-like pattern complete with a quasi-vocal line.

Caitlin Trainor, originally from Rhode Island, now dances, choreographs, and teaches in New York. She likes to knit, drink Campari, and do handstands, but not all at once. Caitlin has danced for the Metropolitan Opera, KDNY, and Tina Croll. She has also danced for and choreographically assisted Sean Curran and Sean Koplowitz. With her undergraduate degree in dance from Skidmore College and a M.F.A. in dance from Mills College, Caitlin presently teaches in the Barnard College/Columbia University dance department. She has also taught at the American College Dance Festival, Montclair State University, and Sarah Lawrence College. She has choreographed new work on the students of Providence College, Murray State University, and Kennesaw State University. In addition to her work in the dance community, Caitlin teaches yoga, pilates, and fitness through private practice in Westchester County and NYC.

Originally from 60x60, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 25, 2009 at 11:11 PM | Comments (0)

This week @The Faster Times

Buy Esa-Pekka's House
Cruising with Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck
At Tanglewood: Thomas Hampson's National Anthem
At Tanglewood: Pilgrim's Progress

Originally from Soho the Dog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 25, 2009 at 08:11 PM | Comments (0)

At Tanglewood: Pilgrim's Progress - The Faster Times

At Tanglewood: Pilgrim's Progress
The Faster Times
... Troyens,” the all-Elliott-Carter Festival of Contemporary Music—but this summer, Levine has only lightly tweaked the usual picnic-on-the-lawn material. ...

Constanten's 'long, strange trip' continues - South Bend Tribune

Constanten's 'long, strange trip' continues
South Bend Tribune
... 'That's for me,' ” he says about his music studies. “I knew I had to study that, and I proceeded to do just that. Boulez tended to be more pedantic. ...

Tom Wallace - Blood and Water

Here is a unusual and interesting “electronic” album. Perhaps the moniker “field recording” would be a bit more accurate. Blood and Water was created at the haemodialysis unit in King’s College Hospital serving the South London area. The sounds are all from dialysis machines. The sounds of the “unit environment, the dialysis machines and the all important water treatment facilities” are shaped by Tom Wallace into this soundscape. Aside from the introduction of the process and unit by Sister Rachel Mwansa, all sounds are from the machines that are allowed to create their own narrative. It is a very unique composition that manages to hold its own and provide a fascinating 18 minutes.

The album is available from the Internet Archives in MP3 and Ogg Vorbis formats.

Download

Originally posted by Marvin from Free Albums Galore, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 25, 2009 at 12:16 PM | Comments (0)

hmmmmm....

...well, look, I'm all for using technology to enhance performance experiences. But I'm all for finding the most efficient and organic way of utilizing those technologies; I don't think it makes sense to incorporate multi-media/electronic/communication gadgetry just for the sake of using the technology in itself.

Case in point, an upcoming Beethoven Sixth Symphony with the National Symphony Orchestra led by NSO associate conductor Emil de Cou in which program notes will be sent via Twitter at appropriate times during the performance.

I don't have a problem with real-time program notes, which some have found to enhance the concert experience (I would think particularly so for those less familiar with the repertoire/type of music at hand). I just don't think Twitter is really the right vehicle.

I love tweeting as much as the the next Gen X/Y-er, but the charm of Twitter is that posts are pithy reflections of experiences in real time, as they occur. The 140-character limitations creates the necessity of boiling down a thought or observation to its essential meaning, and posting is a matter delivering these as they occur to you, a running commentary on life as it occurs (some tweets I just read as I write this blog: "Running to USPS & bank so I can get my errands and exercise done at the same time."; "In Vegas for a meeting, believe it or not. Just saw the spot where Elvis waited in his cape before he went on."; "Just did a shot of aquavit and sight-read the "Moonlight Sonata." It's wild sharps in that sonata.").

Pre-written program notes, tweeted as carefully cultivated musical points, first and foremost, defeat the purpose of Twitter. This is an example of the use of technology as a delivery system (for mass texting) which is peripheral to the whole purpose of the technology itself (from the Twitter website: "Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?").

If you want to provide real-time program notes, why not have a super-title screen?

Ok, Ok, I know some of you will say, "Well, at least with the Twittering, those of us who don't want to be distracted by the program notes don't have to see it on some screen above the orchestra." To which I answer, what's more distracting, a screen high enough above the orchestra so that you could ignore it if you so choose, or seeing the pale glow of countless phones and PDAs as people read their screens every few minutes? Are we encouraging people to read texts during a concert? What precedent does that set?

Orchestras have slowly climbed aboard the technology bandwagon, which I applaud. What I'm less enthused about is the use of the latest "sexy" thing ("Hey, everyone's on Twitter! We need to incorporate this into what we do because it's proof that we're hip and current!") just for the sake of the thing itself, when there is a more efficient and perhaps more natural way to accomplish the same ultimate goal.

I've had a long-standing relationship with the NSO (I first worked with them back in 2002), and I appreciate this attempt to think outside the box; however, for my taste, this particular foray into use of technology seems off-mark. I'll be curious to see commentary from those who attend the concert.

PS: had set this to post on a 12-hour delay without carefully proofing, sorry for the typos in the original!

Originally from Inside the Classics, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 25, 2009 at 12:16 PM | Comments (0)

So How Much Are We Indebted To The 20th Century?

Originally from Discussion Forum - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 25, 2009 at 12:16 PM | Comments (0)

Chico Freeman, Air, Walt Dickerson, George Cables: Buried ... - All About Jazz

Chico Freeman, Air, Walt Dickerson, George Cables: Buried ...
All About Jazz
Masahiko Yuh's taste wasn't confined to AACM and the avant garde, as this album by the more mainstream pianist George Cables demonstrates. ...

and more »

Originally from "contemporary classical" | "avant garde" music - Google News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 25, 2009 at 12:15 PM | Comments (0)

Ringling International Arts Festival willing to take some risks - Tampabay.com

Tampabay.com

Ringling International Arts Festival willing to take some risks
Tampabay.com
4, with soloist Pedja Muzijevic) and Steve Reich (Nagoya Marimbas). Oct. 7 • Chamber music — Anne-Marie mcdermott, piano; Jennifer Frautschi, violin; ...

