New Music reBlog: September 2009 Archives

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September 30, 2009

Fabbriciani, JACK Quartet to perform - University at Buffalo Reporter

Fabbriciani, JACK Quartet to perform
University at Buffalo Reporter
The New York Times called the quartet's performance of Iannis Xenakis' complete string quartets one of the “most memorable classical music presentations of ...

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 Sep 30, 2009 at 11:12 PM | Comments (0)

On Adorno On Music - Forward

On Adorno On Music
Forward
Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was a philosopher only after he was a composer, as if the music he made in his youth required an entire system, ...

Sunday, Oct. 4 - Advocate Weekly

Sunday, Oct. 4
Advocate Weekly
Bennington College, Megan Schubert, Class of 2005, sings Stockhausen, 8 pm Followed by a concert by Big Bang TV, 9 pm Deane Carriage Barn, Bennington, ...

and more »

SOLI Chamber Ensemble Plays Messiaen & Rodriguez - University of Texas at Dallas (press release)

University of Texas at Dallas (press release)

SOLI Chamber Ensemble Plays Messiaen & Rodriguez
University of Texas at Dallas (press release)
She has performed many premieres and has recorded works of Ligeti, Bach/Brahms, Beethoven and Bennett. Music by ROBERT XAVIER RODRIGUEZ is regularly ...

Trade agreement

Reviewing Lynn Chang, Wu Man, and A Far Cry.
Boston Globe, September 28, 2009. (Yes, I forgot when it was going to run.)

Fun item that didn't fit #1: Lynn Chang announced that the concert was originally supposed to be called "East Meets West Meets East," to which, he admitted, Wu Man said "no way."

Fun item that didn't fit #2: While I couldn't find any confirmation of it on deadline, I'm assuming that when Lou Harrison titled the slow movement of his pipa concerto "Threnody for Richard Locke," he was referring to Richard Locke the gay activist and porn actor, who died the year before the concerto's premiere. (L.A. Tool & Die has to be one of the best porn titles ever.)

Originally from Soho the Dog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 30, 2009 at 08:13 PM | Comments (0)

Doveman's new album The Conformist w/ The National, Nico Muhly ... - Brooklyn Vegan (blog)

Brooklyn Vegan (blog)

Doveman's new album The Conformist w/ The National, Nico Muhly ...
Brooklyn Vegan (blog)
Mr. Muhly's appealing instrumental compositions drew on Philip Glass's harmonic stasis and the rhythmic vitality of Stravinsky and Ligeti, mixed with a ...

Classical Moves - Silicon Valley's Metro

Silicon Valley's Metro

Classical Moves
Silicon Valley's Metro
FOR ITS opening concert of the season, the San Jose Chamber Music Society welcomes the Imani Winds to town. For more than a decade, ...

Watch The Arts Journalism Summit On The OM

Friday from 12pm to 4pm EST the National Arts Journalism Program will have its Arts Summit, a series of discussions and presentations devoted to looking for new and, more importantly, sustainable models of arts journalism across all disciplines. [full agenda here]

There will be a live feed hosted on the OM as well as a live chat and Twitter feeds to follow/participate in on the same page. If you can’t make it on Friday afternoon, the lectures will be archived on Youtube and likely here as well.

It would be lovely for you to give the NAJP server a break on bandwidth and join the party here in the Great White North. The Internet is good for many things but as yet has not worked out how to teleport food. On this occasion therefore, you will have to bring your own snacks – a circumstance made doubly tragic by the fact that the OM oven has been churning out top drawer banana bread these last few days. [The secret is bourbon]

Looking forward to seeing/hearing/chatting with you on Friday afternoon!

Miss M

PS – Bring a friend.

Share This Post:

Originally posted by Miss Mussel from The Omniscient Mussel on Classical Music & Culture, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 30, 2009 at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)

Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Awards $424,900 to Support Technology Initiatives in Jazz

Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation has awarded a total of $424,900 in grants through the first round of its Jazz.NEXT program. The following organizations received grants: National Federation of Community Broadcasters; Monterey Jazz Festival; National Public Radio; Savannah Music Festival; and the Walker Art Center.

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

Hump Day Hottie: Lara St. John

Lara St. John

Oh, Canada, thank you for giving us Lara St. John. We love that she leaves a little to our imagination unlike some other less ladylike string players .

Originally posted by Milton Blabber from The Cereal List, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 30, 2009 at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)

Classical Flute Music of India

Pandit Raghunath Seth - Classical Flute Music of India Pandit Raghunath Seth - bansuriSri Balkrishnan Iyer - tablarecorded May 21, 1993 at Holmberg Hall, University of Oklahoma; released in 1994Pandit Raghunath Seth began his career as a staff artist for All India Radio in Lucknow in 1954. He took his early training from the eminent musicologist Dr. S. N. Ratanjekar, and credits the flute master

Originally from A Closet of Curiosities, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 30, 2009 at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)

Contemporary Music: Orchestral Music

Henri Lazarof - Contemporary Music: Orchestral Music LP released in 1977SPECTRUM for solo trumpet, orchestra and tapePerformers:Thomas Stevens - trumpetUtah Symphony, Henri Lazarof - conductorSPECTRUM for Solo Trumpet, Orchestra and 4-Channel Tape was written in 1973 and first performed in January 1975 in Salt Lake City by the Utah Symphony Orchestra with Thomas Stevens as soloist, the composer

Originally from A Closet of Curiosities, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 30, 2009 at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)

09/30/09 playlist

Timo Andres ~ Fast Flows The River

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to sit down with Eliane Aberdam. In addition to being a composer, she is also the composition professor here at the University of Rhode Island. During the course of the interview we talked about and played the following works:

Tziltzulim (for Tuba & Electronics)
Sans Faiblir, La Nuit Attend Le Soleil (piano trio)
Grisailles Vaporeuses (piano trio)
Tête à Tête (violin sonata)
Triumphant Gems (for Tuba & Horn)

Andrew Norman ~ Sacred Geometry
Jacob Cooper ~ Untitled
Alarm Will Sound ~ Cliffs
David Lang ~ Cheating, Lying Stealing

Jeff Harrington ~ KaleidoPsychoTropos (for Quintet)
Balmorhea ~ Truth
Birdsongs of the Mesozoic ~ The Rite of Spring

Originally from Music For Internets, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 30, 2009 at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)

Wei-Chieh Lin Is Out; Devin Farney Is In!

In an Iron Composer first, Wei-Chieh Lin withdrew from the competition on Monday. One of the alternates was able to step in at the last minute and take his place on Friday.

Devin Farney, from San Francisco, will round out the field of five composers at Iron Composer. Visit his website to learn more about Devin and to hear more of his music:

Sink or Swim
For Viola, Octave Mandolin, Electric Guitar, Electric Bass, Djembe ad lib, Delay

…vexed…
Performed by Michelle Kwon, Gretchen Claasen, Esther Rogers, and Lucas Chen, cellos

Originally posted by admin from Iron Composer, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 30, 2009 at 05:50 PM | Comments (0)

John Rot Interview

John Rot is as close to being a hometown contestant as possible in this year’s competition. He has just started his sophomore year at Oberlin College, which is 25 miles southwest of Baldwin-Wallace Conservatory.

In this conversation with Joe Drew, he talks about how his experience at a composition seminar opened his eyes to the adventurism of contemporary music and irreversibly planted the composition bug in his brain:

Interview with John Rot

oncomposer.org/audio/LatencyofInfluence.mp3>Latency of Influence
Performed by Annie Gordon, flute; Nathan Lesser, violin; Jennifer Bower, piano

Originally posted by admin from Iron Composer, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 30, 2009 at 05:50 PM | Comments (0)

Travis Jeffords Profile

Travis Jeffords is driving to Ohio from Bloomington, where he recently moved with his wife.

In this interview, he talks with Joe Drew about the transition from dry dusty Texas to bright green Indiana. You can also hear a recording of Shot in the Dark, which is Travis’ setting of personal ads from the Austin Chronicle.

Interview with Travis Jeffords

Shot in the Dark

Originally posted by admin from Iron Composer, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 30, 2009 at 05:50 PM | Comments (0)

Sunny Knable Profile

Sunny Knable is a Sacramento native who now lives in New York City. In his interview with Joe Drew, he discusses, among other things, his decision to skip graduate school and move to the East Coast.

Interview with Sunny Knable

Lost Leaves, first movement
Performed by Renee Harris, Cathie Apple, and Tim Stanley

Sinfonietta for Woodwind Quintet, I. Andante con moto
Performed by Liberace Woodwind Quintet

American Variations, Var. 7-10
Performed by the composer

Originally posted by admin from Iron Composer, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 30, 2009 at 05:50 PM | Comments (0)

Long since disrelished

The usage of Instrumental Musick in our Public Worship of GOD, hath been long since disrelished among His Faithful People. Justin Martyr long ago exploded it. Yea, Aquinas himself, as late as less than Five hundred Years ago, decried it. Indeed it was one of the Last Things which the Man of Sin introduced, in the Worship of our SAVIOUR, which he had already fill'd with a Multitude of Superstitions. We will then for the present look on the Jewish Trumpets, and Organs too, as a part of the Abrogated Pedagogy.
—Cotton Mather, India Christiana (1621)

That's it: from now on, every prelude and postlude gets listed in the church bulletin as "Abrogated Pedagogy."

Originally from Soho the Dog, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 30, 2009 at 05:13 PM | Comments (0)

Music and place

In this quiet room above the sea I've just played the fourth [Beethoven Piano Concerto] again. I know it now - every stitch of it - more intimately than I know Nancy [LD's wife]. I've got it in my bowels. Sort of empathy. I've been it, I act it, sleep it, shit it, sleep it - everything. And I can tell you that compared to it, the Emperor is a collection of musical platitudes written for a lavatory-paper musical box by a deaf mute. So There!

Lawrence Durrell wrote those words in Corfu in 1935. I took the photo above at the Lac du Dur Chantecoq in the Champange-Ardenne region of France last week. During the three weeks we spent on campsites in remote locations in rural France I was struck, once again, when listening to my iPod as to how place affect the way music is heard. Just as light determines the way we see a landscape, so the aura of a place seems to change our perspective on a familiar piece of music.

The mystical relation between music and place is nothing new, and Britten's Aldeburgh is the best example of how intimately sound and geography are linked. In Buddhism it is called 'dependent arising' and is expressed by the formula, "When this arises that becomes". That arch-dabbler Herbert von Karajan experimented with Zen Buddhism and also had thought-provoking views on the mathematical relationship between the rhythm of music and natural phenomena such as heartbeat, which are in turn affected by place.

Last year I wrote about some an excting new initiative started by Antony Pitts of the Royal Academy of Music, London to map music and place, describing it as 'Google Earth for classical music'. Antony's project has now become part of a group working on musicDNA, an ambitious attempt to produce a multi-dimensional map of the musical universe. Today musicDNA has launched musicGPS for iPhone and iPod touch. Here is a screengrab followed by a description from their website:

Whenever you listen to music on your iPhone or iPod touch (OS 3.0) you can use musicGPS to keep a record of what you listened to, where and when. Open up musicGPS to browse and zoom in and out of your own timeline. And play any combination of tracks on your iPhone straight from musicGPS.

musicGPS records the soundtrack of your life™ - wherever you go. Discover what it was that caught your ear during a journey. See a map of where you’ve been and what you listened to and add a note or photo.

Antony Pitts is a man of many parts, and I was very impressed by his recently released electro-acoustic collage In Memoriam which combines music by Ockeghem, Dufay, Obrecht, and Josquin with ambient sounds, children's songs, poetry, real stories and a new motet composed for the project by Antony. In Memoriam, which is available as an iTunes download for £4.49, is a direct descendant of Glenn Gould's contrapuntal radio experiments which resulted in the Solitude Trilogy created by Gould for CBS. These three sound portraits of the north of Canada were pioneering investigations into the relationship between sound and place. Which is where today's path started.

Now read about raindrops falling on Antony Pitts' chant.
My opening quote comes from Spirit of Place, Letters & Essays on Travel by Lawrence Durrell, published by Faber ISBN-13: 978-1569247228 and, you guessed it, out of print. A review iTunes download of In Memoriam was supplied at my request. Header photo is (c) On An Overgrown Path 2009. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 30, 2009 at 05:13 PM | Comments (0)

Southern Exposure: Eight Years and Counting - Free Times

Southern Exposure: Eight Years and Counting
Free Times
With standing-room only attendance and nearly 30 concerts worth of challenging, provocative music — not to mention a hearty 2007 blue ...

Classical Connect launches the new Interviews channel - PR-USA.net (press release)

Classical Connect launches the new Interviews channel
PR-USA.net (press release)
Mr. Duffie, a former producer of WNIB, a Chicago classical music station which broadcast from 1955 to 2001, has conducted hundreds of interviews with some ...

Thrilling Tharp - Houston Press

Thrilling Tharp
Houston Press
Set to Steve Reich's "Drumming" (wonderfully performed onstage by the Houston Ballet Orchestra's percussionists Christina Carroll, Tim Tull, Karen Slotter ...

Songs of Brutality

What is the role of music in identity construction and real-life crime?

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 30, 2009 at 05:12 PM | Comments (0)

60x60 Dance @ Galapagos, NYC (4/8/09) [Kurth-Nelson/Salhov]

Ives in Space
Music: Zachary Kurth-Nelson
Dance: Lila Salhov

Zach Kurth-Nelson is currently a graduate student pursuing an MA in Composition at Mills College, and studying with Maggi Payne. He received his BA in Composition from Minnesota State University Moorhead, where he studied with Henry Gwiazda. He is also a vocalist, and has been recorded singing Psalmus XXIII on Noah Creshevsky's To Know or Not to Know, released on Tzadik. Ives in Space combines natural sounds with samples of recorded music in an attempt to create entirely new sound conglomerations that exceed the sum of their component parts.

Lila Salhov dances for Jessica Danser/dansfolk and teaches dance in the NYC area. She received her BFA in dance performance from The Boston Conservatory. In Boston, Lila performed with Windhover Dance Company, and baroque dance with the Handel and Hayden Society. Lila is excited to be part of 60X60 Dance, and to work with Ellenore Scott, her beautiful dancer!
Dancer: Ellenore Scott

Originally from 60x60, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 30, 2009 at 05:11 PM | Comments (0)

Four Organs Crash Ensemble

Four Organs Crash Ensemble
The Crash Ensemble starting off … by crashing. Maybe they should’ve put that on the Reich Remixed album.
From Podcast: NonPop.

Originally posted by jeff from cacophonous.org, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 30, 2009 at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

Liszt per arpa

Harpo Marx plays Liszt (with the odd jazz touch here and there) on a harp found amid Nazi loot in a hotel in Casablanca (no, really):

Originally from henningmusick, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 30, 2009 at 02:10 PM | Comments (0)

Four Organs – Crash Ensemble

The Crash Ensemble starting off … by crashing. Maybe they should’ve put that on the Reich Remixed album.

Originally posted by Scott from NonPop, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 30, 2009 at 02:10 PM | Comments (0)

Coming Up Next: 193 : 2 October 2009

What’s so special about 1977, 1987, 2007, and 1935?

Find out Friday night, with:

David Borden: C-A-G-E (part III) (1977)
Michael Gordon: Strange Quiet (1987)
Roger Reynolds: imAge/piano, imagE/piano (2007)
Alan Hovhaness: Sonata Ricercare for piano Op.12 (1935) (world premiere recording and broadcast)

Originally posted by rchrd from Music From Other Minds, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 30, 2009 at 08:13 AM | Comments (0)

Music pioneer to perform at Bard - Poughkeepsie Journal

Music pioneer to perform at Bard
Poughkeepsie Journal
Riley's "In C" in 1964 changed the course of 20th-century music, and its influence has been heard in the works of prominent composers such as Steve Reich, ...

Percussion ensemble loves improv - Windsor Star

Percussion ensemble loves improv
Windsor Star
Other composers famously inspired by Balinese and Javanese music are Olivier Messiaen, Bela Bartok, John Cage and Steve Reich. Nexus was officially launched ...

James Levine Has a Bad Back - The Faster Times

James Levine Has a Bad Back
The Faster Times
... he missed the all-Elliott-Carter-all-the-time 2008 Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood because of a cancerous cyst on his kidney. ...

and more »

Levine drops out of fall concerts - The Star-Ledger - NJ.com

Levine drops out of fall concerts
The Star-Ledger - NJ.com
2 and 3 — at Flushing Town Hall in Queens, presented as part of the Neighborhood Concert Series by Carnegie Hall's Weill Music Institute. ...

and more »

Improvisation key element of Nexus performance - Windsor Star

Improvisation key element of Nexus performance
Windsor Star
Other composers famously inspired by Balinese and Javanese music are Olivier Messiaen, Bela Bartok, John Cage and Steve Reich. Nexus was officially launched ...

Temporarily Sidelined

James Levine to Undergo Back Surgery, Cancels Performances.

Update 3:54 p.m. The conductor James Levine will undergo surgery for a herniated disk in the next few days, forcing him to cancel his performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra on Thursday night at Carnegie Hall’s season-opening gala.

Originally from henningmusick, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 30, 2009 at 02:11 AM | Comments (0)

September 29, 2009

Brian Eno can still walk into a porno store undisturbed (and other ... - The Phoenix

Brian Eno can still walk into a porno store undisturbed (and other ...
The Phoenix
Not long after I made that, I heard a piece of music that changed my life, which was Steve Reich's piece 'It's Gonna Rain.' " A piece as minimal and elegant ...

The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

By Frank J. Oteri
People tend to like what they know more than know what they like, whether it's cuisine, perfume, clothing, or music in any genre.

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 29, 2009 at 11:12 PM | Comments (0)

Imani Winds blow change - Scene

Imani Winds blow change
Scene
“It's part of this discovery and part of the evolution of chamber music that has to happen. That's what the effect of what we're doing is going to be, ...

Martha Argerich, Live at Verbier Festival (2009) - Audiophile Audition

Audiophile Audition

Martha Argerich, Live at Verbier Festival (2009)
Audiophile Audition
1; LUTOSLAWSKI: Variations on a Theme of Paganini (two-pianos); SHOSTAKOVICH: Piano Quintet in G minor Op. 57 Studio: Ideale Audience/Medici Arts 3078928 ...

and more »

James Levine to undergo surgery, cancels Met, Boston Symphony gigs - Baltimore Sun

Baltimore Sun

James Levine to undergo surgery, cancels Met, Boston Symphony gigs
Baltimore Sun
James Levine, music director of the Metropolitan Opera and Boston Symphony, has canceled appearances with both institutions to undergo back surgery. ...

and more »

Baltimore Sun Stereotyping Classical Music Lovers, Evidence Suggests

clefnotes-ad

Dear readers, please forgive the personal tone of this post. As my colleague Benjamins Britten was investigating sources in Baltimore for his piece yesterday on how orchestras can weather the current financial crisis, he called my attention to something rather disturbing. It appears that the Baltimore Sun, that troubled and incredibly shrinking sister paper of the Chicago Tribune, is engaging in, shall we say, a form of profiling that assumes some very unfavorable things about classical music lovers.

clefnotes-ad-crop

The offensive item in question comes in the form a “targeted advertisement” on the right sidebar of the popular Clef Notes blog written by the Sun’s music critic (and former president of the Music Critics Association of North America) Tim Smith. What, exactly, is the Baltimore Sun suggesting with the presence of this ad? That perhaps the classical music loving readers of the Clef Notes blog are somehow scrawny weaklings who present a disheveled and unkempt appearance? Though I’ve been known to go without showering, brushing my teeth, or changing clothes for a week or so at a time during my frequent 12-tone composing binges, I condemn this blatant profiling by the Baltimore Sun.

However, what I truly fear is that we here at The Cereal List have stumbled upon something that is just the tip of the iceberg. Surely there are other examples of this disgusting practice. How can classical musicians ever hope to gain the respect we are entitled to when the mainstream media is clearly conspiring against us?

Originally posted by Milton Blabber from The Cereal List, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 29, 2009 at 06:22 PM | Comments (0)

Who Have You Discovered at Random?

I've been enjoying our new listening facility here. Man, we have a lot of interesting music here and I see that the new player has been bringing in even more uploads. I added 4 new artists to the database today. I've reloaded about a 100 times and still haven't seen my name! Interesting...

Who have you guys found? I've been enjoying Phil Brownlee's miniatures, a lot of interesting Indonesian music (which I stupidly forgot to write down which ones I liked). Lots of electronic music... and I've been reminded of folks I already knew about such as Sparrow and Kondor...

Random Listen

Also for those who missed it, I've made a Random Listen page which has a direct link to the artist now playing.

Originally from Discussion Forum - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 29, 2009 at 06:20 PM | Comments (0)

Alphabetical Listing of All Artists with Players!

So, now that I've got all the artists into the database, I can do things like this:

NetNewMusic Artists

All of our artists, composers, performers listed. Again, sorry for the foreign character mangling. I'll fix that shortly... To get back to the Artists listing just hit that top link - NetNewMusic Artists.

Also, if you just joined, these listings aren't updated until I run my programs to update. So, depending on this and that, you won't get in the listing until that happens. I'm aiming to do it once a week, but while I'm developing it, it will probably be daily. Time to work on some music now!

Originally from Discussion Forum - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 29, 2009 at 06:20 PM | Comments (0)

Dirty Projectors - hotpress.com (subscription)

Dirty Projectors
hotpress.com (subscription)
... and alternating stereophonic melodies and arpeggios, this trio are essentially borrowing from the extended techniques of contemporary classical music. ...

Originally from "contemporary classical" | "avant garde" music - Google News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 29, 2009 at 06:19 PM | Comments (0)

Sights and sounds of performance art drawing crowds during artprize - The Grand Rapids Press - MLive.com

Sights and sounds of performance art drawing crowds during artprize
The Grand Rapids Press - MLive.com
... that have attracted big crowds the past week by incorporating everything from avant garde music to interactive technology to dance to acrobatics. ...

and more »

Originally from "contemporary classical" | "avant garde" music - Google News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 29, 2009 at 06:19 PM | Comments (0)

Tyondai Braxton - Tiny Mix Tapes

Tiny Mix Tapes

Tyondai Braxton
Tiny Mix Tapes
It's all well-ordered mayhem like a Stockhausen piece, majestic and soaring like Copland with a heavy dose of Ravel (the snare drum from Bolero, ...

and more »

Tyondai Braxton - The Quietus

The Quietus

Tyondai Braxton
The Quietus
Whilst the loops are still fundamental, for Central Market Braxton has enlisted the New York-based Wordless Music Orchestra, whose presence widens the ...

and more »

Thom Yorke is wise to catch a Flea - guardian.co.uk

guardian.co.uk

Thom Yorke is wise to catch a Flea
guardian.co.uk
Chat to him – as I was once lucky enough to do – and the man behind the goofy facade is able to enthuse about Miles Davis and Stockhausen as much as the ...

and more »

NonPop Show 064

NonPop Show 064
Program Notes:(running time – approx. 38 min)1. “Palindrome Variations”by Paul EpsteinConnectionsCapstone Records2. “Dark Waves”by John Luther AdamsRed Arc / Blue VeilCold Blue3. “Left In Fragments”by Christopher TignorCore Memory UnwoundWestern Vinyl4. “The Sixth Collection – Pattern XXI”by Mamoru FujiedaPatterns of PlantsTzadik
From Podcast: NonPop.

Originally posted by jeff from cacophonous.org, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 29, 2009 at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

Five Years at Rose Hall for Wynton Marsalis’s Jazz at Lincoln Center - WSJ.com [del.icio.us]

"Outside New York, the jazz-club circuit is shrinking. Increasingly, jazz is presented at arts centers and universities. Within the jazz industry, some are troubled by Mr. Marsalis's dominance in that arena. "What if all that funding was spread across the entire spectrum of jazz," asked Scott Southard, whose International Music Network specializes in jazz, "instead of concentrated in one spot?" Then again, some credit Mr. Marsalis with engendering such support. For Randall Kline, who heads the San Francisco-based SFJazz, "Jazz at Lincoln Center was important in establishing legitimacy. Before, there were no models for jazz in the institutional world."

Originally posted by pbailey68 from paulbailey.us (beta), ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 29, 2009 at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

About Last Night: MORE ABOUT "POPS" [del.icio.us]

"Q. Why Louis Armstrong? A. He was a genius, one of the true cultural giants of the twentieth century. America has never produced a more significant artist. I rank him right alongside Aaron Copland and Robert Frost and Frank Lloyd Wright. But unlike those men, Armstrong was also a great entertainer whose music was and is loved by ordinary people all over the world. In 1964 he actually knocked the Beatles off the top of the pop charts with his recording of "Hello, Dolly!" Aaron Copland never did that!"

Originally posted by pbailey68 from paulbailey.us (beta), ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 29, 2009 at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

NonPop Show 064

Program Notes:
(running time – approx. 38 min)

1. “Palindrome Variations”
by Paul Epstein
Connections
Capstone Records

2. “Dark Waves”
by John Luther Adams
Red Arc / Blue Veil
Cold Blue

3. “Left In Fragments”
by Christopher Tignor
Core Memory Unwound
Western Vinyl

4. “The Sixth Collection – Pattern XXI”
by Mamoru Fujieda
Patterns of Plants
Tzadik

Originally posted by Scott from NonPop, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 29, 2009 at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

Interview: Christopher Tin - From Civilization IV to Calling All Dawns - Gamasutra

Gamasutra

Interview: Christopher Tin - From Civilization IV to Calling All Dawns
Gamasutra
This is not to say that the classical world doesn't explore adaptive and dynamic music (Steve Reich, John Cage) and that game music doesn't flirt with the ...

60x60 Dance @ Galapagos, NYC (4/8/09) [Gherman/Graves]

Obsidian
Music: Marcel Gherman
Dance: Aja Graves

Born in Chisinau, Moldova, Marcel Gherman is a musician, radio DJ and journalist currently working for Sud-Est Cultural magazine. From 1994-2003 he hosted programs on electronic music on the national radio station of Moldova. He studied piano in music school and composition with Oleg Palymski, and has releases under the alias Megatone on labels Tibprod, Simlog, Invasion Wreck Chords, Zaftig, Krakilsk. Has a particular interest in the Advaita Vedanta doctrine of Indian spirituality. This musical composition expresses the texture and color of obsidian, and acts as a metaphor for the feeling of bliss and fulfillment that is intuitively present within each person, for every moment of life.

Aja Graves comes from the state of Utah. She graduated from BYU with a BA in Modern Dance in 2006. Choreography is her particular love; she loves nothing more than creating movement paired with the perfect selection of music. Yes, Aja can dance, but she also likes to cook too. Her recent food successes include an awesome basil pesto, vegetable lasagna, and a hash brown quiche. Eat Me by Kenny Shopsin and Carolynn Carreno is her newest favorite cook book. The chicken salad recipe is to die for. Who knew chicken needed to be massaged? Dancer: Aja Graves

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

Conducting and gnawing infantile megalomania

Readers expecting one of my trademark rants about the new Gustavo Dudamel video game are in for a disappointment. I have to confess that news of Bravo Gustavo brought back happy memories of RCA Victor's 1959 LP Music for Frustrated Conductors which came complete with authentic wooden baton and an illustrated do-it-yourself conducting booklet . Rather than the Symphonie Fantastique featured on Bravo Gustavo the LP included Khachaturian's Sabre Dance, a movement from Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, the waltzes from Die Fledermaus, and, my personal favourite at the time, extracts from Richard Rogers' score for the TV documentary series Victory at Sea, which can be sampled in the video below.

Arthur Fiedler, Morton Gould and Robert Russell Bennett were the un-frustrated conductors of the disc, which can be seen in the American market packaging above. If my memory is correct the UK release came in a much more sombre white box. When the 12 inch vinyl LP was released fifty years ago I was a kid of ten, and I have happy memories of hours spent alongside my parents' huge autochanger mono radiogram wielding the baton and inhaling that unique smell of hot dust on valves, or tubes if you live across the pond. It was never going to make a conductor out of me, but nevertheless I'm not going to knock Bravo Dudamel. For, as a contemporary article explained:

Actually, home conducting may be a healthy thing, according to Manhattan Psychoanalyst Dr. Edmund Bergler: it provides the amateur with sublimating relief from the gnawing "infantile megalomania" that afflicts every man who ever wanted to lift a baton.

href="http://www.overgrownpath.com/2006/07/its-official-music-is-good-for-you.html">music is good for you; unless you are a musician performing new music.
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 29, 2009 at 12:35 PM | Comments (0)

USC THORNTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA - LA Weekly

LA Weekly

USC THORNTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
LA Weekly
Michael Tilson Thomas at USC features the world-renowned conductor/composer/pianist/music historian/TV host and just about everything else leading the USC ...

CRITIC'S CHOICE – CD, “THE PLANETS” Paavo Järvi and The Cincinnati ... - SanFranciscoSentinel.com

CRITIC'S CHOICE – CD, “THE PLANETS” Paavo Järvi and The Cincinnati ...
SanFranciscoSentinel.com
BY STRANGE de JIM By Seán Martinfield Telarc has just released their sixteenth collaboration with Music Director Paavo Järvi and the Cincinnati Symphony ...

Jeu d’eaux

Apart from what the composer has already said about Lost Waters, it is apparently also an overall crescendo through the four numbers: this is how the waves look in Audacity:

[ click for larger image ]

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Originally from henningmusick, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 29, 2009 at 05:11 AM | Comments (0)

Monday Links

Loads of good stuff popping up on the feedreader these past few days. Have at look at:

Inquiring minds want to know: aficionadi aside – does a musical community really care who their music director is?

The Last Days of the Polymath – the 20th century has produced more and more specialized intellectuals. As the body of knowledge increases, this is often the only way to cope but is it really in our best interest?

Miss Mussel’s worst nightmare.

“…I’m preparing for the arrival this week of Gustavo Dudamel by charging my pocket Nikon. The camera will accompany me on daily walks along the beach, where I’m determined to get the first shot of the new music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic walking on water.” – from an astonishingly excellent article from LA Times critic Mark Swed on the coming of Dudi.

The first XKCD book is out - go buy it….and some merch. Your coffee table will never look more smart.

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Originally posted by Miss Mussel from The Omniscient Mussel on Classical Music & Culture, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 29, 2009 at 02:12 AM | Comments (0)

Back to Ghana & Ludwig van Taffy

An old friend returns to Ghana. It was in Scott DeVeaux’s seminar at UVa that I learnt what I know of African drumming, an experience which has had a seminal impact on some of my composition ever since. And here, Scott’s going back.

Beethoven goes ambient:

9 Beet Stretch is Ludwig van Beethoven’s 9th symphony
stretched to 24 hours, with no pitch distortions.

Stretching the Opus 125 is a beautiful thing; call it Heaven in D Minor.

Take-away from the weekend: Practically anytime I have heard scorn poured on others for their alleged distaste for change, the words came from someone quite visibly comfortable in his own worn routines.

Reinforced lesson from long-ago: Walk a mile in the other fellow’s moccasins, first.

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

Folk Music...

Just got back from the Soar Bridge Inn - a fascinating night with various strands of the English Folk Tradition on display with the Keelers and a cut down version of Dolphin Morris- plus a lot of fun and some pathos... blimey... Maybe a small review tomorrow if things are not too hectic...

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

Jazz: The Music of Unemployment: The impossibility of the avant-garde [del.icio.us]

"The problem that follows is at least as old as mass media itself: how can there be an outside-of-the-mainstream, if anything can be absorbed and used by the mainstream? Once upon a time, there was this idea (probably hooey to begin with) that being a "true" artist was about staying a step ahead of whatever the latest cultural "norm" was. Our mission as artists (so we thought) was to figure out which components of a particular practice had been done to death, and then to innovate something new. We have that impulse toward innovation still, but what's the upshot? It doesn't even matter whether "everything has been done before" (the big complaint of young artists). When the raw power of anything can be instantly appropriated by the people who have the budgets, and the products to sell -- recall Jim O'Rourke's comments on "context" -- there has to be some other reason to make art."

Originally posted by pbailey68 from paulbailey.us (beta), ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 29, 2009 at 02:10 AM | Comments (0)

September 28, 2009

About This Blog - Washington Post

About This Blog
Washington Post
The premise of this blog is that it's everyone's right to have an opinion about classical music. The Classical Beat is not only a one-stop hub for classical ...

Fruit Fly Problem?

Miss Mussel arrived home to find her kitchen had been taken hostage by Drosophila melanogaster and friends. Moving the welcome home flowers sweetly provided by Mere Mussel resulted in the formation of an impressive fruit-fly mushroom cloud. Clearly it was time for action.

Although generally the type to peacefully co-exist with nature, when it’s in the kitchen, the goal posts move ever so slightly. As such, a trap was needed and fortunately the Intertubes provided the solution.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, here’s how to get rid of fruit flies:

Get a wide mouthed glass, or shallow dish and squirt some dish soap in the bottom

Fill the dish with water, taking care to make a head of suds on the top.

Add a slug of apple cider vinegar. Balsamic will do in a pinch.

Put it on the counter and leave it for a few hours, replenishing as the head disappears.

Bask in your own cleverness.

hy it works:
The flies are attracted to the cider, come to check it out and get trapped in the head. If for some reason they don’t die there, the soap reduces the surface tension enough that they drown in the water. Job done.

It works better if you remove the fruit or flowers or whatever else is attracting them in the first place but if that’s not possible, the trap still works fairly well.

Share This Post:

Originally posted by Miss Mussel from The Omniscient Mussel on Classical Music & Culture, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 28, 2009 at 11:11 PM | Comments (0)

Sounds Heard: John Luther Adams—The Place We Began

By Frank J. Oteri
What's perhaps most fascinating about material from which John Luther Adams's The Place We Began derives predates his move to rural Alaska, a location which has served as his muse for over 30 years. Yet it sounds as simultaneously monumental, desolate, vast, and mysterious as the music he has composed as a result of living there.

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

Cheap Admiration

I’m really happy to finally release the first track from my upcoming PBE EP “Alt-Classical”

Cheap Admiration (2005), is a simple pop song (loosely based on a harmonic deconstruction) of Johann Pezel’s (1639-1694) Sonata Ciacona.

Around 1670 Pezel was the town stadtpfeifer (band director) in Leipzig and later in his career he applied and was turned down for the job of Cantor of St. Thomaskirche, a job that J.S. Bach would hold 50 years later.

cheap admiration (apple lossless)

cheap admiration (mp3)

Alt-Classical is:

DIY, open instrumentation, alternative venues, mix of amateur and professional performers, music lies somewhere between art music (music meant to be contemplated) and pop music (music meant for mass consumption).

Alt-Classical is the third CD/EP release from the Paul Bailey Ensemble

Paul Bailey Ensemble (PBE)

The Paul Bailey Ensemble (PBE) is an alt-classical garage band that plays the music of a variety of living and dead composers. The southern california group was created in 2002 as a DIY forum outside the usual and limited channels of art music presentation.

Paul Bailey, Trombone
Bruce Gallego, Electric Guitar
Eric Hendrickson, Keyboards
Scott McIntosh, Clarinet
Ryan Nunes, Vibraphone
Carl Stronach, Bass Guitar

Originally posted by admin from paulbailey.us (beta), ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 28, 2009 at 08:49 PM | Comments (0)

The next episode of Blackbox…

… will be about Hans Tutschku’s Zellen-Linien which is a piece for piano and live-electronics. You can listen to my live recording of Zellen-Linien at the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival here.

is piece, please post them here by using the comments field below, or email me directly at seda@sedaroeder.com, and I will then try to address your questions in my upcoming podcast.

I am looking forward to your input:-)
- Seda

Originally posted by Seda Röder from Seda Röder, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 28, 2009 at 08:34 PM | Comments (0)

Blackbox #003: How Méandres meanders

Seda Röder and Bert van Herck The third episode of Blackbox is on Bert van Herck’s piano piece Méandres. The main focus of this episode lies on the question of how the composer transforms a musical idea that seems secondary at first into an important supporting pillar of his work. Of course, you will also find out how all of this relates to the title of Bert’s piece (and of this episode).

As always the podcast contains many musical examples as well as a full recording of my performance of the piece.

I am looking forward to receiving any feedback or questions from you. Please post your comments below or email me directly at seda@sedaroeder.com

Have fun!