The sound of isolation - guardian.co.uk

The sound of isolation
guardian.co.uk
The music student John Adams carried the scores of Pierre Boulez around with him during his freshman year at Harvard, "hoping that somehow, ...

Through Western Bog Laurel - take 20

Listen here:

Subscribe here:

This is the last version for now, I think. I slow the piece down by a small amount every 40 seconds until it is running around 11% slower at the end. Each of the 12 tempo reductions are done by the ratio of 2^(1/72), which is the 72nd root of two (1.0096735332). The beats per minute are divided by that number 12 times. Coincidentally, that's the same as the ratio of one note to the next in 72-EDO, the tuning the piece is realized in. I can't figure out how that happened, but there it is.

Csound takes care of tempo with the t tempo statement.
t0 1200 800 1200 896 1188 1592 1188 1688 1176 2376 1176 2472 1164 3152 1164 3248 1152 3920 1152 4016 1140 4680 1140 4776 1129 5432 1129 5528 1118 6177 1118 6273 1107 6915 1107 7011 1096 7645 1096 7741 1085 8368 1085 8464 1074 9084 1074 9180 1063 9792 1063 9888 1052 10493 1052 10589
The t0 makes it a tempo statement. The next number is the beats per minute, in this case 1200. A quarter note is about 8 beats when there are 1200 beats a minute. The next number after beats per minute is the number of beats where the next tempo marker is found, in this case 1200. So it stays at 1200 beats a minute for 800 beats, about 100 eighth notes. The next number 896 is the beat marker, and 1188 is the beats per minute. 1200 / 1.0096735332 is 1188, approximately. Over the next 96 beats or 12 eighth notes, it slows down from 1200 to 1188 beats per minute. Then at beat 1592 it starts to slow down to 1176 beats per minute, arriving at that speed at beat 1688. The overall effect is a gradual slowing down, sometimes noticably, sometimes imperceptively, until it stops.

Originally from Podcast Bumper Music, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 25, 2009 at 02:11 AM | Comments (0)

July 24, 2009

Sheer Nylon Dances - music of Gerard Brophy - Sun. 5 October

Sheer Nylon Dances
Sunday 5 October, 6pm - Visy Theatre, Brisbane Powerhouse
Book Online, or on +617 3358 8600 (more info on booking)

One of Australia’s best-respected composers, Gerard Brophy, brings his new work to Brisbane for the first time when Topology presents their all-Brophy program.

Gerard Brophy has a sensual, erotic streak running through his music. This becomes quite direct in pieces like Sheer Nylon Dances, scored for strings and “fetishised piano”, the familiar instrument’s sonorities transformed by rubber insertions.

Other works, including his just-finished oboe quintet, embrace the lyrical, passionate sensations made available by the glowing sound colours of string quartet and oboe. (Topology will be joined by five outstanding guest artists.)

In mid career, Gerard Brophy transformed his musical language, moving away from the challenging, angular abstractions of late modernism towards a concern with music that inhabits the body – celebrating rhythmic vitality, tracing caressing melodic contours, exploring luscious sound textures.

Topology’s aesthetic outlook has much in common with this approach. The expanded ensemble will perform six recent Brophy works, including mFm, Sheer Nylon Dances, Room of the Saints, À flor da pele, We Bop and the brand new oboe quintet.

ShareThis

Originally posted by Administrator from Topology, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 24, 2009 at 11:12 PM | Comments (0)

Topology with Hannah Cameron

young singer-songwriter we worked with recently in a schools program at the Powerhouse. We had such fun. Here’s a home video of her performance of her lovely song. Our high-quality videos will be coming soon.

ShareThis

Originally posted by Administrator from Topology, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 24, 2009 at 11:12 PM | Comments (0)

Spirit Dancing - Sun 9 November

Brisbane Powerhouse, 119 Lamington St, New Farm Brisbane
Concert starts at 6pm - book online or by phoning (07) 3358 8600 (Powertix).

Music has amazing power to take us outside ourselves. Topology plays music in this concert that is transcendent and ecstatic, including their own new pieces and some of the best music composed by UK legends Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman, and Australians like Ross Edwards.

The concert finds Topology exploring the meditative beauty of Gavin Bryar’s ritualistic music in The Old Tower of Löbenicht, a haunting and deeply moving work that Bryars dedicated to the memory of a friend killed in the 1988 Lockerbie air crash.

Excerpts:
Terry Riley, Salome’s Excellent Extension, part 2
Gavin Bryars, The Old Tower of Löbenicht
Michael Nyman, Shaping the Curve

About some of the music:

Ross Edwards: White Cockatoo Spirit Dance (1998)
White Cockatoo Spirit Dance has all the characteristics of a maninya, one of Edwards’ Australian dance chants - a form he evolved throughout the 1980s which has left a definitive stamp on his own and much other recent Australian music.

Vibrant, captivating, life-affirming, and virtuosic, White Cockatoo Spirit Dance is a spontaneous melodic outpouring whose obsessive rhythms appear to have been ritualised from nature. (Edwards claims to have been influenced particularly by the sounds of insects).

Here’s what an audience member said about a recent Topology concert on ABC Radio 612

ShareThis

Originally posted by Administrator from Topology, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 24, 2009 at 11:12 PM | Comments (0)

Interview with Christa, Bernard, Rob and John of Topology

You can hear four of us answering questions at the Apple computer CreateWorld conference in Brisbane. Here it is.