– Seda

[Click Here to Download a Transcript of this Episode - PDF]

If you would like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do so via your newsreader or itunes.

How can I get the podcast delivered automatically in the future?

Originally posted by sedaroeder.com from Seda Röder, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 28, 2009 at 08:34 PM | Comments (0)

Listen online: Seda’s performance of Yayalar’s “In the temporal gardens”

For those of you who couldn’t make it to the last HGNM concert (and of course for those who would like to listen to the piece once again!), I just finished uploading my live recording of Tolga Yayalar’s In the temporal gardens. Enjoy! And please do let me know if you have any comments (you can use the comment form below).

ttp://www.sedaroeder.com/blackbox-001-a-conversation-with-tolga-yayalar/">pre-concert podcast that Tolga and I produced for this performance. It contains a lot of background information and some suggestions on how to approach the listening experience!

About the composition

“In the temporal gardens was written for and is dedicated to Seda Röder. This piece, which takes its title from a poem by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, explores Bergson’s idea of material and intuition by reflecting two contrasting experiences of reality. In the piece, this dichotomy manifests itself in various ways and constitutes the backdrop of a dialectic unfolding. The composition is really about the dialectic relationship between various musical layers which are spread throughout the piece both vertically and horizontally.”
– Tolga Yayalar

“A extended work of ferocious difficulty”
– Drew Massey, amusicology

About the composer

A native of Istanbul, Tolga Yayalar studied Jazz Composition at Berklee College of Music. He is currently a PhD candidate at Harvard University. He has studied with Bernard Rands, Harrison Birtwistle, Joshua Fineberg, Brian Ferneyhough, and Helmut Lachenmann.

For more information visit Tolga’s website.

Originally posted by sedaroeder.com from Seda Röder, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 28, 2009 at 08:34 PM | Comments (0)

See you in New York!

On Saturday, April 4, I will be playing Zellen-Linien by Hans Tutschku at the first New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival organized and hosted by The City University of New York.
Where: Elebash Recital Hall CUNY, Graduate Center.
When: Saturday, April 4, start time 6.45pm

I hope to see many of you at the festival!
- Seda

Originally posted by Seda Röder from Seda Röder, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 28, 2009 at 08:34 PM | Comments (0)

Backstage at Incubus Concert

Hey everyone!

Yesterday, my friend Mike Einziger from Harvard, invited me to the Incubus show at the Comcast Center in Boston! It was a great show! Here are some images of me and the band from the backstage area! I hope you enjoy them!

– Seda

That’s me and Mike Einziger before the show:

Picture of Mike “Veritas” Einziger in action:

With band manager Steve and DJ Chris Kilmore, who used a ring modulator!! :

With Mike after the show:

Originally posted by Seda Röder from Seda Röder, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 28, 2009 at 08:34 PM | Comments (0)

Music exists within silence

The five seconds of silence that precede the music on any ECM album may be the most important statement a record company could make. The pause is a recognition that music exists within silence; only by acknowledging it can a listener become wholly involved.

Manfred Eicher is the author of that silence, and of the silence that appears to surround all the recordings produced on his remarkable label. The quality of that silence is intended to lead us towards a heightened awareness, a contemplative state where we are encouraged to listen harder and more acutely to the music, and to the spaces between it.

When he was asked, almost forty years after founding ECM, if he had any patterns or models in mind when he started the label, Eicher's answer was straightforward: "A very good model, all the time, was for for me the sound of Miles' Kind of Blue and Bill Evans, how he sounded there".

Richard Willams writes in The Blue Moment, a new book which seems to have slipped under the radar of the music community. The proposition that contemporary art music has influenced popular forms of music is well-rehearsed. But in his absorbing commentary, which is provocatively sub-titled 'Miles Davis and the remaking of modern music' Richard Williams' argues that Miles Davis' seminal Kind of Blue has influenced classical musicians ranging from La Monte Young and Terry Riley to Toru Takemitsu. The Blue Moments' index reflects the book's eclectic and inclusive nature, and Brian Eno, Cornelius Cardew, Robert Wyatt, The Velvet Underground, John Coltrane and Keith Jarrett rub shoulders with Johnny Mathis, Frank Sinatra, Gerry and the Pacemakers and Australian cult band The Necks.

Kind of Blue was recorded in March 1959 in Columbia's studio in a deconsecrated Armenian Orthodox church on 207 East 30th Street, Manhattan, seen in the photo above. This studio was the venue for many classic sessions including Glenn Gould's two accounts of the Goldberg Variations as well as Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited. Richard Williams' descibes how, in those heady pre-digital days the art of great recorded sound was devoutly worshipped in the old church on East 30th Street.

Its unvarnished wooden floor and plaster walls and ceiling were purposely left untouched, as was a large drape that covered the back wall. Mitch Miller, Columbia's head of A & R, ordered that the floor should never be washed, in order to preserve its resonance (explaining that once the body of a fine violin has been cleaned, its tone is never the same).

My footer photo shows the facade of the Armenian church on East 30th Street. This photo and the one above come from the excellent Reeves Audio Recording website. Glenn Gould's digital 1981 Goldbergs was the last recording to be made in the studio's peerless acoustics. Following the sessions for the Bach this famous venue suffered the architectural equivalent of Pro Tools editing, and was demolished to be replaced by a faceless apartment block.

Ten years after the session on 30th Street in New York, Munich-based ECM released its first album, the Max Waldron Trio's Free At Last. As my opening quote shows Richard Williams, who has edited the Melody Maker, headed A & R for Island Records and writes for the Guardian on sport and music, links the phenomenom that is ECM to the zeitgeist of Kind of Blue, and goes on to identify Norwegian label Rune Grammofon as an ECM-influenced label to watch.

The Blue Moment joins the growing number of fashionable music titles that are creating a new genre of music writing which favours anecdotal narration over academic rigour. Richard Williams' background as a journalist serves him well for this task; but when he embarks on the occasional track by track analysis of the music his prose can be as wearisome as one of ECM's more arcane offerings. But, minor reservations aside, The Blue Moment provides a welcome, if highly personal, European perspective on the forces that shaped late twentieth-century music.

Read about the influence of Bill Evans, pianist for Kind of Blue, on Hungarian György Ligeti here, and about Miles Davis' Spanish-inspired follow-up album here.
Footer photo credit Reeves Audio Recording. The Blue Moment was borrowed from Norwich library and is published by Faber (ISBN 9780571245062). Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk. Version 1.1 28/09/2009

Originally from On An Overgrown Path, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 28, 2009 at 08:26 PM | Comments (0)

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra in 2010 - National Business Review

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra in 2010
National Business Review
He has worked with some of the world's great conductors – Boulez, Gergiev, Pappano and Barenboim – in leading roles at New York's Metropolitan Opera and ...

More feedback

Word in from the West Coast:

Current listening

A recital disk, Noise in the Library, featuring the work of one Karl Henning. I’ve only listened to the first two pieces, Heedless Watermelon and Irreplaceable Doodles, so far. First off, let me say that this performance of the Doodles is far and away the most convincing yet. I confess that the first few times I listened to the Doodles (in other renditions), they seemed more doodling than irreplaceable (sorry, Karl!); but all of a sudden, the work is not only making structural sense, but revealing its beauties. Heedless Watermelon, for flute and clarinet, is a delight; it also takes Karl down some hitherto unexplored harmonic labyrinths. I’m eager to listen to the rest of the CD, later today.

Originally from henningmusick, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 28, 2009 at 08:11 PM | Comments (0)

Satie...Milhaud...Bacharach?

An old friend recently pointed out this title clip from the 1967 film of Casino Royale, with a dare that I couldn't blog about it. The movie is notorious as an incoherent mess, due to a production gone wrong in just about every way a film can, proving that the more large ego-ed filmmakers and stars you can gather together the worse the outcome will be. It ought to be unwatchable for too many reasons to count, but somehow, almost every awful bit manages to contain some spark that keeps you glued and — the neural receptors for pleasure and pain being as proximate as they are — willing to endure more.

With the major exception of Alan Price's score to Anderson's O Lucky Man!, I actively dislike pop music soundtracks*, but Burt Bacharach's score here is not one of the film's problems, and although the score (much of it played by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass) was very much part of the commercial music of the era, it has so many features that are untypical of mid-60's pop music that it ultimately has to be put into a category of its own. First of all, it provides precisely the continuity that the movie's producers threw out when the last traces of the source novel were ultimately abandoned to the horde of actors, directors, and screenwriters who assembled this dog's breakfast. If, however, with the passage of time, we can look — and listen — again to this film, not as a work of mainstream narrative, but as an effort — if only in part intentional — in '60s-pop-tinged avant-garde filmmaking, then the strengths of the score become even clearer.

I will even venture that the block-like construction of the opening credits above reveals Bacharach standing in an authentic lineage, via his teacher Milhaud, back to Milhaud's mentor, Satie, and Satie's score for the ballet Parade, and the film insert Entr'acte, in particular. While there are details of Bacharach's harmonic practice — modal progessions, chords with "added tones" — that immediately make a Satie-via-Milhaud connection, and the negotiation of all three composers with popular genres is obvious, the important shared features here are really formal, with the deployment, almost at random, of a limit set of blocks of distinct material without development in terms of tonality, figuration, or texture. Where Bacharach here innovates is in the sound production, in which the various blocks are assigned distinctive dynamic profiles and discrete positions in the stereo field, an innovation in projecting the block structure which I find entirely within the spirit of the Satie-Milhaud tradition.

_____

* For that matter, I'm skeptical about the whole notion of a musical soundtrack for film; Robert Bresson's rejection of non-diegetic music almost convinces me, but I can't be that strict and serious: as long as we grant films license to suspend disbelief, there will be a place for music in film.

Originally from Renewable Music, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 28, 2009 at 08:10 PM | Comments (0)

Room for Souvenirs

Reviewing Boston Musica Viva.
Boston Globe, September 28, 2009.

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

October Events Presented by The UAB Department of Music - UAB Kaleidoscope

UAB Kaleidoscope

October Events Presented by The UAB Department of Music
UAB Kaleidoscope
The program will include clarinet music of France, Italy, Germany and Poland, with works by Schmitt, Lutoslawski, Mendelssohn, Castelnuovo-Tedesco and ...

Steve Reich Interview from "Sextet" Premiere Newly Available from ... - Nonesuch Records (blog)

Steve Reich Interview from "Sextet" Premiere Newly Available from ...
Nonesuch Records (blog)
Twenty-five years before Steve Reich was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his piece Double Sextet, the composer introduced a preliminary version ...

Poll: Viol-Lita

ViolForBabySmaller

Thanks to our readers for their many wonderful captions. We’ve narrowed the captions down to five fantastic finalists and it’s up to you to choose the winner. Remember, there are 5 CDs from Cantaloupe Records on the line. Cast your vote now! Polls will close at 11:59 p.m.

Originally posted by Milton Blabber from The Cereal List, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 28, 2009 at 05:12 PM | Comments (0)

Orchestras should stop naming chairs, start selling them on eBay

Editor’s Note: The Cereal List is pleased to welcome Benjamins Britten to the aggregate as our Economics Analyst.

In case you’ve missed the news, our economy hasn’t been doing so well. And you know how like in High School the first thing to get cut from the budget were music programs? Well, that same kind of thing is happening on the macro level throughout the country as many orchestras continue to either struggle or bite the dust. And lest we think that this is simply an affliction for the small-fry 2nd, 3rd, and 4th tier outfits, how about the news last week that the Philadelphia Orchestra, needs an extra $15 million just to make ends meet?

As you might expect, opinions vary widely throughout the orchestra world on how to confront such colossal budget shortfalls. The American Symphony Orchestra is now offering $25 tickets for any seat in the house, while the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra likes to raid its own cookie jar.

Interesting ideas, to say the least, however after conducting some vigorous market research, The Cereal List believes it has identified a Der Freischütz-ian magic bullet of a solution to save the nation’s orchestras: stop naming chairs and start selling them on eBay.

“Selling seats from the concert hall can have a doubly positive effect,” said TCL Consultant Reginald Harvey. “Profits from seat sales will generate extra revenue which orchestras can use to pay their musicians the balance they owe them on their contracts, while having less seats in the hall will increase the number of sell-out concerts they’ll have throughout the year. It’s really a win-win for everyone.”

Originally posted by Benjamins Britten from The Cereal List, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 28, 2009 at 05:12 PM | Comments (0)

60x60 Dance @ Galapagos, NYC (4/8/09) [Grey/Dai]

Aspect
Music: Melissa Grey
Dance: Jian Dai

One definition of aspect is the way in which the planets, from their relative positions, look upon each other [and] their joint look upon the earth. Commonplace sounds that mark the beginning of my day provide the sonic palette: constellating harmonies from noise, Aspect shifts the perspective from the mundane to the stars' collective view of Earth. Melissa Grey's compositions range from concert works for chamber orchestras, live electroacoustic performances, collaborative media installations to music and sound for radio, film and video.

Dai Jian was born in Hunan Province, China and graduated from the Beijing Dance Academy & Guangdong ATV Professional Academy for Performing Arts, founded by Madam Yang Meiqi. In 1998 he was awarded the Second Prize at the Fourth National Dance Competition. 2004 He received a full scholarship to attend the ADF. He also danced and choreographed for Jin Xing Dance Theater and Guangzhou Song & Dance Ensemble in China before becoming a member of the Shen Wei Dance Arts in 2005. Dai Jian joined Trisha Brown Dance Company in 2008.

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

Basque composer E. Soutullo selected for World Music Days festival - EITB

Basque composer E. Soutullo selected for World Music Days festival
EITB
Throughout its history, the World Music Days festival has been a platform for some of the most important twentieth century composers such as György Ligeti ...

Audio guide reminder (EU edition)

Audio-Samples zum Buch The Rest Is Noise: Das 20. Jahrhundert hören finden Sie hier. Para los ejemplos de audio relacionados con el libro El ruido eterno, vaya aquí. Clicca qui ad ascoltare ai campioni con riferimento al libro Il resto...

Originally from Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 28, 2009 at 12:22 PM | Comments (0)

Tosca at the Met

Fiasco. The New Yorker, Oct. 5, 2009.

Originally from Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 28, 2009 at 12:22 PM | Comments (0)

Tam Lin Plays The Bitter End On October 2, 2009 - Top40-Charts.com

Tam Lin Plays The Bitter End On October 2, 2009
Top40-Charts.com
His songs have been praised as, 'Music that steps out of a dream' (Freshout Media, Philadelphia, PA), 'Gentle and literate tunes [that] are wistful yet ...

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 Sep 28, 2009 at 12:20 PM | Comments (0)

A chat with composer Leonard Slatkin - Detroit Free Press

A chat with composer Leonard Slatkin
Detroit Free Press
Conservative in style, Barber's ear for lush melody and romantic expression made him a beloved figure among audiences, though from the start his music was ...

A Dozen Piano Concerto Discs - Audiophile Audition

Audiophile Audition

A Dozen Piano Concerto Discs
Audiophile Audition
PHILIP GLASS: The Concerto Project Vol. II = Piano Concerto No. 2, After Lewis & Clark; Concerto for Harpsichord and Orchestra - Paul Barnes, ...

and more »

Jody Pou/Emily Manzo - Anton Webern

Selections from Anton Webern’s Song Cycles Op.3, 4, 12, 23 & 25 are performed by soprano Jody Pou and pianist Emily Manzo on this fourth online album from the exceptional Shsk’h netlabel. Webern was one of Arnold Schoenberg most celebrated and loyal students. He diligently stayed in the twelve tone technique of his teacher and is known as one of the finest practitioner of serialism. His works are intense but brief diamonds of 20th century classical music. These songs are a perfect introduction to the composer and are also excellent showcases for the considerable talents of Pou and Manzo.

The album is available in 256kbps MP3.

Download (Click on “Vol. 04)

Originally posted by Marvin from Free Albums Galore, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 28, 2009 at 12:19 PM | Comments (0)

Update: Video and Images of AMREF Benefit Concert

“Thank you all for coming out to Killian Hall yesterday night! I hope you enjoyed listening to the concert as much as I enjoyed playing it for you! I also wanted to thank you for your generous contibutions to the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF) which will help improve health care for many communities across the African continent.”
– Seda

Video of Sound Check –Hans Tutschku: Zellen Linien

overview" id="ngg-gallery-6-753">

Originally posted by sedaroeder.com from Seda Röder, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 28, 2009 at 12:18 PM | Comments (0)

"We are just artists who use a different medium with different rules."

Found this quote about the misery of scientists

and more:
"We are all but artists-turned-businessmen."

It refers to this article:
Real Lives and White Lies in the Funding of Scientific Research
The granting system turns young scientists into bureaucrats and then betrays them

In this blogger's view scientists and artists have much in common and both suffer from inadequate funding conditions.

We all know that giving priority to financial considerations in certain fields will bring absurd and tragic consequences and in long term will turn all of us into cruel robots. Why can't we control money instead of letting money to control us?
Part of the answer might be this
(if i just knew where i found this quote)

Originally from Discussion Forum - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 28, 2009 at 12:17 PM | Comments (0)

New Random Artist on the Front Page Here!

OK, as you may have noticed it's up. A couple of things to think about.

1. The composer name comes from the info you input when you add your snog. And the MP3 ID tags, I believe.
2. Cover art is kind of compelling!
3. The database isn't updated until I run the process. This means new artists, if you're in a hurry to get on the random player, send me an email and I'll see what I can do.

Comments?

Originally from Discussion Forum - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 28, 2009 at 12:16 PM | Comments (0)

Making noise about jazz - San Diego Union Tribune

Making noise about jazz
San Diego Union Tribune
In recent years, ArtPower! has exceeded attendance expectations for contemporary classical music and dance artists who are not well known here. ...

Originally from "contemporary classical" | "avant garde" music - Google News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 28, 2009 at 12:16 PM | Comments (0)

The uncompromising sound of the insurance salesman - Daily Star - Lebanon

Daily Star - Lebanon

The uncompromising sound of the insurance salesman
Daily Star - Lebanon
... a lecture and a workshop, Schneller took his audiences on a voyage through some lesser-known tracts of contemporary classical music world. ...

and more »

Originally from "contemporary classical" | "avant garde" music - Google News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 28, 2009 at 12:16 PM | Comments (0)

Basque composer E. Sotoulle selected for World Music Days festival - EITB

Basque composer E. Sotoulle selected for World Music Days festival
EITB
Throughout its history, the World Music Days festival has been a platform for some of the most important twentieth century composers such as György Ligeti ...

Berlin Philharmonic in Warsaw - Thenews.pl

Berlin Philharmonic in Warsaw
Thenews.pl
The programme of the concert included Beethoven's Second Symphony and the Fourth Symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich, with the orchestra's Music Director Sir ...

and more »

Tyondai Braxton - Central Market 28 Sep 10:29 - Drowned In Sound

Tyondai Braxton - Central Market 28 Sep 10:29
Drowned In Sound
Pop music at its best is an arena where alternative plans and configurations are performed, and the authority of what precedes us is tested. ...

and more »

Dance Review: Exuberant Philadanco an ideal partner for August ... - Pittsburgh Post Gazette

Dance Review: Exuberant Philadanco an ideal partner for August ...
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
Set to a driving minimalist score by Steve Reich, it had a military tone, from the costumes to the straight lines and sharp accents. ...

Musica Viva's new works take flight - Boston Globe

Musica Viva's new works take flight
Boston Globe
Harbison's music gives the interior life expressionist, dissonant languor; the outside world intrudes with aggregates of tight musical hooks, the busyness ...

This new hall is decked with stunning sound - Globe and Mail

This new hall is decked with stunning sound
Globe and Mail
The most impressive single sound in the whole show came at the end of Gyorgy Ligeti's L'escalier du Diable (one of two Ligeti etudes given a superb ...

Michael Adelson To Conduct PSO - Westchester.com

Michael Adelson To Conduct PSO
Westchester.com
He is deeply committed to music of our time, having worked with composers such as Pierre Boulez, Bernard Rands, Harrison Birtwistle, Magnus Lindberg and ...

Music Review | Mario Diaz de León - New York Times

Music Review | Mario Diaz de León
New York Times
You could see it in action on Friday night at Roulette, a venerable new-music institution now in a soho storefront of modest size, when a concert featuring ...

Bravo Gustavo – Conducting Hero

Miss Mussel has a soft spot for Guitar Hero and has spent more time than she cares to admit trying to beat seemingly interminable Knights of Cydonia by Muse. In aid of publicising Gustavo Dudamel’s ascension to the LA Phil podium (like anyone on our classical music planet could possibly be unaware of the event) the orchestra marketing people have engaged Hello Design to come up with the rather lovely Bravo Gustavo conducting game.

It’s short, it’s fun and it’s difficult enough to feel like you’ve accomplished something. After a few goes, Miss Mussel has reached the illustrious rank of Conductor with a score of 6890 and is pleased to see that her masters degree was worth it after all.

There were some usability issues in terms of choppiness and slight stalling of the music and video but Miss Mussel suspects that has more to do with a dodgy internet connection than a flaw with the game.

In addition to the computer version, those of us on the iPhone bandwagon are also able to download a mobile version of the game although it is hardly worth it. After a few seconds tapping out the beat and then making the protagonist race to the scaffold, the fun is over. There are no points to amass and the loop of music (excerpts of Symphonie Fantastique) are too short to satisfy any sort of conducting fantasy.

All in all, though, a good effort.

Share This Post:

Originally posted by Miss Mussel from The Omniscient Mussel on Classical Music & Culture, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 28, 2009 at 02:12 AM | Comments (0)

No alibi

The party is drawing to an end and there's no better way to send — that is, push — the last guests home than hammering out a round of standards on the piano. Pure Gebrauchsmusik. As I run out the welcome clock with As Time Goes By, someone grabs my shoulder and asks, come on, Deej, isn't that the kind of music you really wanna write? and all I can do is shake the shoulder free and reply No, I really am writing the kind of music I wanna write...

Originally from Renewable Music, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 28, 2009 at 02:10 AM | Comments (0)

Unintended Consequences

Here's a wonderful little piece of music I created by accident, 51 seconds long. Take a listen to it, and then click here to learn what it is.

Originally from PostClassic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 28, 2009 at 02:10 AM | Comments (0)

September 27, 2009

The uncompromising sound of the insurance salesman - Daily Star - Lebanon

Daily Star - Lebanon

The uncompromising sound of the insurance salesman
Daily Star - Lebanon
... performance of a specific piece of music, “Poeme Electronique” was performed in a structure designed by Xenakis (who doubled as an architect) based on ...

Club report

Bob Shingleton of On an Overgrown Path alerts me to the fact that a club called The Rest Is Noise is opening this Thursday on Brixton Road in London. According to the Guardian, it's the latest venture from "the gang...

Originally from Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 27, 2009 at 08:11 PM | Comments (0)

60x60 Dance @ Galapagos, NYC (4/8/09) [Gauthier/Kook]

Cycles 1
Music: Thierry Gauthier
Dance: Jacqueline H. Kook

Thierry Gauthier is an eclectic composer, distinguished by his experimental techniques. He has studied computer assisted sound design and holds a BM in electroacoustic music composition from the University of Montreal. He received an honorary mention at the music competition Musica Nova and was a finalist at JTTP. Gauthier has been commissioned for movies, art-videos, television series, documentaries, multimedia, installations and multidisciplinary performances. Cycles1 is an expressionist acousmatic piece where the concept and process is minimalist and repetitive. The cyclic revolution is conceived with microsounds which are accumulated, repeated and granulated by the mediation of microloops.

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

Where have all the flowers gone?

I hardly dare go on another of my extended jaunts. In 2007 while I was away Sir Malcolm Arnold passed on, and last year it was Esbjörn Svensson. This year while I was travelling we lost the two remarkable ladies of music seen in these photos.

Back in September 2006 I ended a post on James Simon Kunen's 1968 novel The Strawberry Statement with these words:

* Now playing - The Great Mandala, yes I know that Peter, Paul and Mary are about as unfashionable as you can get, but this is one of the great antiwar songs of the era. Composer Peter Yarrow's explanation that the song 'says our lives present us with a choice, in this case, the choice was to either serve in a war that ran counter to basic American principles, or to take the consequences of refusing to do so; for young men called to service, it was the preeminent ethical dilemna of our time' is a stark reminder that relevance never becomes unfashionable.

reader SFMike commented:

Peter, Paul and Mary were pretty unfashionable even then, their style being so old-time folk-singer, but I had the good fortune to see them perform live once in California around that time and the three of them were some of the most accomplished performers I've ever seen. They took a huge "outdoor bowl" audience into their hands and made it feel like an intimate occasion.

ry Travers, one of that old-time folk trio, died aged 72 after a long illness. Thank you Mary for your music making. It will always remind us that relevance must never become unfashionable.

Also in 2006 I this about one of the great conductors of all time:

Antal Doráti's reputation was justifiably built on his conducting. Just one example is his recording of Stravinsky's complete Firebird ballet which was made for Mercury in Watford Town Hall in 1959. It is one of the major achievements in the history of recorded music and was made on Ampex 350 series three channel ½ inch recorders using valve (tube) recording electronics. Listening to it again does raise the question as to what real benefits do digital recording and jet-setting maestros bring us today?

recording, and many other classic discs, was Wilma Cozart Fine, seen below, who died, aged 82, on Sept. 21. Thank you Ms. Fine for your legacy of recordings; they will always remind us that great sound, irrespective of age or technology, must never become unfashionable.

Another classic Wilma Cozart Fine recording here.
Lower photo credit to Fine family. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

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

La rentrée

More art of typography here.
Photo of Vandeness en Auxois, France is (c) On An Overgrown Path 2009. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

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

Classical Connect Launches the New Interviews Channel - PR-USA.net (press release)

Classical Connect Launches the New Interviews Channel
PR-USA.net (press release)
Mr. Duffie, a former producer of WNIB, a Chicago classical music station which broadcast from 1955 to 2001, has conducted hundreds of interviews with some ...

Pianist Jeffrey Siegel begins yearlong tribute to Chopin with ... - The Plain Dealer - cleveland.com

Pianist Jeffrey Siegel begins yearlong tribute to Chopin with ...
The Plain Dealer - cleveland.com
But even music students can play him and not recognize his genius." Where: Waetjen Auditorium, Cleveland State University, 2121 Euclid Ave. ...

60x60 Dance @ Galapagos, NYC (4/8/09) [McLeer/Douglas]

Black Lung
Music: Christian McLeer
Dance: Chloe C Douglas

Christian McLeer is the artistic director and founder of Remarkable Theater Brigade. His musical success began as a youth, winning piano competitions and commissions while still in high school. His work HOPE was his first commission at the age of 14 from American Cancer Society. He attended Julliard Pre-College and worked his way through Manhattan School of Music where he acquired his Bachelorâs degree, composing and performing professionally for classical, jazz and rock ensembles.

Chloe Douglas is interested in sight-reactive and experiential dance, dance for video, and any work that brings dance a new context for a new audience. She is inspired by her boyfriend Fred Brehm, along with Coco Karol, Mira Peck and Ashley Wallace and Spring. She is very grateful to participate in 60x60.

Originally from 60x60, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 27, 2009 at 05:12 AM | Comments (0)

September 26, 2009

Dance review: 'Prayer' makes dramatic season opener for Texas ... - Dallas Morning News

Dance review: 'Prayer' makes dramatic season opener for Texas ...
Dallas Morning News
... red slip-dresses, Collier, DuBois, Hunter and Rebecca McManus appeared to defy gravity as they bounced on their toes to circular Steve Reich music. ...

and more »

Gyorgy Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre is unique - Times Online

Gyorgy Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre is unique
Times Online
... it seemed to me, the transcendental baby from the end of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, for which Ligeti's music was used (without his consent). ...

Indian Music: Ragas and Dances

The Original Uday Shankar Company of Hindu Musicians - Indian Music: Ragas and Dances LP released in 1968; all music recorded in 1937Instrumental ensemble: Vishnudass Shirali, Sisir Sovan, Rabindra (Ravi Shankar), Dulal Sen, Nagen dey, Brijo BehariArs longa and all that, but in art as in life a lot can happen within a few decades, and it is ever fascinating to observe the interaction of chance

Originally from A Closet of Curiosities, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 26, 2009 at 11:11 PM | Comments (0)

Partitas old and recent - Examiner.com

Examiner.com

Partitas old and recent
Examiner.com
As the online edition of The Oxford Companion to Music observes, "partita," like many musical terms, went through a variety of meanings, ...

Ink barely dry

My blogging is not quite keeping pace with my musical activity. This page (practically all of it) was written Thursday morning; I snapped the picture on the train last night; and only posting this Saturday morning.

[ click for larger image ]

tyle="font-family:Georgia;color:#215868;">. . . and in fact on that train last night (whose departure was not at midnight, and which did not leave for Georgia), I finished out the piece. It is a brief (four minutes) companion to the flute-clarinet duet Heedless Watermelon, written to fill out the April date at King’s Chapel.

Originally I had planned to do a clarinet/organ recital on that occasion, as it’s been a spell since my cl/org material has had an airing. But the recital’s timing is immediately after Easter, and the organist pleaded extenuating circumstances. He’s a good chap, and we’re not savages ’ere, so the cl/org program will enjoy a further respite.

Fresh from the triumph at the library, my thought directly turned to a fl/cl program . . . give the Heedless Watermelon another whirl, and I shouldn’t mind another lash at the Studies in Impermanence. That leaves about four minutes to fill out the half-hour’s program preferred at King’s Chapel — hence the new fl/cl duet, All the Birds in Mondrian’s Cage.

Severe economies of line, apparent restriction of activity (I think I want the whole piece played piano, for but one instance) . . . the title and a scheme for the music came to me at about the same instant.

Originally from henningmusick, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 26, 2009 at 02:10 PM | Comments (0)

Mystery Music Excerpt Challenge

Here is a short excerpt of a larger work.

Can you name the composer and when it was written?

http://paulhmuller.wordpress.com/files/2009/09/mystery.mp3

Originally from Discussion Forum - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 26, 2009 at 11:46 AM | Comments (0)

Early Fall Miscellany

Not sure if it’s this late summer (early fall?) heat wave in NYC or what, but I’ve lost my steam a bit. So here’s a quick teaser post, hopefully to stimulate me to write as well as you to read!

* Opening night of Nozze was just as cool when singing Bridesmaid as when singing Susanna. Maybe even more exciting, because I actually had energy at the end of the night to go have a cocktail with B!
* Coffee today with a composer working on his first opera. Going to talk about the “traditional” delegation of voice types to character types - and all the fun ways to mess with them!
* Hillula, the first Bhakti Project commission, will be returning to NYC this November! Save the Date: Nov. 19th at the awesome Galapagos Art Space.
* Speaking of Bhakti Project, I am mulling over a potential new plan, one that would ideally involve several composers... maybe even a recording this time? Time to start summoning that grant money ”from where ever it is right now.”
* I’m finally getting a mailing list put together! If you’d like to be on it, please send a message to annecarolynbird at me dot com, or go to the Contact page of my website and click the link.
* Working on Suor Angelica (music and text), reading Faust, researching songs for the Astronomy recital, and getting to know Hillula again. Looks like we’re back in full swing!

Originally from the concert, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 26, 2009 at 11:43 AM | Comments (0)

Let the Celebration Begin - DePauw University

DePauw University

Let the Celebration Begin
DePauw University
This year, Joan Tower will be the composer in residence from Feb. 17- 21. The festival is underwritten by Robert A. and Margaret A. Schmidt, '69, '69. ...

and more »

Nonesuch Events for the Weekend of September 25–27 - Nonesuch Records (blog)

Nonesuch Events for the Weekend of September 25–27
Nonesuch Records (blog)
Philip Glass performs solo piano pieces at the Teatro Juan Bravo in Segovia, Spain, tonight, as part of the four-day Hay Festival. ...

Gustavo Dudamel starts off at a fast tempo - Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles Times

Gustavo Dudamel starts off at a fast tempo
Los Angeles Times
Besides Beethoven's Ninth and Mahler's First symphonies, Dudamel will conduct in his first week with the LA Philharmonic the world premieres of John Adams' ...
Gustavo Dudamel learns to conduct his careercalendarlive.com

all 6 news articles »

Interview: James Hesford Of The Working Classical Music Orchestra - Londonist

Londonist

Interview: James Hesford Of The Working Classical Music Orchestra
Londonist
You seem to approach contemporary classical music from an unusual angle. It took me a long time to actually connect 'Art' with music. ...

Originally from "contemporary classical" | "avant garde" music - Google News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 26, 2009 at 11:41 AM | Comments (0)

Sonic Circuits Interview: Jeff Surak - DCist.com

DCist.com

Sonic Circuits Interview: Jeff Surak
DCist.com
What was it that got you started in your appreciation for experimental and avant-garde music? Jeff: Oh, I've been making it for 25, 27 years now. ...

Originally from "contemporary classical" | "avant garde" music - Google News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 26, 2009 at 11:41 AM | Comments (0)

A trio of savvy world premieres - Globe and Mail

A trio of savvy world premieres
Globe and Mail
When there is music, it is the great pianist Arthur Rubinstein performing a Chopin nocturne, which is a nice nod to Paris where Stein made her home and ...

Embracing the Orchestra as Alive - New York Times

Embracing the Orchestra as Alive
New York Times
A piece for which Whitman might have coined his poetic term “barbaric yawp,” “Kraft” reflected the influences of Xenakis, whose music Mr. Lindberg came to ...

Texas Dance Theatre's debut not without a few kinks - Fort Worth Star Telegram

Texas Dance Theatre's debut not without a few kinks
Fort Worth Star Telegram
McKnight's Eight Lines featured four women in red dresses bouncing and bopping to Howie B's percolating remix of music by Steve Reich. ...

A String Player's Guide to the Art of Looping - Strings Magazine

A String Player's Guide to the Art of Looping
Strings Magazine
Looping has a long history: musique concrète pioneer Pierre Henry, Edgar Varèse, and Karl Stockhausen experimented with the technique as far back as the ...

Kriikku's Kraft

Kari Kriikku is hardly a household name, but he should be. He is a clarinetist of astonishing agility and expressive imagination. He's beginning to develop a higher American profile, thanks to the support of Finnish compatriots such as Esa-Pekka Salonen...

Originally from Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 26, 2009 at 05:12 AM | Comments (0)

A Slope of Rugrats

Lord, am I enjoying wallowing in this wonderful recording of Sarah Cahill playing my transcription of Harold Budd's Children on the Hill from a few weeks ago at the Second International Minimalism Conference. Near the end of the fast part, every key change could signal a return to the A section, and every one that doesn't is a heartbreaking reassurance that the heaven of the piece isn't about to end yet.

It's been a long teaching week, so I'm not in the mood to discuss why one should never, ever transcribe and recreate a recording of an improvisation; be assured that I know many of you think that, and that I am suitably ashamed of my unconscionable behavior. If you miss the original recording's crying baby, well, right. Please allow me, on a tired Friday night, to enjoy the illusion that I put dozens of hours into a project that pleased me and a few other people and did no one any harm.

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

Gustavo Dudamel starts off at a fast tempo - Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles Times

Gustavo Dudamel starts off at a fast tempo
Los Angeles Times
And all music is pretty much the same for him -- Beethoven, Brahms, Verdi, Mahler, Shostakovich, György Ligeti. What works now for Dudamel, ...

and more »

Reactable

Reactable. Really object-oriented synthesis.

“The instrument is based on a translucent and luminous round table, and by putting these pucks on the Reactable surface, by turning them and connecting them to each other, performers can combine different elements like synthesizers, effects, sample loops or control elements in order to create a unique and flexible composition.”

A more sedate demonstration of the table.

Originally posted by Scott from NonPop, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 26, 2009 at 12:51 AM | Comments (0)

September 25, 2009

Chanticleer performs Sunday at 5pm - Sacramento Bee

Chanticleer performs Sunday at 5pm
Sacramento Bee
Songs of Love & Loss, War & Peace," a concert of wide ranging music that includes works by Palestrina, Dufay, Janequin, Ligeti, Chen Yi, Sametz, McGlynn, ...

and more »

#1 at Amazon: Phil Kline’s Around the World in a Daze

For the last week, Phil Kline’s Around the World in a Daze has appeared daily as the #1 Bestseller in Amazon’s Indie Classical rankings.