ShareThis

Originally posted by Administrator from Topology, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 24, 2009 at 11:12 PM | Comments (0)

Through Western Bog Laurel - take 19

Through Western Bog Laurel - take 19
For more information, see http://bumpermusic.blogspot.com/2009/07/through-western-bog-laurel-take-19.html and http://bumpermusic.blogspot.com/2009/07/through-western-bog-laurel-take-11.html This is a piece for Flutes, Finger Piano, Percussion board, Balloon Drums, Marimba, Vibe, and Harp. It is tuned to a 72-EDO approximation of the Partch Tonality Diamond. About 9 minutes long.

Originally posted by jeff from cacophonous.org, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 24, 2009 at 11:10 PM | Comments (0)

Nonesuch Events for the Weekend of July 24–26 - Nonesuch Records

Nonesuch Events for the Weekend of July 24–26
Nonesuch Records
Steve Reich joins the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival in progress at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams at the far ...

Concerto Night: Third time's a charm for flutist - The Daily Sound

Concerto Night: Third time's a charm for flutist
The Daily Sound
We just performed Reiche and now we're going to work on Ligeti's Six Bagatelles, which we will likely play at the Chamber Music Marathon in August. ...

Guggenheim "Works & Process" to Feature Peter and the Wolf and ... - Playbill.com

Guggenheim "Works & Process" to Feature Peter and the Wolf and ...
Playbill.com
Additional offerings include Steve Reich Interpreted, featuring choreography by Larry Keigwin (Dance of the Vampires) and Peter Quanz (Sept. ...

Through Western Bog Laurel - take 19

Listen here:

Subscribe here:

This is another take on the same piece I've been working on for a while. This version includes adjustments to the tuning of the samples. There were some intonation problems with the marimba, harp, vibes, flute, and balloon drum. To determine pitch I used Cooledit (now called Adobe Audition) and its FFT option. You basically load a sample file and select Analyze-FFT and it puts up a Fast Fourier Transfer window showing the most prominent frequencies, with the pitch in note/cents from 12-EDO for the most prominent frequency. For most non-bass notes that is the fundamental. Here's one for the harp D#6, 4 cents flat at a point about half a second into the harp sample.

My Csound preprocessor allows me to put -4 into a list of samples, and Csound adjusts the sample when it's used in the synthesis instrument. Four cents is not noticiable, for the most part. Anything over 10 is not good.

Most of these samples, from the McGill University Master Samples CDROM library, are not very in tune, and they don't necessarily hold the same pitch for the whole note. Many go up and down by a few cents from the start to finish.

This is the first time I have systematically used the Cooledit frequency analysis to fine tune the samples. I previously tuned them by ear to a reference sine wave. It was a time consuming process, and error prone. The harp sample was particularly out tune, with one note 43 cents off, and others 10-20 off. The flute was also way out of tune, with the highest note 31 cents sharp. Here's C6 31 cents sharp one second into the sample. Typical flute player getting excited that he can hit such a high note. I back that sample down by 31 cents and we are good to go.

Originally from Podcast Bumper Music, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 24, 2009 at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)

60x60 Dance @ Galapagos, NYC (4/7/09) [Smallwood/Cotter]

Whitecap
Music: Scott Smallwood
Dance: Emma Cotter/RETTOCAMME

Scott Smallwood was born in Dallas, Texas, and grew up at 10,000 feet in elevation in the Colorado Rockies. Currently based in New Jersey, his work ranges from sonic photographs, abstracted studio pieces, improvisations, and composed structures, encompassing real and abstracted sound textures based on a practice of listening, improvisation, and phonography. He performs regularly as a solo improvisor, as well as in groups, and his work has been released on Autumn Records, Deep Listening, Televaw, Simple Logic, Static Caravan, and Webbed Hand Records.

RETTOCAMME is a process-oriented dance/art/design group founded by Emma Cotter in 2003 in NYC.Most recently, RETTOCAMME presented the first installment of "The February Project" at Triskelion Arts, an evening length collaboration with composer Jordan McLean and visual artist Ryan Roth, created andperformed by four dancers, four musicians and four photographers. Dancers: Emma Cotter, Elisa LaBelle

Originally from 60x60, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 24, 2009 at 05:11 PM | Comments (0)

Koyaanisqatsi 1, Hollywood Bowl 0

Originally posted by admin from paulbailey.us (beta), ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 24, 2009 at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

Creep into the, oh forget it

Draw a straight line and follow it.

Apparently I've just broken copyright law. I can't believe what's holding up my Cage book: you are no longer allowed to quote texts that are entire pieces of art. This means I've been trying to get permission simply to refer to Fluxus pieces like La Monte Young's "This piece is little whirlpools in the middle of the ocean," and Yoko Ono's "Listen to the sound of the earth turning." And of course, Yoko (whom I used to know) isn't responding, and La Monte is imposing so many requirements and restrictions that I would have to add a new chapter to the book, and so in frustration well past the eleventh hour, I've excised the pieces from the text.

This seems not to have been the case 13 years ago. When I wrote American Music in the 20th Century, I quoted La Monte's piece about feeding hay to the piano, and several others, without even footnoting them because they were so famous, and no one at Schirmer batted an eyelash. But now, if something's changed and I can no longer quote Fluxus texts without getting permission, then I just have to write Fluxus off the list of things I write about. Some of these pieces are too brief to refer to without quoting them in their entirety. How do you use Nam June Paik's "Creep into the vagina of a living female whale" as an example without giving the whole piece away? How am I supposed to refer to it: "Creep into the vagina, etc"? Call it Danger Music No. 5 and tell you to look it up? Paraphrase it: "crawl into the birth canal of a matronly member of the order Cetacea"? And if the copyrights are held by unreasonable people who can hold your book hostage to their detailed demands, then it's just time to find a different research area. The situation is absurd, somebody under whatever questionable chemical influences scrawls seven words on a piece of paper and 50 years later I can't refer to that piece of paper without paying someone some money and following their prescriptions. A couple of years ago my Music Downtown book was held up because the designer had used the Village Voice font on the cover. The creeping tentacles of copyright law are paralyzing the arts and making intelligent scholarship and even creativity impossible.