It’s great to see new music top the charts. We think this is a tribute to Phil’s wonderful music, which has inspired excellent reviews in such publications as The New York Times, Fanfare, New York Magazine, Stereophile, and many more.

Also, this double DVD release is currently on sale for $14.93, so that helps too.

Read more about Phil Kline’s Around the World in a Daze.

______________________________

Originally from Starkland, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 25, 2009 at 11:10 PM | Comments (0)

Drums And Architecture At Third Coast Percussion's Opener - Chicagoist

Chicagoist

Drums And Architecture At Third Coast Percussion's Opener
Chicagoist
Third Coast Percussion opens its season this Saturday at Roosevelt University with a program connecting music and architecture. The concert is an extension ...

SFist Interviews: House in Bali's Evan Ziporyn - SFist

SFist

SFist Interviews: House in Bali's Evan Ziporyn
SFist
And Steve Reich also lived in the bay area, he was a student at Mills. Meredith [Monk], I guess, I work with her because I live in the East coast, ...

Ravi Shankar In Concert

Ravi Shankar - In Concert Ravi Shankar - sitarZakir Hussain - tablacassette released in 1991No date and place given when and where concert was performed. :(Ravi Shankar is veritably the most successful Indian musician in modern times. His contribution to the art reaches far beyond the frontiers of successful performance or training. He has been the most significant architect of the process of

Originally from A Closet of Curiosities, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 25, 2009 at 08:12 PM | Comments (0)

Guardian: Five Stars for Alarm Will Sound's "Dazzlingly Well ... - Nonesuch Records (blog)

Guardian: Five Stars for Alarm Will Sound's "Dazzlingly Well ...
Nonesuch Records (blog)
The group, having "carved out a distinctive niche for itself in the US new-music scene," says reviewer Andrew Clements, has made a name for itself ...

and more »

Friday Photo Finish: Viol-Lita

ViolForBabySmaller

A picture may be worth a thousand words but often 990 of them aren’t quite the right ones. So each and every Friday we’re giving you a chance to set the story straight with our weekly caption contest. You submit your captions and over the weekend The Cereal List aggregate will convene a panel to narrow the field down to small set of finalists. On Monday, we post the finalists and allow readers to select the winner.

This week’s prize for winning is the following array of killer CDs from Cantaloupe Records:

1. BANG ON A CAN – Bang on a Can Meets Kyaw Kyaw Naing
2. PHILIP GLASS – Music in Fifths / Two Pages
3. ALARM WILL SOUND – Michael Gordon: Van Gogh
4. MICHAEL GORDON – [purgatorio] POPOPERA
5. BANG ON A CAN – The Carbon Copy Building

Submit your captions in our comments section!

**Caption comments can be submitted without using real names but must include a working email address (which will not be published).

Originally posted by Milton Blabber from The Cereal List, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 25, 2009 at 05:12 PM | Comments (0)

60x60 Dance @ Galapagos, NYC (4/8/09) [Maters/Brandenburg]

Double Future Container Love Music
Music: John Maters
Dance: Colette Brandenburg

Born in Nijmegen, Netherlands, John Maters attended the Royal Academy of Arts in Hertogenbosch. His group presentations include: Vegetable Man, curated by Dario Antonetti; Soundlab V, Cologne; Gallery Aferro, Newark; Pendu Gallery, New York; Open Source Art Champaign, Illinois. In Double Future Container Love Music he continues exploring the possibilities of recycling and re-transformation, rethinking a work by considering it in relationship to different contexts. This piece infiltrates ordinary conditions with the mixed emotions of homesickness and consolation, which are disturbed by the undetermined sounds of a building-ground, where past and future are present.

Colette Brandenburg currently choreographs, performs, and teaches in LA, although she misses living in Brooklyn immensely. Colette trained with Evelyn Kreason and completed the Independent Study Program at the Alvin Ailey School. She has been a member of Michigan Ballet Theater, Midwest Dance Theater, and currently performs with Saba Dance in LA. She has been a guest faculty member at Valley College as well. She wants to thank all of her dancers past and current for letting her experiment her choreography on them.
Dancers: Colette Brandenburg, Victoria Brown, Eileen Crowe, Dana Vultaggio, and Shannon Zimmerman

Originally from 60x60, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 25, 2009 at 05:11 PM | Comments (0)

Bookmarks for September 21st through September 24th [del.icio.us]

Bookmarks from September 21st through September 24th:[del.icio.us]

Their cut-and-paste world | Brand X | Los Angeles Times
“if you surfed L.A.’s public access airwaves in the 1990s, you might have come across a paunchy, balding man who loved dancing to John Phillips Sousa marching songs while wearing nothing but a Lone Ranger mask and an American flag Speedo. But that’s not the weird part. The titular star of “Dancing With Frank Pachowski” surrounded himself with a semicircle of elderly people who sat and watched stone-faced as he performed. “It’s absolutely brilliant,” declares Nick Prueher. Five years ago, Prueher and his pal Joe Pickett — both former writers at the Onion — created the Found Footage Festival, a traveling show of video oddities that they’ve culled from thrift stores, garage sales and garbage bins. The fourth incarnation of their show, which has its West Coast premiere at M Bar tonight and Friday, features nearly 60 videos…”
The Seattle Phonographers Union « Amaranth Arthouse Music – “The group eventually came out. After a brief introduction the performance began. Each performer played a part in the building and decreasing soundscape through samples ranging from everyday noises to political speeches. The genius in this form of concert is the ability to shuttle the listener to wherever their imagination, following the lead of the music, takes them… I noticed midway through the gig that the outer seating wasn’t the best spot, since a speaker sitting directly behind you takes away from the stereo experience. Therefore, I took the opportunity of changing to a middle aisle seat from a couple who had left the show. It made quite a bit of difference. I checked my watch after what seemed like 20 minutes and almost 90 minutes had elapsed. The show soon came to a close. Its hard to explain the show in detail, four months later, but the collaboration and improvisation of the group really worked. I highly recommend checking these folks out.”
Sequenza21/ » We Wuz Robbed -
On hearing that no musicians or composers were awarded the 2009 MacArthur Genius Award/Grant, Scott Unrein replies: “I had a tee-ball coach who would always say, “hey genius, put a little hustle in it.” I think that’s enough of an application to ensure I’ll be in the running next year. Good luck, suckers.”
Calder Quartet performs at University of Maryland – washingtonpost.com -
“This has almost certainly been good for their career (earning appearances on Leno and Letterman, along with several programming awards), but on the basis of Sunday afternoon’s concert at the University of Maryland, one wonders whether it has given them a helpful context for rendering the great masters. In a thoroughly conventional program of Stravinsky, Janácek and Schubert, the Calder displayed good basic ensemble skills but a blurry, generalized musicianship, everything sounding the same”
The Savvy Musician: Building a Career, Earning a Living, & Making a Difference -
“THE SAVVY MUSICIAN, by Dr. David Cutler, is a thorough and comprehensive book created to help you 1) build a career, 2) earn a living, and 3) make a difference. It examines critical elements often overlooked or misunderstood by musicians, such as entrepreneurship, product development, branding, marketing, networking, the new recording paradigm, personal finance, funding, relevance, and legacy. This book helps you take control of your career by discovering opportunities that are both prosperous and meaningful.”
Coffeeloop -
Coffeeloop exists to create new experiences for a new musical era. To find the pulse of contemporary music. But what does that mean? What do you think of when you hear the words “classical music”? For most people, ideas like old and traditional come to mind. Yet the best experiences in our lives we would often describe as new, or exhilarating. “It needn’t be this way. Coffeeloop aims to bring experience back to classical music, not with fireworks or laser shows (though we don’t rule those out), but with engagement. Engagement with you, and between the audience, the critic and the performer. There is enough excitement to go ago around — in fact, the more we share, the more there is for everyone.”

Originally posted by admin from paulbailey.us (beta), ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 25, 2009 at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)

DBN enjoys busy summer schedule - L&Si Online (press release)

DBN enjoys busy summer schedule
L&Si Online (press release)
MIF 2009's opening event at the Velodrome featured a concert by Kraftwerk and Steve Reich, for which DBN's Nick Todd was their project manager and designer. ...

About Tonight - DCist.com

DCist.com

About Tonight
DCist.com
... Smith Center for the Performing Arts for the kick-off of Sonic Circuits, the area's largest festival of experimental, noise and avant-garde music. ...

Originally from "contemporary classical" | "avant garde" music - Google News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 25, 2009 at 12:50 PM | Comments (0)

Information politics: the defining issue of our age - Telegraph.co.uk

Information politics: the defining issue of our age
Telegraph.co.uk
... unimpressed with the supposed “radicalism” of the Pirates is Konrad Boehmer, one of Holland's most distinguished contemporary classical music composers. ...

and more »

Originally from "contemporary classical" | "avant garde" music - Google News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 25, 2009 at 12:50 PM | Comments (0)

New directions: Carlsbad Music Festival returns with largest-ever ... - North County Times

New directions: Carlsbad Music Festival returns with largest-ever ...
North County Times
"We wanted the festival to be a platform for emerging alternative contemporary classical music artists and championing new works. ...

Originally from "contemporary classical" | "avant garde" music - Google News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 25, 2009 at 12:50 PM | Comments (0)

Kraftwerk: the elusive kings of digital pop - Times Online

Times Online

Kraftwerk: the elusive kings of digital pop
Times Online
Raised on classical and avant-garde music, they launched a free-form jazz-rock group that performed mostly at student parties and art galleries. ...

and more »

Originally from "contemporary classical" | "avant garde" music - Google News, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 25, 2009 at 12:50 PM | Comments (0)

Form and Process? Form or Process"

What is the meaning of the forms created by process music?

I have been thinking about and struggling with broad form in my music (and what composer doesn’t?). I constantly find myself reaching the end of the idea I am working on, but sensing that the piece isn’t done. Then I have to resist the urge to indulge in some facile resolution, such as adding a contrasting motivic idea and returning to the original notion at the end. While that basic dialectic is essential to European music and is a part of even the op song formula, and carries deep psychological resonance, I can let it become meaningless formula. If non-pop music takes on much of its meaning because it is not bound to the same broad formal designs as most pop music (and I think that is the case) then that over-all shape of piece ma convey as much meaning as the musical “details.”

I have been thinking about the formal shape Central European instrumental music of the mid to late 18th century and the music Reich, Riley and Glass. The shape of the last movement of Mozart symphony says a lot about how Mozart and his culture thought of life and their place in the world. The emphasis is on a projection of all the structural elements to future forms and events is very different from the more static approach of a Bach concerto. In a Bach concerto the sections, generally each variations, might well be reshuffled with some doctoring, and the piece would still work. Bach is not projecting the form to ultimate dramatic conclusion, the way Mozart does. This seems to be a different emphasis on time. I hesitate to imply that there is a neat and tidy one on one relationships between the literary/philosophical basis of the Enlightenment and Mozart’s music. However, I do think that Mozart’s music could not have the shape it does without the Enlightenment. Sturm und drang and even the sonata approach (I don’t hold with calling it a form) are very much a reflections of a time when people felt that the world functioned in manner and was intended to give meaning to human existence. It reflects a time when people could accept with a straight face the notion that one can control one’s fate and resolution and triumph are a natural outcome.

Process music raises some questions for me. Process music seems to me to be THE big (if not only) contribution to the formal shape of noon-pop music in the second alf of the 29th Century. Academic serialism was lost trying to stuff symmetrical rows and set fragments into 19th Century bottles, so that other academics could explain it in journals. I remember having five bucks during college in 1974 and finding an LP with Reich’s “Come Out” in the school bookstore’s discount bin. “Come Out” bowled me over (as did the Richard Maxfield piece on the same LP). Despite m reaction to that piece I’ve never been much inclined to write process music. I’m not sure why it never appealed to me. It’s probably telling that when Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” came out the music hit me even harder than ”Come Out.” The less “pure” approach to process appealed to em even more, and the incredible sense of bodily movement appealed to me just like Tito Puente at his best. Obviously, process music said “I rebel, resist and and reject the obscurity of academic serialism.” It speaks approvingly of a populist purpose for the composer, though “Come Out” probably has fairly limited appeal to the public at large. The clarity of it conveys a message, but what does the form itself convey? Is the seeming “passivity” of pure process music reflect an era when mirroring the description of physical processes is the best we can hope for?

I’ve been thinking for the last decade about trying to write pieces that reflect the shape of dreams - not the content - but the over-all shape> the question then is want types of shapes do dreams take on? How can one reflect that musically? Music may have much in common with language, but it may have as much in common with dreams and/or the unconcious.

How do you approach form? What meaning is conveyed by the large shape of your music? Any thoughts?

Originally from Discussion Forum - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 25, 2009 at 12:49 PM | Comments (0)

assistance identifying great solo vocal performances

Hi, I have a piece I want to try that needs some great solo vocal performances - no accompaniement. Preferably youtube or with some sort of video.
Any ideas - particularly pieces that every MOR classical radio listener would identify immediately

thanks, Greg

Originally from Discussion Forum - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 25, 2009 at 12:49 PM | Comments (0)

Its Casual...., ImprovFriday+1 9/25-26/09

Open the white pages and call across town. Tell them ImprovFriday+1 is about to start.

Welcome new participants to the now two day event ImprovFriday+1. In just a couple hours the event will kick off (Friday your time) and continue through Saturday, until midnight PST. Its so easy to join in, all you have to do is post an improvisation or work designed for the event. Post it anywhere you want, but be sure to place "improvfriday+1" somewhere in the description.

A suggestion for Twitter users: Benjamin Smith suggested we type as many relevant hash tags as possible, like "improv" or "music." It is a good idea. I tend to forget but I'm going to make a mental note this time.

Rules:

1. If you don't want your works used for collaboration or mix, type (NMC).
2. If you use other IF's works for a mix, please cite the who's works you used. If its not an IF participant's mix, that's your call.

That's it. The most important part is to make music and listen to music.

Cheers,

James

Originally from Discussion Forum - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 25, 2009 at 12:49 PM | Comments (0)

Generative Music

Just a note that composer Charles Griffin is trying out and reporting on some generative-composition MIDI software over at his blog. So far he's got posts on two different programs and approaches: Tiction and Nodal. Charles' reason for exploring this stuff?: "I’m in the planning stages of a multi-movement, electroacoustic, multi-media work that I will write for a flute quartet based in Rīga (and possibly a second group in Göteborg). In any case, I chose as my inspirational starting point the subject of Emergence, the study of how complexity arises in various kinds of systems."

I haven't played with newer versions of these things, but he's getting me interested again. Definitely worth looking over, even for the non-electronic folk.

Originally from Discussion Forum - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 25, 2009 at 12:49 PM | Comments (0)

Name that Tune!: I am back!

Folks, in spite of what else has been said, I am back with tunes to name. Here are my groundrules:

1. This is purely for fun. I cannot stress that enough. If anyone else out wants to create their own game, I am cool with that.
2. Guesses are encouraged; snide asides are not.
3. Here are some composers that will not be used, as they were used in the previous incarnation: Carter, Ferneyhough, Boulez, Tom Johnson, Julia Wolff, Lutoslawski, Berg, Nyman, Stockhausen, Glass, Dutilleux, Zimmermann, Harris
4. I will tally the points (50 for composer, 50 for the piece, 0 for the performance)

All right, let's have some fun, dagnabbit!

Originally from Discussion Forum - NetNewMusic, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 25, 2009 at 12:49 PM | Comments (0)

Wandelweiser

by Michael Pisaro

Wandelweiser is a word

Wandelweiser is a word for a particular group of people who have been committed, over the long term, to sharing their work and working together. I still find it something of a miracle that we discovered each other and have continued to function for over seventeen years: coming from different musical backgrounds, living in different parts of the world, and feeling free to go our separate ways when necessary. In fact, the “group” as such doesn’t ever come together as a whole, and includes others besides composers: musicians, artists, writers – friends. In Haan (near Düsseldorf) there is an office where scores are collected, the web site maintained, and recordings are released. This place, lovingly run by Antoine Beuger, is essential to the continued existence of the organization, but not to the deep connections that exist between us. Our sense of a shared mission is due, I think, to the countless beautiful musical and artistic moments we have experienced with each other.

Edition Wandelweiser was the name Burkhard Schlothauer gave to the fledging publishing and recording company he formed with Beuger in 1992. I guess it means “change signpost” if one understands it as a combination of Wandel with Wegweiser; or perhaps more literally, “change wisely”– (or, if one understands the second part as Weise: wise man of change?) Whatever it means, I was never completely comfortable with the name, but have always understood it somewhat humorously – as something that just popped out of Burkhard’s linguistically inventive mind, rather than as a description of any kind of aesthetic program. (I’m pretty sure he was not trying to indicate that we were especially wise.) In any case, Antoine had recently met Jürg Frey, Chico Mello, Thomas Stiegler and Kunsu Shim and it must have seemed that they had enough in common (not just musically) to band together. They had a feeling that there had to be a way to do things outside of the rich, overconfident new music organizations in Germany and Switzerland, plus a sense of being outside of the status quo these organizations created. Over the years several more joined – including myself, Manfred Werder, Carlo Inderhees, Radu Malfatti, Marcus Kaiser, Eva-Maria Houben, Craig Shepard, André Möller, Anastassis Philippakopoulos (and several others who have since left: amongst them Makiko Nishikaze and Klaus Lang) and then, at some point, there seemed to be enough people, even though we kept meeting (many) other interesting musicians. (I will say more about this later.)

The first years of the organization were quite dynamic. Members came and went. For a while there were connections with Edition Thürmchen in Cologne and Edition Mikro in Zurich, two other publisher collectives of avant-garde music. For a period of about five years, starting in the mid-‘90s, Wandelweiser had an association with another performance and publishing group, named Zeitkratzer (the whole organization then was grouped under the umbrella of the English translation of that name: Timescraper). Burkhard was the only one who belonged to both groups. At the time Zeitkratzer (directed by Reinhold Friedl) was more oriented towards the live electronic side of the experimental music spectrum. Still, there was a fair amount of overlap between the two groups, as Zeitkratzer recorded works by Schlothauer, Malfatti and Beuger, and had as members, musicians such as Axel Dörner and Ulrich Krieger, who shared some aesthetic preferences with the composers in EW. After 2000 however the two groups went their separate ways. (Some associations continue – since 2007 Ulrich Krieger has taught at CalArts.)

Wandelweiser in 1992

This was an exceptionally obscure stream of music in 1992 – almost invisible, at the edge even of the experimental avant-garde. There were no signs of it in North America or, as far as I know, anywhere outside of Germany and Switzerland. One would only have discovered it by accident.

Here is how I found out about it. Kunsu Shim – who, while no longer a part of Wandelweiser, was crucial to the aesthetic development of the group – was visiting Chicago in the fall of 1992 (with his partner, German composer Gerhard Stäbler). Kunsu, of Korean background, had lived for several years in Germany. He was very quiet (and slightly shy), but friendly – the opposite of the boisterous American “new music types” I knew at the time, and the first person I had met in a long time who wanted to talk about the music of John Cage and Morton Feldman.

Cage had been a visitor to Northwestern University, where I was teaching, for a few weeks in the spring of 1992. He had died in August of ’92 and his name was still very much in the air. At that time – and I think for most of the long period after Silence was published (1961) – it seemed musicians were more interested in discussing Cage’s ideas than his music. For Kunsu, the music of Cage, and of those who worked with him and followed in his wake was felt to be more radical and more useful than the writing: because it had so many loose ends and live wires still to be explored (something I would also later encounter with other Wandelweiser composers). Thus 4’33” was seen not as a joke or a Zen koan or a philosophical statement: it was heard as music. It was also viewed as unfinished work in the best sense: it created new possibilities for the combination (and understanding) of sound and silence. Put simply, silence was a material and a disturbance of material at the same time.

In 1990 I had started to put relatively long silences into pieces, without really knowing why I was doing it. I wanted to stop telling musicians what to do in every detail and to start creating possibilities for performers to explore a particular, individual sense of sound within a simple clear structure I would provide. But I felt as if I was alone in these interests. Part of the circumstance behind Wandelweiser is the uncanny synchronicity: around that time several of us (including Kunsu, Antoine, Jürg, Manfred and Radu) were making more or less tentative stabs in this direction, without at all being aware that there were others doing it.

Kunsu Shim and my first encounter with silent music

Kunsu gave me some tapes of his music. One consisted of a recent solo marimba piece (… floating, song, feminine… (1992).) There were hardly any sounds on that tape! I was instantly captivated. Tape hiss, a very few incidental noises (a chair, a cough, a few other unrecognizable sounds) and once in a great while a single short and abrupt marimba note, which seemed to appear out of nowhere: like the sharp tip of a pencil puncturing a sheet of paper, or a red balloon in a clear sky. (Later I would learn that the player was on a ladder and occasionally dropping mallets onto the keyboard. I’m not sure if this would have affected my response to the piece.) It was at once so clear, so simple that even a 3-year old would get it, and yet, simultaneously so mysterious and complex in its affect.

These early pieces by Kunsu, including in addition, vague sensations of something vanishing (string quartet and contrabass, 1992), marimba, bow, stone, player (1993), expanding space in limited time (solo violin, 1994), and the chamber pieces (1994) seemed to be putting the world on the head of a pin. In expanding space in limited time the bow sometimes moves only half its length in five minutes. If you saw the violinist playing you would think he was a living sculpture installation instead of music. In a performance of the piece at Northwestern’s Pick-Staiger Hall in 1994 it took 20 minutes for me to hear any sound from the violin at all. Once I did start to hear it, over the course of the nearly two hours duration, the music became almost unbelievably rich: there seemed to be more sound, more tightly compacted in this miniature world, than in the statistical complexities of Xenakis (or the black metal of Burzum). The music also revealed the complexity of “silence” itself. Silence in music was not the cessation of sound, or even a gesture: it was a different sound, one with more density than those sounds made by instruments.

No apology

Why do we like what we like? This is usually the most difficult point to explain.
Why would a schooled musician like myself, someone who grew up listening to and studying Jimi Hendrix and avant-rock, free jazz, and classical music suddenly decide that music with very little sound was the most exciting thing in the world? Basically every member of Wandelweiser has a version of this story. I’ve spent a lot of time pondering what it was that was so fascinating and inspiring about this piece (and the other pieces from this direction that I was beginning to hear). I have come to the conclusion that, while it’s possible to trace the moments that might have set the stage for such a reaction, the reaction itself is inexplicable. It is, at its root, not logical. It doesn’t follow from anything like a step-by-step process. You make a decision in a moment, and suddenly you’ve turned down one fork in the road. Terrifying and reassuring; strange and familiar; exciting and normal: all at once.

There’s no reason to love this music. One just does (or one doesn’t). Aesthetics and history come after the fact. Essays (like this one) will not make you like it better and will not ultimately defend its continued existence. The last thing I would want to do is to normalize something I continue to find strange.

Once one has made the turn onto this strange road, a world of difference opens up. What looks like a narrow passageway from the entrance, turns out to have all kinds of byways, pathways, way stations — it becomes a world of its own. Small musical differences that to some might just seem like inflections (for example, the difference between a silence of 50 and of 60 seconds, or of a few decibels, or the difference in timbre between a low trombone or an e-bow guitar, or between digital silence and recorded silence) become intensely interesting to those working with them. Having had some training in just intonation, this was familiar: the difference between an equal tempered and a just (5/4) major third is for some unimportant, and for others of fundamental importance. (If someone says about a kind of music that it “all sounds the same,” it’s very likely to interest me. In my aesthetic experience it’s more enjoyable to make my own landscape out of things that are apparently the same, that to be given a group of diverse things that already stake out their own clear positions on the map.)

To finish the Kunsu story

The recording of Kunsu’s music was definitely much farther in this direction than I had gone. Soon he had provided me with a few more of his scores along these lines (there weren’t many then) and a few recordings. It was then that I first encountered the music of Antoine (his incredible lesen, hören: buch für stimme, for voice and tape from 1991) and Jürg (his very simple and beautiful Invention for piano, from 1990). [Later it became clear that both Frey and Beuger had been moving in this direction for a while – Frey making gradual movements away, from the 1980’s onward, from his orientation in the New York School music of the 1960’s, and Beuger, who already in his teens had put silences into pieces, picking up composition again in the late 1980’s/early 1990’s with pieces such as schweigen, hören for orchestra (1990) – very likely the first piece to sound like a “Wandelweiser” piece.]

Kunsu and I met again a little over a year later (1994, I think), and after that, unbeknownst to me, he took the liberty of sending Beuger some of my recent scores. A few months later I received a phone call from Antoine and we had a long conversation (anyone who has had the pleasure of one of these long phone talks with Antoine will know what an incredible experience that can be), at the end of which he asked if I was interested in joining the collective.

Shortly thereafter, on a trip to Germany, I met a group of the current (Antoine, Jürg, Burkhard, Chico, Thomas), and soon to be (Radu, Carlo) members for the first time. It was an incredible bunch of interesting, strong, diverse, stimulating, and very humorous people! It was like meeting up with some of Walter Zimmermann’s desert plants in the midst of the fertile high culture of central Europe (notwithstanding that some came originally from Korea, Brazil and unfashionable places in Switzerland, Austria and Holland).

Making sounds with Stones

One thing I took part in on that trip in the fall of 1995 was a recording of Stones by Christian Wolff in the atelier of Burkhard Schlothauer’s apartment in Berlin. I love the disc, but the recording process itself was unforgettable. We had one rehearsal only: just enough to situate everyone to the recording environment and to see what people were doing. Each person made their own realization of the score, given minimal requirements from Antoine – I think ten sounds, however one wanted to understand that, to be made over the course of the 70 minutes duration of the recording. Naturally everyone had a different method of realizing the piece. Antoine had used chance procedures, and it had thrown up a need to make three sounds at once, quite a trick given the kinds of sounds he had chosen (involving balancing something and striking it in two different ways with stones simultaneously, if I remember correctly). This took some amusing acrobatics, but in the end came off successfully. Thomas Stiegler made every stone sound using his violin, intertwining pebbles with bow hair in the strings, dropping tiny stones on the body–it was like a miniature symphony in a violin. Burkhard dragged a large stone very gently over the floor of the atelier for a long, long time. Kunsu Shim’s sounds were all to occur within a period of about two minutes, 55 minutes into the recording. He sat without any visible motion (as far as we could tell, none whatsoever) for the first 55 minutes and then quietly, almost inaudibly, made ten extremely delicate sounds with a few very small pebbles and some cloth. Jürg Frey, as someone who had performed many pieces by Wolff, had determined, Wolff-style, to hinge a few of his sounds upon actions by others, unbeknownst to the people playing. By chance this had created a situation where the sign for the beginning of a sound and its end (i.e., the actions of two different performers) necessitated that he rub two good size stones over another gently for nearly half an hour. At the end of this Jürg was covered in white dust.

Listening to a Wandelweiser disc

The making of this recording and, especially the idea that we would release such a thing (as happened in 1996) is reflective of one of the most important features of the thinking that was taking place within Wandelweiser. Obviously a recording is different in many ways from a live performance. The most profound difference in my view is how one experiences them. A concert is a series of moments in which something indefinable passes through sound and between people. The moments are sensuously immersive (sights, sounds, feelings, smells, tastes), but impermanent. But you have a relationship with a recording. It can be a brief relationship – and can then somewhat resemble a performance. But the best recordings are lasting in their own particular and repetitive way.

A recording is also an artifact that doesn’t care what you do with it. You can listen to the same song 500 times; you can refuse to open it (c.f. Brian Olewnick’s review of Sectors (for Constant) by Sean Meehan); you can hang it on the wall, sell it or throw it away.

With recording, sound is stored for use. How do you use a recording like Stones? Do you just listen to it like anything else (perfectly possible in this case) or do you find ways of listening to it that suit the recording in other ways: say playing it all day at low volume (so that it can be forgotten, except for those very few moments when a sound rises to the surface, reminding you it’s still there). Or play it so loud that you hear everything.

In other words, the recording can be viewed as open, something like an instrument—a particular instrument that makes a limited set of sounds that can nonetheless have a variable relationship in the environment in which they are played. Although there are many discs in the Edition Wandelweiser catalog that can function as fairly normal listening experiences, their presence alongside those such as Stones, calme étendue (Spinoza), Branches, silent harmonies in discreet continuity, exercise 15, ein(e) ausführende(r) seiten 218 – 226, phontaine, Transparent City, and im sefinental (to name only the most obvious in this direction), creates an interesting double trajectory: from the recording as concept towards its use as music, and, conversely, the invitation to a listener to experiment in their own way with how to experience the more traditionally presented music. (I don’t mean to suggest that Wandelweiser owns or established this category – just that it plays a role in how I experience the music on any given EW disc.)

The first decade

So, after a while, as concerts started to happen (in Düsseldorf, Aarau, Zürich, Munich, Chicago, etc.) and discs started to be released (with an initial onslaught of eight in 1996) some attention was given to the group in the German speaking new music press and at various music festivals. The presences of Radu Malfatti (I didn’t know any of his work as an improviser yet) and Manfred Werder (having just returned from a few years in Paris) made themselves felt. At this stage (late ‘90s) Wandelweiser seemed very much like a German thing — not just as a basis of operations but where most of the things were happening. This was ironic, inasmuch as most of the members were not from Germany. (I have to add here that the “Swiss contingent” of Jürg and Manfred did a lot to make sure that Wandelweiser was not only a German thing, with many strong and memorable concert series in Aarau and Zürich.)

I’ve often wondered about this landing in Germany. It may have something to do with the high regard the American avant-garde was held in Europe, and in particular in Germany, compared to the status it had in the US at the time. It was often my impression that Cage, Feldman, Wolff, Lucier and the others had had a greater impact on the late 20th century music life in central Europe than they had had in the US. The musical situation in the States, at least in classical and jazz music, had been flooded with more conciliatory voices: the minimalism of Glass and Reich, then the neo-Romantic attitudes struck by the majority of academic composers; in jazz this tendency was symbolized by Wynton Marsalis (coinciding with an apparent lack of momentum in free jazz, and very little improvised music to speak of). My friend, the musicologist Volker Straebel has called this period “the death of the American avant-garde” – and this was precisely what it felt like. So Europe in general, and Germany in particular, with its large resources for culture (even helping marginal enterprises like Wandelweiser) was more fertile ground.

There were two centers of Wandelweiser activity in Germany. Antoine, Kunsu, Marcus, André, Eva-Maria, percussionist Tobias Liebezeit, pianist John McAlpine, the artist Mauser, and for a while Carlo, his wife, Normisa Pereira da Silva and Radu all lived in and around Düsseldorf/Köln. Thomas Stiegler wasn’t too far away, in Frankfurt. Antoine has had an ongoing series at the Kunstraum in Düsseldorf since 1993. A huge number of Wandelweiser concerts have taken place there (the list itself would be a piece of a kind – just reading the way the titles change over the years is interesting ¬– at least to me). There seemed to be just enough in the budget to bring musicians together, and so over the years many of us have come to feel that this place is a second musical home. (I just need to close my eyes to hear the sound of the rooms with Jürg Frey’s clarinet echoing through them.)

The artist Mauser (about whom more later) had his studio in nearby Cologne and this was another frequent performance location in the first decade. It was a very simple, fairly large and extremely pleasant studio space in the courtyard of an apartment building in a relatively quite section of the city. Here the practice of daylong concerts (Ein Tag), developed by Mauser and Antoine, really found its footing. For a while these were yearly ¬– and incredible – events, where either very long pieces or collections of pieces would be done alongside time based work in other media: visual arts performance and installation, video, dance and so on. Many would come and spend a few hours there, to watch some of the performance, and to relax on the patio under the trellis and have Kaffee und Kuchen. Others would spend nearly the whole time following the performance, even though often very little would be happening. Although I could only occasionally take part in events there, the days at Mauser’s are easily amongst my most memorable artistic experiences.

The other center of activity was Berlin. In the first decade the Verlag (the German word for publishing company) was there, housed by Burkhard at his business. Recordings (such as Stones) were made in Burkhard’s studio or in an old church near his house in the countryside a few hours away (Hohenferchesar). Former members Makiko Nishikaze, Chico Mello and Klaus Lang also lived in Berlin, at least part of the year. I was close by for the better part of a year in 1998/1999 on a fellowship from Künstlerhof Schreyahn. The musicologist and close friend to several in the group, Volker Straebel lives there. At the end of 1996 Carlo moved to Berlin. There, along with artist Christoph Nicolaus, he created one of the “founding” Wandelweiser situations. This project, called 3 jahre – 156 musikalische ereignisse – eine skulptur (3 years – 156 musical events – one sculpture) took place in the choir loft of the Zionskirche (in Mitte, directly across the street from Carlo, Normisa and their young son Matheo’s apartment), every Tuesday for 3 years, always promptly at 7:30 p.m. Each concert featured the premiere of a new 10-minute solo piece (plus the rotation of one of the pieces of Nicolaus' sculpture – which consisted of stone posts of various lengths laid on the old wood floor of the balcony). Although some friends outside the group wrote works (including amongst others, Peter Ablinger and Wolfgang von Schweinitz), the overwhelming majority of the new pieces came from Wandelweiser composers. I’d venture to say that if you see a ten-minute solo piece in the EW catalog from 1997 to 1999 it was written for this project. Cumulatively over the three years, thousands of people came to the concerts, and had their first experience of this music. Peter Ablinger once described to me his pleasure at taking an hour ride in the U-Bahn to hear a ten-minute concert (with a trip to a café or pub afterwards – where often long discussions would ensue).

In any case, even in Germany, we had to exist on a shoestring. All the discs and the performances (after the initial round) only happened because individuals in the group found a small opportunity to do something. A free space close by; the interest of a few creative performers; a little grant money: in sum nothing that would come close to funding an average size music festival, would be enough for several densely packed Wandelweiser events. (A typical example would be a week in Düsseldorf with concerts every evening and two on Saturday and Sunday – with new pieces being rehearsed by various groupings of the ensemble.)

When I look back over all the events that took place over the years (certainly in the hundreds, with probably close to one thousand pieces performed) I am amazed by how much can be done with little or no money (still pretty much the case) and relatively little public attention.

Different aesthetics under one roof

At this point I think I need to mention that Wandelweiser does not embody, as far as I’m concerned, a single aesthetic stance. To be sure, from the outside there appear to be a set of shared characteristics, including an interest in silence, duration and radical extension of Cagean ideas and the work that followed from it. In fact, fourteen years ago, these might have been terms more easily applied to (much of) the music – but even then there were lots of different ideas about where the music was going as well as important differences in taste and philosophical stance.

Here is a list of some of the things I can remember discussing with people in the first years (and this might help to suggest how diverse the set of influences and conditions were):

• There were several different ideas about which works of Cage were most valuable. It wasn’t only 4’33”, but the number pieces, 0’00”, Roaratorio, Music for __, the Variations, Empty Words, Cheap Imitation, the String Quartet (in Four Parts). What seemed to be at stake here was not only the status of silence, but of the relationship between silence and noise (“the noise of the world”), and the function of tone within that continuum. Beuger’s important essay Grundsätzliche Entscheidungen (1997) deals directly with this issue.

• The music of Wolff was critical for many of us. Christian was at the meeting in Boswil in 1991, where Antoine met Jürg Frey and Chico Mello. (Jakob Ullmann, Urs Peter Schneider, Ernstalberecht Stiebler and Dieter Schnebel were also there. Manfred Werder was in the audience for one of the performances.) Wolff has also been a great supporter of our music and many of us have worked closely with him on his (and our) music. Much of his music attempts to tap into the creative power of performance in an explicit way. Christian had been close friends with Cornelius Cardew, had worked with the Scratch Orchestra and had played with AMM – but this feature had been present in his music already quite early on, for instance in his For 1, 2 or 3 People (1964). While I would not call what happens in this piece improvisation, it does involve on the spot decision-making that people who have worked in improvised situations would immediately recognize. At the root, and this I think applies even more to Wolff’s music (where it has been pursued in many different ways) than Cage’s, there is an understanding of a composition as a stopping point, as opposed to an endpoint, in the whole process of creating music. For many of us (all of us?), Wolff proved a deeper source of inspiration for making new work than Feldman. (Which is not to say that Feldman’s work is not beautiful or helpful for some of us–it is.)