Originally from PostClassic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 24, 2009 at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

Meditations on a Byzantine Hymn

Paradoxically, the work's deliberate archaisms now seem to strike a notably contemporary resonance in the context of the current popularity of the music of religous composers such as Pärt and Górecki.

John Pickard writes about Edmund Rubbra's Meditations on a Byzantine Hymn in a perceptive sleeve note for the CD seen above. Rubbra composed his Meditations for solo viola in 1962 and later made the two viola arangement recorded by members of the Dante Quartet. Rubbra's string quartets, which are the main works on the disc, are well worth investigating, particularly the taut Fourth from 1977, which is dedicated to Robert Simpson. Wonderfully committed playing from the Dante Quartet and glorious Snape Maltings sound engineered by Tony Faulkner in 2001 for Dutton. I paid £10 delivered from an online seller.

Rubbra dedicated his Sinfonia Concertante for Piano and Orchestra (1934) to his teacher Gustav Holst. The photo below shows Rubbra (left) with Holst and students. The photo was taken at the then University College, Reading where Holst was professor of music from 1919. Rubbra studied at Reading on a scholarship from 1920. (Coincidentally I studied at what became Reading University from the annus horribilis 1968 to 1971).

Leo Black's book Edmund Rubbra - Symphonist tells how -

Part of Holst's familiarisation process with a new pupil was to go on long walks together and discuss the world, so that in his student years Rubbra was introduced by his teacher not only to Joseph Conrad but also to political thinking and socialist ideas, in books such as Benjamin Kidd's Social Evolution.

A neat coda to this story is supplied by the news this week that archive footage from the 1970s has been discovered showing Edmund Rubbra, Imogen Holst and Herbert Howells talking about Gustav Holst. There is a clip on the BBC website that includes fascinating and very rare footage of Rubbra. More variations on an Orthodox theme here.

Rubbra/Holst photo credit is Cheltenham Art Galleries and Museum. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 24, 2009 at 02:11 PM | Comments (0)

Friday Links

Stuart Jeffries offers an indie kids’ guide to classical music in today’s Guardian and, predictably, things are heating up in the comments. Miss Mussel would have recommended different pieces but then that’s half the fun. Has he got it right or is this just another round of pretentious claptrap whose sole purpose is to condescend to today’s yoof with outdated elitist ideals…or something.

Ben at Classical Convert is ranking Beethoven symphonies based on Youtube views. It seems the most popular Beethoven number is 957364812 – Miss Mussel’s is 753846219 – what about you?

If you ever find yourself in the company of two or more horn players and wish to stir things up just for the sport of it, Bruce Hembd has a handy list of 10 things you can casually drop into conversation.

Typeface geeks (you rang?) will be happy to note that the Internet-safe font library is about to get thousands of new books. Finally.

What do human brains sound like? Ummm….one hand clapping?

Share This Post:

Originally posted by Miss Mussel from The Omniscient Mussel on Classical Music & Culture, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 24, 2009 at 02:11 PM | Comments (0)

Tomorrow Never Dies (ImprovFriday 7-24-09)

Welcome new participants. Things have become a little more simple since two weeks ago. This is how you participate: Make a work or improv and post it to your social network of choice.

Please place ImprovFriday in the description (not the work itself). Otherwise, I have no idea who is participating and neither will anyone else. You know, if you're going to post an improvisation tomorrow, or a new work work for that matter, I will wonder why you wouldn't put ImprovFriday in there. It only helps us grow (think of the blob).

Saturday (Sunday at the latest), I'll link to the works in my blog. Reminder that we no longer use blip.fm/, but just link to your social network using the link of whoever is hosting the mp3.

One last thing: If you're participating, remember that its open season on anyone's works in regards to using works for collaborating. Therefore, if you feel your work is trademarked as untouchable, you might use something else ;)

Originally from Discussion Forum - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 24, 2009 at 12:15 PM | Comments (0)

3puen: "Secret Hot Dog Party"

3puen (pronounced "Pyoon"), a DIY-electronic pop combo, might be the closest thing NYC's had to Sparks for the last seven years or so, plumbing pipes no less Warholian, though excelling with focus on personal psychodramas, sometimes tied in to food or movies/television (things the band knows exceptionally well). However, unlike Sparks, there are no brothers, and 3puen only sold their CD's in a deli on 2nd Avenue in the East Village. They started out on an acid trip, played live and did some Fad Gadget covers, developed a repertoire of originals and performed once on Michael Goodstein's Choking on Cufflinks. "Secret Hot Dog Party" is part of a three-song "Self Hatred Suite" from a few years back, this video is brand new. One of the composers resides in Austin these days and is getting back on the wagon making music. While WFMU never really played this tune on air for FCC reasons, their tune "Sugar Cookie" continues to be somewhat of a hit staple among the staffers. Fun stuff.

Originally from WFMU's Beware of the Blog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 24, 2009 at 12:14 PM | Comments (0)

Beyond The Product

Doug McLennan over at ArtsJournal has a blog post up today taking arts organizations to task for not keeping up with other entertainment venues when it comes to customer comfort.

"Despite the fact that the average concert hall was many times more expensive to construct than the new-generation movie complexes, the customer amenities inside the halls constructed over the past 20 years - how can I put this kindly - kind of suck... There's an argument to be made for preserving formal rituals in going out to see a performance. But things change. I like some of the rituals, but I have to admit I often resent the degree to which it is imposed by rigid seats and cramped legroom. And why can't I bring my drink back in to the show?"

This is the kind of issue that those of us who make our living on stage forget to think about most of the time - after all, we don't sit in those cramped seats very often, and to be perfectly frank, if you think the audience spaces are uncomfortable, you should see the backstage areas we work in. (Just for example, if we have more than three soloists on a single concert, we don't have enough dressing rooms for them.) But we should, and this ties into a much larger issue. Doug's been talking a lot on his blog lately about the need for arts groups to realize that we're no longer just competing with other arts groups - we're competing with baseball teams, rock bands, TV programs, and the almighty Internet, and we might want to start acting like we're aware of this.

As it happens, of course, the Minnesota Orchestra recently announced that we're intending to spend $40 million to upgrade Orchestra Hall, and nearly all of that money will be spent on audience spaces like our severely undersized lobby. Now, unfortunately, $40m isn't enough to suddenly transform a 35-year-old concert hall into this, but it's certainly enough to make a tangible difference in the concertgoing experience.

So what are your priorities? What, specifically, do you think we should be spending our renovation budget on? And what popular upgrades do you think would be a huge waste of resources that we shouldn't even think about bothering with?

Originally from Inside the Classics, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 24, 2009 at 12:13 PM | Comments (0)

Los Angeles Music - Philip Glass, Interviewed - page 1 [del.icio.us]

"LA WEEKLY: By the time Koyaanisqatsi came about, you were already well established in areas combining music and visuals. PHILIP GLASS: At that point I was 41 years old, and I had been playing with my ensemble for 10 years. Einstein on the Beach was 4 years old, and the opera Satyagraha was composed by then. So I didn’t really consider myself a film composer, and at that time I wasn’t. Godfrey Reggio approached me with the idea of working with this film, and I said, “Well, I don’t write film music.” What a way to start in the film business, huh? But when I saw what he was doing, I was so impressed, and I said, Okay, I can do this"

Originally posted by pbailey68 from paulbailey.us (beta), ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 24, 2009 at 11:10 AM | Comments (0)

Critic's picks - classical music - Boston Globe

Boston Globe

Critic's picks - classical music
Boston Globe
BANG ON A CAN Tomorrow, the so-called Banglewood festival at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art zeros in on Steve Reich (inset), ...

Rocking Beijing - Wall Street Journal

Rocking Beijing
Wall Street Journal
Most of Beijing's underground bands still look to the West for inspiration; Mr. Zhang, for example, draws from minimalist composers Steve Reich and Philip ...

Kline DVD Reviewed at American Record Guide

The new July/August 2009 issue of American Record Guide reviews our Phil Kline Around the World in a Daze DVD. We are especially pleased with this comment:

"Pennies from Heaven, an 18-minute layering of bell sounds, shows why more pieces should be recorded in surround sound. Becoming utterly engulfed by bells too numerous to count, all playing descending lines with mixed rhythms, syncopations, and stresses, borders on the mathematical sublime."

Coming 28.vii.09

Bullish Upticks (IIa)

The Irrationally Exuberant Music of Karl Henning

Heedless Watermelon, Opus 97 (2009) flute & clarinet – Première
stars & guitars, Opus 95 (2009) bass flute & harp – Première
Tropes on Parasha’s Aria (from White Nights, Opus 75) flute, clarinet & harp

Peter H. Bloom, flutes
Mary Jane Rupert, harp
Karl Henning, clarinet

Tuesday, 28 July 2009
12:15pm
King’s Chapel
Corner of School & Tremont Streets, Boston
Freewill donation.

When the going gets tough, the tough get composing.

Originally from henningmusick, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 24, 2009 at 05:10 AM | Comments (0)

Trio rehearsal

Met with harpist Mary Jane Rupert & flautist Peter H. Bloom to rehearse one of the easiest pieces in the world to rehearse, a trio adaptation of one of the characteristic dances in Night the Second of the ballet-in-progress, White Nights. A few years ago I had prepared a cl/vn/pf arrangement of this dance, Tropes on Parasha’s Aria, which I played together with Stephen Symchych & Mark Engelhardt.

As in the case of that prior adaptation, a fine time was had by all this evening; approval of the music (and the arrangement) was unanimous, and it was agreed that the trio must close the program. “Nothing else could follow this!,” remarked Peter.

Originally from henningmusick, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 24, 2009 at 05:10 AM | Comments (0)

Coming 29.vii.09

Bullish Upticks (IIb)

The Irrationally Exuberant Music of Karl Henning

Blue Shamrock2) clarinet solo
The Angel Who Bears a Flaming Sword, Opus 94a (2008) alto flute solo – Première
Irreplaceable Doodles, Opus 89 (2007) clarinet solo
Heedless Watermelon9) flute & clarinet – Première

Peter H. Bloom, flutes
Karl Henning, clarinet

Wednesday, 29 July 2009
12:15pm
West End Branch, Boston Public Library
151 Cambridge Street, Boston
Free & Open to the Public.

When the going gets tough, the tough get composing.

Originally from henningmusick, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 24, 2009 at 05:10 AM | Comments (0)

First Impressions of Classical TV - Examiner.com

First Impressions of Classical TV
Examiner.com
... and I was delighted to discover in the Classical Music Video category a free offering of four works by Edgard Varèse conducted by Pierre Boulez. ...

Dweezil Takes Frank on Road - California Chronicle

Dweezil Takes Frank on Road
California Chronicle
Frank Zappa, who died in 1993, left behind a huge body of music, including symphonic works and Stockhausen-like tape collages, jazz-rock fusion and social ...

and more »

The indie kid's guide to classical music - guardian.co.uk

guardian.co.uk

The indie kid's guide to classical music
guardian.co.uk
For the time being, avoid anything labelled Salford Toccata by Harrison Birtwistle, explosante fixe . . . by Pierre Boulez, Helikopter-Streichquartett by ...