• There was, early on, and continues to be an ongoing curiosity about the depth and breadth of the experimental tradition, American or otherwise, with a special interest in some of the radical and obscure works. Antoine is especially gifted at uncovering little known, radical work. I first learned of Tomasz Sikorski, Michael von Biel, Maria Eichhorn, Robert Lax, Alain Badiou and even Douglas Huebler from him (this list could go on much longer). Thanks to Antoine, at one recent Wandelweiser event, Terry Jennings’ Piano Piece (1960) was performed and seemed to be right at home amongst pieces by some of us. At a concert in Neufelden (near Linz) this summer, the Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble played Toshi Ichiyanagi’s Sapporo (1962) and it almost felt as if it had been written for us to play.

• We have had occasional discussions about the various directions jazz and improvised music had taken in the previous 30 years. This was important in the sense that it intersects in so many ways with the notions of indeterminacy. Radu, having worked his way from Jack Teagarden to Paul Rutherford and then beyond, brought a lot of experience and opinion to these discussions. But for myself as well, growing up in Chicago, playing jazz guitar, and hearing so much of the music of the various AACM combinations, this was an especially important issue. At the beginning there was little idea that what we were doing had much in common with what was going on improvised music – this would come later.

• There was a definite awareness of the importance of the German avant-garde: especially Helmut Lachenmann (with whom Kunsu had studied) and Matthias Spahlinger (with whom Thomas Stiegler had studied). From early on, some of the thinking about instruments and the use of sound, and above all, instrumental noise, was influenced in audible ways by these important figures.

As kind of a counterbalance there was an interest in many various small and strange things: art and music made by the various members of Fluxus, odd bits of poetry (Hans Faverey, Robert Creeley, Ferdinand Pessoa), the work of the Gugging artists and poets (especially Oswald Tschirtner) or, especially in my case, American vernacular music of the 1920’s and 1930’s (Harry Smith territory). For me these various oddball streams came together in the one-of-a-kind poetic work of Italian/Austrian poet Oswald Egger (who was introduced to Antoine through the publisher Thomas Howeg, Zurich).

• Over the years there have been many discussions amongst us concerning fundamental issues in making music. Because some of the ideas in the pieces attempt, in their own way, to get to the root of a particular musical situation, sometimes it has been helpful to use thought from outside. As Gilles Deleuze points out, philosophy has been, over the last three millennia, the main source of concept creation. (Science and mathematics in his view create “functions,” ¬and art creates “percepts” – sensuous objects to be perceived.)

Each of us, without being anything like a professional philosopher (we’re more like non-professional philosophy readers), has drawn inspiration from philosophical work. This is very hard to talk about in depth without sounding pretentious, so I’m not going to. However, not mentioning it also seemed wrong – it’s an important part of the Wandelweiser atmosphere.

The conceptual background is present in a lot of the work we have shared (again, especially at first). I think it partially explains why, over certain periods an intense amount of activity was centered in one particular area of musical creation.

For a period in the mid- to late 1990’s there was a lot of work done, by several different composers, on the solo piece. Behind it is, I think, an interest in the number 1. This led to a great number of very diverse pieces: exploring the unit of time structure (first music for marcia hafif, stuck 1998, für sich), being alone (tout à fait solitaire), the sonic features of one instrument (die geschichte des sandkorns, kammerkomplex, mind is moving, die temperatur der bedeutung), an expanse of limitless time (calme étendue, ein(e) ausführende(r)) or the disappearance of perceived time altogether (ins ungebundene, a certain species of eternity) – to mention a few of the many works. One thing that has always been striking about this work to me, is the tangible presence of the performer when not playing. This is something that is never communicated on a recording – the continuity of the sound and silence is borne by the particular person, whose singular presence is more important than anything written on the page.

At some point the duo (or “twoness”) came into something of a focus (early on, mostly in the work of Jürg Frey, but then most recently by Beuger). Looking at the pieces, one sees a world of difference between 1 and 2, in musical terms. It’s hard to avoid the idea that two in music always implies, at the very least, relationship – if not love. [Lovaty, zwischen, dedekind duos, 2 ausführende, and two/too.]

The most important conversation

Many important exchanges happened during the rehearsal process. We all spent a great deal of time getting to know each other’s music by playing it. The Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble is a group of sympathetic performers who nonetheless bring their own styles of playing and thinking. One writes for individuals rather than instruments. When Antoine, Jürg, Radu, Manfred or Marcus play on one of my compositions, I know that their musical character will permeate the work. And I know that their way of playing it will tell me things about my own piece that I could not have known without them. Even the simplest looking piece takes on a curious afterlife, as one sorts through what happened to it in the hands of ones friends.

As Jürg Frey has said: the most important conversations took place not in words, but in the music itself, from one piece to another; with one person going a different direction with very similar material to what the other had used. Seen in this way, it is only by getting inside the individual works that one sees the energy that is at play amongst this group of musicians: where notions of what is similar and what is different are replaced by much more complicated (and interesting) trajectories and tensions.

Radu brilliantly summarized to me the coming together, the commonality and the differences in this way:

I think that these things [i.e., the ideas of what we were doing] are there anyway and that "creative" people are only those who pick it up earlier then the rest, or hear it, or feel it sooner. In the Wandelweiser situation: Who started it? Who is a "follower"? I think we all started to become interested in similar things, even coming from very different angles and directions and therefore we met and got together and felt a mutual understanding right away.

A river delta

That’s the image I can best use to describe what has started to happen as a result of all these conversations over the years, as our work has developed. What might have seemed at first like something of a single narrow stream, has proved to be capable of some variety. Early on, I took pleasure in the fact that I was never quite sure exactly whose piece I was hearing. The overlap and the sense of a truly shared language was exciting and inspiring. Now I take pleasure in being able to recognize, sooner rather than later, whose piece it is – even as it continues to be part of the same stream.

Art

Antoine introduced me to the monochrome painting of Marcia Hafif, an American artist. The idea behind this work was that “one” kind of material (that is, one color and kind of paint) was already multiple. It is, abstractly, one color, but in reality, when the paint is applied to the canvas by hand, there are many miniscule variations in tone and texture. The fact that the description was simple but the reality complex, did not fall on blind eyes or deaf ears. It is interesting how revealing a choice of a favorite artist can be. Jürg Frey loves the still life painting of Giorgio Morandi: and thus it becomes possible to see in his work the subtle, careful, endless shift of the same basic material – each time somehow just new enough to engage you, and to make you more deeply aware of the possibilities for expression with limited means. It won’t surprise anyone that Manfred Werder is fascinated by the conceptual artists. I can remember him reading Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972 like it was a suspense novel. Carlo Inderhees has been influenced by the work of On Kawara. (That makes sense, doesn’t it?) Although I love all this art, recently my own tastes run to James Turrell, Juan Muñoz and some of the installations of Sarah Sze. As these exchanges started, I had the sense that much had happened in the realm of the visual arts that had no parallel with developments in music (Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Agnes Martin, etc.). Perhaps, with all of the interesting work done in experimental music in the last 15 years, this has started to change.

The presence of one artist-musician and two great artist friends of Wandelweiser is a very significant (if in the US, seldom visible) part of the group.

Mauser introduced himself to Antoine at a concert of John Cage’s in Cologne in the early 1990’s. His work, which kept evolving right up until his death in 2006, was a significant part of the Wandelweiser environment. Entering Mauser’s studio for the first time in 1995, I at first thought it was devoid of art. As we sat and talked, the sun shifted and I became aware of very light, somehow luminous squares on the walls. At some point it was clear that they weren’t just effects of the light, but artworks: very fine translucent paper had been fixed to the wall, and the paper caught light to varying degrees, depending upon the angle with which the light hit it. Could anything be simpler? But nothing is as easy as it looks. The art appeared and disappeared magically and seemed to have its own un-emphatic duration. It had taken Mauser decades of very hard work, filled with uncertainty, to arrive at this solution: at once clear in concept and unbelievably sensual (you took it all in with your eyes before your brain started working). It became a model for musical work for some of us.

The artist Christoph Nicolaus has been a close friend to several in the group for nearly as long as it has existed. Christoph does many kinds of work: drawing, photography, video and other media. Much of his work is durational in nature: collecting single drops of water from various sources every day and storing them in glass containers (where they create beautiful “clouds” of evaporation); photographing the same location at the same times every year (in spring, summer, fall and winter); making a daily drawing using the sun and a magnifying glass to burn narrow, straight lines onto paper (dark brown images which nonetheless retain the luminosity of the sun). With his ongoing series Garonne, he is making a very large set of videos of rivers (having already covered much of the world to do this) according to a very simple principle: finding a bridge and filming directly down on both sides, using autofocus, as long as the battery holds out (thus creating a series of ca. 60 minute videos, paired for each river, with water flowing from the top to the bottom of the screen in one, and from the bottom to top of the screen in the other). An installation presents a collection of 2 to 6 rivers shown simultaneously, chosen at random from the pile. The differences are astounding: the colors (all shades of green, brown, black, orange and blue), the flow, the wind and weather, the kinds of debris – one would never imagine how singular each river could appear. One of my favorite Wandelweiser events was the exhibition of these videos in Berlin in 1998, simultaneous with Carlo’s solo cello piece für sich played by Marcus Kaiser. Carlo’s music, Marcus playing and Christoph’s videos were in profound harmony – something “multi-media” art often strives for, but rarely achieves. Nicolaus has installed a beautiful collection of Mauser’s work in his large apartment in Munich and hosts monthly concerts there under the title Klang im Turm. It is one of the central current locations for Wandelweiser events.

The least classifiable member of Wandelweiser is Marcus Kaiser. He is a cellist–painter–architect–composer¬–builder/designer–maker of sound pieces–video artist. Marcus does not juggle these activities – he works on all of them simultaneously as if they were part of some vast rhizomatic assemblage. He paints jungles the way they grow: adding layer after layer of green until it is nearly a monochrome. He records individual layers of sound regularly over the course of many days, until, when simultaneously played back, these recordings reach a point of near saturation (in which, however, sonic features remain distinguishable). He designs desks that serve as workspaces in a communal environment. His work is grand in scope, but not oversized; it is bold, but presented with gentleness and humility. (These last two are deeply personal qualities that anyone who knows Marcus will recognize.)

Mild weather / distant thunder (Wandelweiser events)

Although over the years there has been great variety in the location, structure and personnel involved in the concerts, the character of a Wandelweiser event has some constants: A great deal of music; many discussions; the feeling of good-natured friendship and community.

A strong reaction from someone else (“I really did/did not like that, and here’s why.”) can serve to clarify one’s own thinking. However, in my experience the interactions that emerged from Wandelweiser events, have usually taken place in an atmosphere of general support — where it is a given that one would continue to care about and for the other, regardless of aesthetic differences.

Antoine, who in Düsseldorf has staged more large-scale Wandelweiser events than any of the rest of us, has always been particularly clear in his feelings about this matter (and is himself a good model for the attitude): people should not feel “wounded” by presenting their work or ideas. Critique does happen, but to me it has seemed rather far down the list of things to accomplish during one of these gatherings. In any case, with a group of close friends, one usually knows how they feel about one's work. Over the long run, sympathies and differences will make themselves clear in the decisions made in the work itself (as if individual works were part of larger picture). For instance, starting in the mid-90’s one could follow the use of the bass (or low) drum duo from work to work, composer to composer: Ohne Titel (für Agnes Martin) (Frey, 1994/95), fourth music for marcia hafif no. 3 (Beuger, 1997), time, presence, movement / one sound (Pisaro, 1997) – finally becoming four such instuments in Malfatti’s l'effaçage (2001).

None of this means that striking events are avoided — quite the contrary. But these tend to be shocks produced by the works themselves. If I think about some of these: the first time I experienced Beuger’s nine hour composition, calme étendue; the endless (and occasionally hilarious) stream of Swiss birds and valleys in Jürg Frey’s Lovaty; the way the density of Marcus Kaiser’s incredible jungle paintings permeates his cello playing; the radical juxtaposition of control and freedom in Radu’s Düsseldorf Vielfaches; the 15-second summary of the orchestral experience contained in Manfred Werder’s 2008-1 (just to mention the first five that come to mind), shook me as an artist in a way no harsh words could ever do. I’m still dealing with these events. (In part, my summer two-week festival, the dog star orchestra, is an attempt to find some kind of North American / West Coast parallel to these concert meetings.)

Beyond the creative impetus received from discussions and exchanges of ideas, there was, above all, the pleasure of wonderful performances of the music. In addition to the members of the Wandelweiser Composers Ensemble, we have each been very lucky to work with performers whose dedication to the music and to the people making it is responsible in part for the continuity of the work being made.

Here I tip my hat to a special group of musicians who have kept faith for many years in a spirit of friendship and generosity: pianist John McAlpine, percussionist Tobias Liebezeit, oboist Kathryn Pisaro, speaker Sandra Schimag, accordionist Edwin Alexander Buchholz, the Quatour Bozzini (Clemens Merkel, Nadia Francavilla and Isabelle and Stéphanie Bozzini), violist Julia Eckhardt of Q-02 and Incidental Music, flutist Normisa Pereira da Silva, cellist Stefan Thut, percussionist Greg Stuart, pianist Jongah Yoon, pianist Guy Vandromme and saxophonist Ulrich Krieger. I can’t imagine our music without the creative participation of these people.

A few statements about composition (concepts, structures, sounds)

Let us call a musical concept an idea or thought about music at some remove from the embodiment of the thing itself.

A written composition contains a concept of how a particular music should be made. (In this way, all written music is conceptual.)

In a composition, a small, clear concept might be preferred to a large, overarching one. (For this way of thinking, better a piece that takes up the simple coincidence or non-coincidence of two players than one that seeks to redefine orchestration.)

There is greater diversity to be found in a collection of clear concepts than in a collection of overarching ones.

Clear concepts can sometimes lead to perplexing results: results that test the powers of perception on some level and are conscious of that test. One kind of sonic pleasure is connected to the effort the mind of the listener makes to understand (or properly hear) the sound situation initiated by the composition.

The musical situation will get some degree of its structure from the composition; but the composition cannot account for everything. In the written work, something might be said about the time, or sound, or player or instrument (or all of these), but it is essential to keep in mind that much (most?) of the sonic reality will occur in the situation itself.

The performers of the work are capable of being aware of the concept and the structure given by the composition, and of making active decisions at the same time.

There is no clear and logical way to affix a percentage of creation or responsibility to any one of the musical actors. The music arises as a result of a whole set of circumstances, almost as if, once set in motion, it is doing the acting and the thinking.

The process described here is independent of conventional notions of what might or might not sound good, what is easy or difficult to grasp, or what is easy or difficult to listen to.

At its best the surface of the music (i.e., the sounding result) will be engaging enough to draw a listener into the world of the piece. It is inside this world in that significant artistic events (moments that can alter the way we hear and understand music) transpire.

There is nothing wrong with a beautiful surface, placid and composed, despite its contact with musical upheaval.

Where are we now?

Over the years the network of people associated with Wandelweiser has expanded. The regular concerts taking place in Aarau, Düsseldorf, Munich, Zürich, and Los Angeles, along with semi-regular ones in New York, Berlin, London, Vienna, Chicago and Tokyo have done a lot to make people aware of the music and to draw people to it. Given that new music is being written constantly and then performed, the concerts are still the frontline of activity (and represent much more than could ever be recorded and released).

As is probably already clear, the openness of much of this work to environmental sound, its more than occasional extended duration, and the frequent use of indeterminacy means that in most cases there is no such thing as a “repeat” performance: the second performance of a piece (in a different context or with different performers) can feel like another premiere. So we all, even after all these years, continue to find many reasons to perform each other’s work, and often serve as advocates for it (which seems to be a rare thing – it was at least seldom found in the contemporary music environment in which I grew up).

Now, mainly though personal contact and involvement in performances, there are also a number of musicians of a younger generation who take Wandelweiser as one of their starting points. As influence is such a tenuous thing, it would be hard to know where to begin or to end a list of these musicians. It’s probably best to say that, for a group of younger musicians, the music of Wandelweiser is a part of the experimental music atmosphere in which they learned to breathe.

The recent compact disc recordings are, as in the past, not an extension of, but a complement to the concerts. As mentioned above, many of the more interesting EW discs represent things that could never have been performed as such. To choose recent examples, both Antoine Beuger’s too, with recordings of separate duos made in Düsseldorf (Jürg Frey and Irene Kurka), and Tokyo (Rhodri Davies and Ko Ishikawa) combined to make a new piece out of two other pieces — and the duo field recording performance disc by Manfred Werder and Stefan Thut do not represent possibilities available in a concert space (Im Sefinental). My two most recent discs on the label are also examples: both realizations of an unrhymed chord were specifically designed as recordings, and hearing metal 1 is a work for recorded percussion to begin with.

It is here perhaps that the music of the Wandelweiser group shares something with some interesting recordings on labels such as Erstwhile, Improvised Music From Japan, Slub Music, Hibari, Another Timbre, Manual, Cathnor, Confront, Potlatch and others that seem ostensibly more concerned with improvised music. Recent releases on these labels also often confound notions of live and recorded means, and blur the line between what has been spontaneously invented (or improvised) and what is composed (or assembled) in the studio. Perhaps this sense of shared territory is one of the reasons that EW releases have found a successful outlet in the US in Erstwhile distribution (erstdist).

I’ve recently started thinking about how much overlap there is between these apparently different enterprises. It is not uncommon for improvisers these days to limit or fix aspects of their performance before playing. One might set a total duration beforehand (as Radu likes to do), or bring only a certain limited set of materials or an (apparently) limited instrument (such as Sachiko M’s sine wave sampler). Or perhaps an improvisational work might find itself in a context where composed works have also been played (a practice which AMM has long engaged in). Recently in concerts and on recordings, works by Sugimoto or Cage might be understood as belonging to “repertoire” of an ensemble that most often improvises. While I think it’s fair to say that something is being shared by these various musical streams, I would prefer at the moment not to name what that is (in part because I have no idea what to call it). At the moment I feel that this unnamed area has a tremendous potential going forward.

Non-national music

Despite its base in Germany, Wandelweiser is not a national style or trend. It was remarkable that people from Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, Brazil, Korea, Japan and the US felt they had much more in common musically (and often personally) than they did with their own countrymen. The American experimental tradition was gone (or at least, not a part of our generation) and this was being replaced by something else. Whatever it might be called, it was certainly not the province of one national way of thinking about music or making music. Outside of the countries where the members of Wandelweiser live, there have been a couple of strong developments in the last several years.