Two Pianists: A Virtuoso and a Philosophizer - New York Times

Two Pianists: A Virtuoso and a Philosophizer
New York Times
In his hands the spiraling passagework, thick with pungent cluster chords, anticipated the harmonies of a much-later Hungarian master, Gyorgy Ligeti. ...

July 23, 2009

A Vail encore for a historic career - Vail Daily News

A Vail encore for a historic career
Vail Daily News
... an incredible supporter of new music, who had a tremendous ability to conduct the most complex things.” Under Pierre Boulez (1971-77), “the orchestra ...

and more »

Classical Music/Opera Listings - New York Times

Classical Music/Opera Listings
New York Times
... Stravinsky and Steve Reich. At 8 pm, Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center , (212)721-6500, lincolncenter.org; $25 and $50. (Schweitzer) MARLBORO MUSIC ...

With a little Alp from my friends

Today in Intellectual Property news: copyright law invades the domain of Bavarian beer-hall yodeling.

The money-spinning power of "horlla-rü-di-ri, di-ri, di-ri", the famous chorus of the Kufsteinlied, which is capable of making even the hardiest of lederhosen-clad Germans go weak at the knees, has been keenly felt this week in a Munich courtroom battle over who owns the copyright.

The heirs of Karl Ganzer, the Austrian composer of the 63-year-old beer-hall hit which is said to be Europe's most-played folk song, were yesterday successful in their attempts to sue the music publisher Egon Frauenberger, who claimed he had written the song's refrain and therefore had a right to a twelfth of the royalties.

The most famous version of the "Kufsteinlied" was recorded in 1968 by Franzl Lang, the Jodlerkönig. Here he is singing it in 1991. Now I'm thirsty.

Originally from Soho the Dog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 23, 2009 at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)

Gorecki on guitar

My recent post about Louth Contemporary Music Society's new CD of Tavener, Pärt, Knaifel, Silvestrov, Cage and Górecki attracted a lot of attention. One of the founders of LCMS, Eamonn Quinn, noticed that my Jordi Savall podcast use Steve Reich's Nagoya Guitars as a signature tune; so he sent me an interesting CD of contemporary guitar music from Ireland.

The Dublin Guitar Quartet, seen in my lower photo, play eight-string and eleven string guitars. The extended range of these instruments allows them to specialise in arrangements of contemporary music, and their repertoire includes transcriptions of Philip Glass' First and Third String Quartets. Their CD Deleted Pieces , which Eamonn Quinn sent me, includes a very striking arrangement by quartet member Brian Bolger of the second movement of Henryk Górecki's Quasi Una Fantasia String Quartet No. 2, a work originally commissioned by the Kronos Quartet.

Other composers on the CD are Kevin Volans, Dublin rock band Redneck Manifesto, Brian Bolger and Leo Brouwer. Deleted Pieces was released in 2005 by Greyslate Records, but it seems to have been, er ...., deleted. My header image is the cover artwork for the disc; this, I think, shows the recording venue of the Church of ss. Cuan and Brogán, Clonea Co. Waterford, but don't ask about the beds. And yes, the album title and artists are missing. They were added via a self-adhesive sticker on the jewel box. Deleted pieces somewhere in the production process perhaps.

* Henryk Górecki's Symphony No. 4 is being given its world premiere by Marin Alsop and the London Philharmonic Orchestra on April 17, 2010 in the Royal Festival Hall, London. The programme also includes the European premiere of Philip Glass' The Four Seasons and a first performance of a new work by Marc-Anthony Turnage. Back in 1993 Nonesuch's recording of Gorecki's Third Symphony entered the top ten of the British pop charts and was a classical bestseller. So a recording of this new symphony must be inevitable.

That mention of Gorecki's Third Symphony can only point to Is classical music too fast?
Deleted Pieces was provided free for reviewing purposes. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 23, 2009 at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)

The Natural

I have a friend who has this incredible facility at hearing notes, rhythms, and timbre.

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 23, 2009 at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)

An Orchestration Lesson from Samuel Beckett

Orchestration is a form of personel management. The best playwrights manage the exits and entrances of their players supremely well. Perhaps composers can usefully pay attention to this.

One of my pieces-in-progress is a wind quintet, a tricky genre due in large part to the fact that continuity has to be provided by players who have to breath every once in a while, thus inviting lots of entering and exiting in a continuous stream of changing scoring patterns. But how might those patterns be sensibly organized, in a piece, for example, in which every combination of instruments is used only once?

I recently stumbled onto a nice solution to this suggested by a stage work by Samuel Beckett, Quad, a "frantic mime" for four players, lights, and percussion. Beckett wanted to organize Quad on the basis of a sequence in which every combination of the four players would be used, each combination in the sequence differing from its neighbor by the entrance or exit of one player, and when a player exits it is always the player who has been on stage longest.

It turns out that the conditions Beckett set were mathematically impossible to realize with four players (making Quad another example of an inexorable and imperfect logic at work in Beckett), but solutions to what is now known as the Beckett-Gray code have been found for other numbers, among them n = 5, which immediately struck me as an interesting premise for a wind quintet, in which the player who has played longest is most deserving of a breather. I have long used Gray and similar codes in other pieces, but I'm especially taken with the Beckett-Grey and I expect to use it elsewhere, and not only in orchestration.

Originally from Renewable Music, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 23, 2009 at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

Chopin, Lutosławski, Szymanowski at the Proms - Thenews.pl

Chopin, Lutosławski, Szymanowski at the Proms
Thenews.pl
The Promenade Concerts in London, one of the world's premier music festivals, includes several works by Polish composers, this year. In addition to Chopin, ...

and more »

60x60 Dance @ Galapagos, NYC (4/7/09) [CDZabu/Masters]

Amerika Ist Nun Erwackt
Music: David Hahn
Dance: Michelle Mantione

notes:
David Hahn creates diverse styles of music ranging from processed electric guitar to musique concrte sound collages to more traditional settings for instrument and voice. Educated at Brown University, Hahn also attended The New England Conservatory of Music, The Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, and Stanford University. He has performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, the Seattle Symphony, Musica Nel Chiostro in Florence, and the City of London Festival. He co-founded the Boston Renaissance Ensemble and received the Noah Greenberg Award for "Excellence in the Performance of Early Music" from the American Musicological Society.

Michelle Mantione is a native New Yorker who's first passion is dance. She developed her own degree in Physically Integrated Dance through the CUNY Baccalaureate Program; studying at Hunter College a wide range of dance from ballet and modern to salsa, West African and folk dance. Other genre of arts she is currently involved with is: acting apprentice with Visible Theatre, and film & media assistant with the Disabilities Network of New York City/Manhattan Neighborhood Network. Ms. Mantione is a firm supporter of the Tri-Union effort of the I AM PWD Campaign (Inclusion in the Arts & Media of People with Disabilities), and is currently choreographing work for public spaces that aims to blur the line of the performer vs. the audience member; there will be an open rehearsal of this work in mid-January 2009.

Originally from 60x60, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 23, 2009 at 02:11 PM | Comments (0)

Chamber Music Festival and Bridgehampton: one big happy family - 27east.com

Chamber Music Festival and Bridgehampton: one big happy family
27east.com
2 “Company” by Philip Glass, and a quartet from Schubert's “Death and the Maiden” to “La Muerte Chiquita” by Café Tacuba/Golijov and a traditional Persian ...

The Week Ahead: Arts - Boston Globe

The Week Ahead: Arts
Boston Globe
The troupe brings two works by Italian choreographer Mauro Bigonzetti, “Four Seasons'' and “Cantata,'' performed to live music by the female vocal quartet ...

and more »

Chopin, Lutosławski, Szymanowski at the Proms - Polish Radio External Service

Chopin, Lutosławski, Szymanowski at the Proms
Polish Radio External Service
The Promenade Concerts in London, one of the world's premier music festivals, includes several works by Polish composers, this year. In addition to Chopin, ...

and more »

Guitarist shines in annual piano festival - Sioux Falls Argus Leader

Guitarist shines in annual piano festival
Sioux Falls Argus Leader
"These youngsters who come in and perform are really world-class musicians who may not be known world-wide," says David Xenakis, president of the festival's ...

Sound of Silver - Pitchfork Media

Sound of Silver
Pitchfork Media
"All My Friends" begins with a piano riff that sounds not unlike a speeding train (or, at least, Steve Reich's approximation of one) and rolls downhill into ...

Saturday, July 25 - Advocate Weekly

Saturday, July 25
Advocate Weekly
Also, performance by Bang on a Can artists of Reich's seminal work, "Music for 18 Musicians," 8 pm $24. Marshall Street, North Adams. massmoca.org or ...

and more »

Osvaldo Golijov Signs with Boosey & Hawkes

Boosey & Hawkes has signed Osvaldo Golijov to its roster of composers.

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 23, 2009 at 02:11 AM | Comments (0)

Chris McIntyre—Integral Force

Chris McIntyre's work within the field helps codify a disparate mass into this thing that we call "the new music community".

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 23, 2009 at 02:11 AM | Comments (0)

July 22, 2009

Great compositions - The National

Great compositions
The National
The former music teacher became, almost overnight, a major figure in the world of film composing. He now has more than 50 scores under his belt, ...

Live at the Five Spot - WNYC

Live at the Five Spot
WNYC
Also music from Alfred Schnittke, Elliott Carter and Peteris Vasks. View WNYC's music playlists dating back to 2001 (full playlists are generally posted the ...

Recap: Opening the 2009 Verbier Festival - PlaybillArts

PlaybillArts

Recap: Opening the 2009 Verbier Festival
PlaybillArts
At 2:30 in the same venue, 23 year-old pianist Jean-Frédéric Neuburger demonstrated what an important piece the “Piano Sonata” of Henri Dutilleux can be for ...

That Was Nice

A successful execution of a lackluster concept, particularly one whose raison d'être is the demonstration of competence, is much less appealing to me than a flawed or even failed execution of a fascinating concept.

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 22, 2009 at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)

Tonsils on Piano - JC Combs - From Bats in the Belfry - 18 bagatelles

Tonsils on Piano - JC Combs - From Bats in the Belfry - 18 bagatelles
From the album Bats in the Belfry, released January 2009

Originally posted by jeff from cacophonous.org, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 22, 2009 at 08:10 PM | Comments (0)

More cowbell silliness


	Make your own at MoreCowbell.dj

Originally from Space Age Puppets and Masks, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 22, 2009 at 05:12 PM | Comments (0)

The Whirlies - early sketches

I have a commission for another piece from the Scottish Philharmonic Orchestra, for a concert at Òran Mór in Glasgow on 17 November. It's going to be called 'The Whirlies', which is a famous roundabout in East Kilbride; to be the first movement of a suite dedicated to the, er, roundabouts of East Kilbride!

The piece is essentially for strings, but - and I haven't exactly told them this yet - I intend to turn up and do some live electro-junk impro along with the piece as well.

Two bits of string material so far;

failing fly.mp3
failing fly var.mp3

Originally from Space Age Puppets and Masks, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 22, 2009 at 05:12 PM | Comments (0)

Yetanotherblog

Well... not really sure if opening up yet another blog is the way forward, but, having recovered this ol' one here, maybe I'll use this for breaking news on my compositional activities.

Originally from Space Age Puppets and Masks, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 22, 2009 at 05:12 PM | Comments (0)

Bare Wires

I'm putting in a proposal to Cryptic Nights to do a show called, to give it its full title, Ted Edwards proudly presents Bare Wires - Live in concert or just Bare Wires for short. Below I've gathered together in one place some relevant video and other documentation;

'The Other Other Hand' is pretty much fully documented from initial ideas to final performance at workingtitle08.blogspot.com - the best place to start is probably the three-minute preview video at the top of that page, also available on YouTube. A fully edited 80 minute edited video of the complete show is online here.

Also on my YouTube page are two videos which show one of the starting points for the Ted Edwards project; my fortuitous discovery of several pieces of interesting retro music gear discarded in the street near where I live, in this case a Novation BassStation synth.

Further down this blog you will find some information about the forthcoming performance of a new commission The Whirlies for the Scottish Philharmonic Orchestra at Òran Mór on November 17th. This will be the first show in which I myself appear in my Ted Edwards role; below you will find a photo and description of the gear to be used, plus a demo recording of the piece.

For a thorough background on my work for the last twenty years or so, go to jsimonvanderwalt.com - particularly relevant to Bare Wires might be the Openings series of works, such as CIRCULARTHING, the score for which is shortly to be published in Notations 21, a followup book to John Cage's seminal 1968 collection of graphic scores 'Notations'.

Originally from Space Age Puppets and Masks, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 22, 2009 at 05:12 PM | Comments (0)

More text to screech

Updated version of the Bare Wires text interface;

Originally from Space Age Puppets and Masks, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 22, 2009 at 05:12 PM | Comments (0)

No bands

According to MySpace Music, there are no bands within 100 miles of Glasgow;

Seems a bit of a shame, really. Anybody feel like starting a band?

Originally from Space Age Puppets and Masks, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 22, 2009 at 05:12 PM | Comments (0)

Lovely music for piano and striking clock

…

Originally from Space Age Puppets and Masks, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 22, 2009 at 05:12 PM | Comments (0)

The Whirlies - finished

The performance of 'The Whirlies' is coming up very soon;

The Whirlies
by J. Simon van der Walt
A new piece for strings and electro-junk improviser, inspired by the roundabouts of East Kilbride

Scottish Philharmonic Orchestra
Cond Peter Cynfryn Jones
Solist Edward 'Teddy' Edwards

Òran Mór (Byre's Road, Glasgow) Monday 17 Nov 2008
Doors open at 1715, Concert begins at 1815
£10 includes cocktail and canapés
0141 357 6200

Also featuring
Vaughan Williams A Lark Ascending
Debussy Danses Sacré et Profane
Respighi Il Tramonto

Here's a wee snippet of the piece, midi strings, but the impro material is for real;

oser's note

"What is East Kilbride famous for? I'm not entirely sure how most people would answer that question! For myself, although I'm not exactly Scottish born and bred, there is a big chunk of me which is 'from' East Kilbride; I spent two highly formative periods of my life there, during my primary school years, and again for the last couple of years of high school before university. And one of the things which always sticks in my head about East Kilbride is… roundabouts! Being one of those 60's new towns, it has an elaborate road plan, with sweeping dual carriageways carefully separated from winding dead-end closes; the kind of town where you can see the house you're trying to get to, but there seems to be no way of actually getting there…

The biggest roundabout in East Kilbride is known to most residents by name; 'The Whirlies'. In recent times it's been rather travestied by the addition of traffic lights, but in it's heyday it was a madness of a junction, roads spiralling off in every direction…

Of course, a piece of music can't really be about a roundabout. More than that, this is a reminiscence of my teenage years, when I first started to become seriously interested in music. There were two strands to this. Firstly, I was starting to branch out from my Father's transcendental but admittedly rather limited listening diet of Bach, Wagner, and, er nothing else, to explore the delights of jazz, experimental rock music, Stravinsky, and Bartók. My second way into music was through the soldering iron, literally getting my fingers burnt hacking together home-made noisemakers using transistors salvaged from broken hi-fi sets and the like.

The piece also forms a trailer of sorts for a forthcoming project provisionally entitled 'The Ted Edwards Electr-O-Matic Orchestra', or something like that.

Here's the setup I'm using for the electro-junk impro;

That's my grandfather's old banjo-ukulele through a pickup to a genuine original Realistic Electronic Reverb (with added feedback loop), through a mixer to keep the levels under control. No live computer processing! (but a tiny amount of reverb added in the demo to make it 'sit' with the dodgy washy midi strings.)

I hope you like my new direction :|

Originally from Space Age Puppets and Masks, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Jul 22, 2009 at 05:12 PM | Comments (0)

Bare Wires - text to screech

Hers is a very early and approximate proof-of-concept video of a possible text-to-screech interface for 'Bare Wires';

op and screen onstage, visible to the audience. The setup is used by various performers during the piece, in various ways; to address the audience, or to direct an improvisation, ask questions, tell a story… anything, really.

'text-to-screech' is my coining for taking familiar text-to-speak technology built into many modern computers, and mangle it, creatively misuse it. The most extensive project I have done along these lines was a commission in 2005 for an online piece for Paragon, which is unfortunately not up any more. A similar strategy was used in 'The Other Other Hand', where creatively edited machine speech was used to represent the voice of the Edwardian composer C. Hubert H. Parry.

The interface shown above is done in Max/MSP, using the built-in voices on a mac. The first aim was to program it so that it would speak each word immediately after it was typed, which was relatively simple to achieve. In addtition, when an 'x' is typed in a word, the partcular voice used changes, typing 'u' or 'v' subtly affects the rate and pitch of the voice. For the next iteration, I want to try the effect of having it speak the word then display it; also to munge the spoken text more drastically, perhaps mutliple voices speaking, perhaps a more clearly pitched approach, perhaps looping a word, so that the result is more 'musical'.

The demo video above fakes up very roughly what it might be like if one performer types up instructions to the others, and then addresses the audience. Another idea I have been playing with is a game whereby the performers are instructed, for instance, to make some sort of distinctive gesture every time an 'a' is typed, and no to obey any other instructions given. So, for instance, the audience sees the performers being told 'play a n