For nearly ten years now a set of shared musical activity has existed between many members of Wandelweiser and experimental musicians in the UK. My wife Kathy and I had the opportunity to get to know something of the scene in London in 1996. As she was there doing her dissertation research on the Scratch Orchestra, we had the chance to meet and talk to John Tilbury, Howard Skempton, Michael Parsons and many others (and we heard AMM live for the first time in Chicago not long thereafter). During our stay in London, I learned of the music of Laurence Crane, who I managed to meet on the next trip over. Shortly thereafter, Manfred Werder came into contact with two composers with whom members of Wandelweiser have since often worked: Tim Parkinson and James Saunders. (To this list of UK collaborators, I would also add composers Markus Trunk and John Lely, though this list is growing rapidly.) Members of Wandelweiser have performed at INSTAL (Glasgow) in both 2008 and 2009, and this has led to more contact with the vibrant experimental improvisation community in the UK and elsewhere.

Radu Malfatti had of course lived once in England, but is, as usual, a special case. Since his musical shift, many of his friends from that earlier era were no longer on speaking terms with him. However a whole new set of associations with a younger generation developed – mostly improvisers, in London and Berlin, who looked to him as a trailblazer in a new style of making music. (There are simply too many names here to mention!)

The Tokyo Connection

To close this section, I’d like to say just a little about the relationship that has developed in recent years between Wandelweiser and some musicians from Japan.

Some of these, in retrospect, had something like an aura of inevitability. Certainly, to choose one example, Toshiya Tsunoda’s somewhat “hands-off” approach to field recording (already present in the very beautiful recordings of 1997) — something I think of as steady state recordings of silence — are not so far away from thinking we in Wandweiser might have recognized (had any of us known of it then).

When Taku Sugimoto first contacted Radu Malfatti in July of 2000 it might have come more or less out of the blue, but if one looks for a moment at the music coming out of Tokyo from at least the mid-90’s onward there is a sense that there too something radical, having to do with the fundamental nature of sound and silence, was at work. The world of Opposite is not so far from that of Beinhaltung, that of The World Turned Upside Down not so far from the one of Dach. In any event, as their work together (such as Futatsu) amply demonstrates, there was a quick understanding between these two great musicians.

When Taku Unami began distributing Wandelweiser discs through Hibari in 2004, the music became much better known (and apparently, appreciated) amongst experimental musicians in Japan. Both Radu and Manfred (starting in 2004) have worked there several times, along with, most recently, Antoine. In a short time some beautiful musical projects between these musicians have developed — including most recently some wonderful recordings: Manfred Weder’s 20061 on Toshiya Tsunoda’s Skiti label, A Young Person’s Guide to Antoine Beuger (produced by Sugimoto for his Slub Music label), and kushikushism, a duo project by Radu Malfatti and Taku Unami (also on Slub Music).

Antoine told me a story that may or may not be symbolic of the way in which Wandelweiser is understood in Japan, especially amongst younger artists. When Manfred, Radu and he visited Tokyo in November of 2007, Antoine received many discs, often without any labeling, from young musicians. One particular musician gave him a few, explaining in each case, which ones were “more Wandelweiser” and “less Wandelweiser.” On one of the “more Wandelweiser” discs, there appeared to be no sound at all.

As I’ve become acquainted recently with much more of the music made in Japan by experimental musicians from the “onkyo” group and its offshoots, I’ve returned to the thought behind Radu’s comment above many times. Sometimes the concerns, if not the music, seem so similar as if to be almost identical: as if a group of ideas was circulating of which no one was directly conscious – as if they had no real point of origin and were able to place themselves anywhere they could find a “host.”

In the music of Sachiko M and Toshimaru Nakamura there is (or can be) such an intense stillness. Where does it come from? How available is it to others? In the work of these musicians with Keith Rowe I find an inspiring parallel to some of the music I got to know from my Wandelweiser friends. To be sure, there are many differences: the prevalence of electric over acoustic instruments, the fact that the music is improvised, and the various lineages that the musicians have within their traditions, to name the most obvious. Nonetheless, the stillness, the silence and the serene beauty; the sense of taking your time and trusting your audience to take the time with you; the evolution of the work and the sense that an active exploration is going on; to me these suggest a deeper kinship. Perhaps the most representative (and beautiful) example of this is the work of these three (with Otomo Yoshihide) at the incredible concert in Berlin on May 14, 2004, documented on ErstLive 005 – particularly on the final disc.

When I think about our group now, and especially the large set of friends of this music, I wonder if some of the most fragile seeds planted in the mid-century, by Cage and the experimental tradition, by the certain subgroups within free jazz and improvised music communities, and by the quiet experimental tendencies in Japan (Toshi Ichiyanagi, Yuji Takahashi) have, after spending many years underground started to spring to life: invisibly – everywhere.

Summer/Fall, 2009

I would like to thank Jon Abbey, Manfred Werder, Radu Malfatti and Antoine Beuger for their help with this article.

photos/credits:

1. the wandelweiser composers ensemble (joachim eckl)
2. antoine beuger (photographer unknown)
3. john cage (ben martin)
4. jimi hendrix (unknown)
5. desert plants (unknown)
6. stones (CD cover/ida maibach)
7. zionskirche (unknown)
8. christian wolff (unknown)
9. gilles deleuze (still from French TV)
10. radu malfatti/mattin (yuko zama)
11. lichtfresken (mauser’s studio) (unknown)
12. sonnenzeichnungen (nicolaus) (unknown)
13. marcus kaiser (unknown)
14. kun

Originally from erstwords, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 25, 2009 at 12:49 PM | Comments (0)

Classical Connect Launches the New Interviews Channel - PR.com (press release)

Classical Connect Launches the New Interviews Channel
PR.com (press release)
Classical Connect inaugurates the launch of the Interviews channel by publishing Bruce Duffie's interview with Elliott Carter. Chicago, IL, September 25, ...

Star Wars theme named Best Science Fiction Film Soundtrack of All Time - Little About (blog)

Star Wars theme named Best Science Fiction Film Soundtrack of All Time
Little About (blog)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Richard and Johann Strauss, Gyrgy Ligeti)7. The Day the Earth Stood Still (Bernard Herrmann)8. Close Encounters of the Third Kind ...

and more »

uncp's Moore Hall Recital Series hosts eighth blackbird - Laurinburg Exchange

uncp's Moore Hall Recital Series hosts eighth blackbird
Laurinburg Exchange
Since its founding in 1996, eighth blackbird has actively commissioned and recorded new works from such eminent composers as Steve Reich, George Perle, ...

OJAI FESTIVALS, LTD. ANNOUNCES LEADERSHIP CHANGES - Ventura County Star

OJAI FESTIVALS, LTD. ANNOUNCES LEADERSHIP CHANGES
Ventura County Star
Mr. Benjamin is the 64th music director and will celebrate the works of Ojai alumni including Pierre Boulez, Oliver Knussen, Olivier Messiaen, ...

A new season begins

Times Square prepares for Luc Bondy's diet Tosca.

Originally from Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 25, 2009 at 05:12 AM | Comments (0)

Appearing in Boston

The celebrated Aardvark Jazz Orchestra will open its 37^th season at Scullers with a show entitled “All Blues,” painting the many shades of blues in jazz from Miles and Duke to Mingus and Basie to boogie and funk originals by Aardvark founder/music director Mark Harvey.

Wednesday
September 30, 2009
Show: $18
Add Dinner for: $38
Show: 8pm

Early music ensemble Cascata in Cambridge:

October 27, 2009
7:30PM
“Love's Virtuosity”
Vocal music on the subject of love juxtaposed with instrumental virtuosity, both from the rich repertoire of early seventeenth century Italy. Music by Monteverdi, Marini, Strozzi and more...

University Lutheran Church
66 Winthrop Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Tickets
$20/10 st, sr
A portion of the proceeds will benefit the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter

Originally from henningmusick, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 25, 2009 at 05:11 AM | Comments (0)

A/Rhythmia: Alarm Will Sound/Pierson - guardian.co.uk

A/Rhythmia: Alarm Will Sound/Pierson
guardian.co.uk
Alarm Will Sound is a 20-piece ensemble that has carved out a distinctive niche for itself in the US new-music scene since it was founded at the Eastman ...

Singers Plop Out of Buttocks, Land in Grim Farce: London Stage - Bloomberg

Singers Plop Out of Buttocks, Land in Grim Farce: London Stage
Bloomberg
This is the world of Gyorgy Ligeti's 1978 gallows comedy “Le Grand Macabre,” currently at the English National Opera. The production is by La Fura dels Baus ...

The Seattle Phonographers Union « Amaranth Arthouse Music [del.icio.us]

"The group eventually came out. After a brief introduction the performance began. Each performer played a part in the building and decreasing soundscape through samples ranging from everyday noises to political speeches. The genius in this form of concert is the ability to shuttle the listener to wherever their imagination, following the lead of the music, takes them... I noticed midway through the gig that the outer seating wasn’t the best spot, since a speaker sitting directly behind you takes away from the stereo experience. Therefore, I took the opportunity of changing to a middle aisle seat from a couple who had left the show. It made quite a bit of difference. I checked my watch after what seemed like 20 minutes and almost 90 minutes had elapsed. The show soon came to a close. Its hard to explain the show in detail, four months later, but the collaboration and improvisation of the group really worked. I highly recommend checking these folks out."

Originally posted by pbailey68 from paulbailey.us (beta), ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 25, 2009 at 02:10 AM | Comments (0)

Their cut-and-paste world | Brand X | Los Angeles Times [del.icio.us]

"if you surfed L.A.'s public access airwaves in the 1990s, you might have come across a paunchy, balding man who loved dancing to John Phillips Sousa marching songs while wearing nothing but a Lone Ranger mask and an American flag Speedo. But that's not the weird part. The titular star of "Dancing With Frank Pachowski" surrounded himself with a semicircle of elderly people who sat and watched stone-faced as he performed. "It's absolutely brilliant," declares Nick Prueher. Five years ago, Prueher and his pal Joe Pickett -- both former writers at the Onion -- created the Found Footage Festival, a traveling show of video oddities that they've culled from thrift stores, garage sales and garbage bins. The fourth incarnation of their show, which has its West Coast premiere at M Bar tonight and Friday, features nearly 60 videos..."

Originally posted by pbailey68 from paulbailey.us (beta), ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 25, 2009 at 02:10 AM | Comments (0)

September 24, 2009

Star Wars Music: Best. Music. Ever. - StarWars.com

StarWars.com

Star Wars Music: Best. Music. Ever.
StarWars.com
The remainder of the top ten consisted of up-and-comers Richard and Johann Strauss along with György Ligeti for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Bernard Herrman for ...

and more »

When electronics opened up a new world - บางกอกโพส

บางกอกโพส

When electronics opened up a new world
บางกอกโพส
I think that, like some of that early Ligeti an Penderecki, they are exquisitely crafted but interesting rather than moving, not the kind of music that ...

09/23/09 playlist

Gregory Spears ~ Brave Men Sail
Sean Shepherd ~ Lumens

Stephen Gorbos ~ Surely Some Revelation?
Scott Smallwood ~ Transplants

David T. Little ~ Spalding Gray
David Smooke ~ Hurricane Charm

David Lang ~ How To Pray
Alarm Will Sound ~ Fingerbib
NOW Ensemble ~ Cloudbank
Build ~ No Response

Judd Greenstein ~ Elastic Iridescence
Dominic Frasca ~ Deviations
itsnotyouitsme ~ Great Day

Originally from Music For Internets, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 24, 2009 at 08:37 PM | Comments (0)

Tonight: Grand Archives, Kid Koala, Gregory Paul - Seattle Weekly

Tonight: Grand Archives, Kid Koala, Gregory Paul
Seattle Weekly
Eventually, he arrived at a seamless, utterly unique blend that owes as much to modernist composers like Steve Reich and Brian Eno (and even My Bloody ...

Composing the sound of the sea - guardian.co.uk

guardian.co.uk

Composing the sound of the sea
guardian.co.uk
Listening to the piece in this land and seascape up here, I now think it's up there with music's most successful evocations of the sea. ...

Things to Do, Sept. 25-Oct. 2 - Cornell Chronicle

Things to Do, Sept. 25-Oct. 2
Cornell Chronicle
Ensemble X will perform music by Elliott Carter, Andrew Waggoner, DMA '86, and Sebastian Currier; and compositions by conductors Francesco Antonioni and ...

Getting the Priorities Straight

By Dan Visconti
In my own composing efforts as well I've found it useful to consider my musical priorities which, if lacking, would cause the whole effort to cease being worthwhile.

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 24, 2009 at 08:11 PM | Comments (0)

The Occasional Cereal List No. 4

roker-mozart

NAME CHANGES THAT MIGHT BE SUGGESTED FOR THE MOSTLY MOZART FESTIVAL WERE AL ROKER TO SUDDENLY BECOME EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

Partly Mozart Festival

70% Chance of Mozart Festival

Mostly Mozart with a Slight Possibility of Haydn Festival

Scattered Opus Numbers Highly Probable

Handel but Feels Like Mozart Festival

Severe Mozart Alert

“Gastric Bypass Surgery Worked for a Little While But I Like Hot Dogs Too Much,” (said Mozart) Festival

Originally posted by Franz List from The Cereal List, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 24, 2009 at 05:11 PM | Comments (0)

60x60 Dance @ Galapagos, NYC (4/8/09) [Schappert/Jansen]

Phase Shift
Music: John Schappert
Dance: Krista Jansen

John Schappert's formal education and background is in music, the computer sciences and systems engineering. He has been a musician, chef, computer operator, database and systems administrator, systems engineer, house-husband, caretaker, and home-school teacher. His life-long passions for electronic and Electro-acoustic music, Christian spirituality, art, and systems engineering have now come together to create a fusion of unique sound design and construction as inspiration, technology, and opportunity present themselves. He owes whatever talents and opportunities he may have to God and to his wife, and offers to them his eternal gratitude for their endless patience and inspiration.

Krista Jansen began her training with Ellen Robbins at the age of five and has been dancing and choreographing ever since. She is currently an assistant in two of Ms. Robbinsâ classes. She has performed with Doug Elkins, Levi Gonzalez, Brynn Rosen, Rachel Wynne, Christine Shallenberg, the Fly-by-Night Trapeze Dance Company and others as well as performing her own choreography at Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, The Fourth Street Arts Festival and Dance Theatre Workshop.
Dancer: Krista Jansen

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

DSO, Slatkin to record Rachmaninoff 'live' - The Detroit News

DSO, Slatkin to record Rachmaninoff 'live'
The Detroit News
Back in the 1980s, when he was music director of the St. Louis Symphony, Slatkin recorded the entire body of Rachmaninoff's orchestral works. ...

and more »

Trio of Kates truly delights - Toronto Star

Trio of Kates truly delights
Toronto Star
... around and play tricks on each other with a mix of boisterous glee and tender affection, driven forward by the incessant pulse of Steve Reich's music. ...

and more »

Coming Up Next: 192 - 25 September 2009 - Bali part 3

We conclude our three part series on music by composers openly influenced by the music of Bali and Java with a program devoted to Colin McPhee and Evan Ziporyn.

This time, three piano transcriptions for two pianos of Balinese ceremonial music that McPhee completed in 1936 while in Bali, in a recent recording, along with McPhee’s Suite in Six Movements from 1946.

And, a section from Evan Ziporyn’s SHADOW BANG, for Balinese puppeteer and western instruments playing in Balinese style.

All this in preparation for the American premiere of Evan’s A HOUSE IN BALI at UC Berkeley this weekend.

Originally posted by rchrd from Music From Other Minds, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 24, 2009 at 08:12 AM | Comments (0)

DSO program features new music, guitarist Sharon Isbin's debut - Detroit Free Press

DSO program features new music, guitarist Sharon Isbin's debut
Detroit Free Press
... drummer and percussionist Lukas Ligeti might be considered a preview. Hypercolor revels in music that falls in the cracks, slipping between jazz-rock ...

KC Symphony launches its season this weekend with a program to ... - Kansas City Star

KC Symphony launches its season this weekend with a program to ...
Kansas City Star
The Kansas City Symphony, conducted by Michael Stern, opens its season this weekend at the Lyric Theatre with some swoony music sure to make the heart beat ...

The word on múm - Jerusalem Post

The word on múm
Jerusalem Post
"I had two older brothers growing up who were very much into music, more non-commercial stuff like Frank Zappa, so I got quite an education at a young age," ...

Classical Music: Discordant - Richmond Times Dispatch

Classical Music: Discordant
Richmond Times Dispatch
The greatest concert in our limited experience was a Cleveland performance of Mahler's Third conducted by Pierre Boulez, with Michelle DeYoung as the mezzo ...

First returns

This is freak’n awesome…
— The entire (and verbatim) response
of the first person (other than the composer)
to listen to the cd of the 17 Sept recital.

(And I have the e-mail to prove it.)

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

Classical Connect Launches The New Interviews Channel - Newswire Today (press release)

Classical Connect Launches The New Interviews Channel
Newswire Today (press release)
... of the Interviews channel by publishing Bruce Duffie's interview with Elliott Carter. Classical Connect, the free classical music performance web site, ...

Early Day Miners digging for a good time - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Early Day Miners digging for a good time
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
... band was called Ativin -- just your average two-guitars-and-drums trio playing experimental instrumental music in the vein of composer Steve Reich. ...

September 23, 2009

First steps in Max/MSP

creencasts and videos online

Nothing earth-shaking here, just the very first Max/MSP patch I built with my Performance Technology students today.

Originally from Space Age Puppets and Masks, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 23, 2009 at 11:13 PM | Comments (0)

Star Wars has best sci-fi movie music ever - NewsLite

Star Wars has best sci-fi movie music ever
NewsLite
A survey of sci-fi fans found the multi award-winning music was - by a galaxy far far away - their favourite. It was followed in the chart by the score to ...

and more »

STAR WARS SOUNDTRACK TOPS MOVIE MUSIC POLL - Contactmusic.com

STAR WARS SOUNDTRACK TOPS MOVIE MUSIC POLL
Contactmusic.com
... for the opening of the hit films, originally written for the first feature by John Williams in 1977, has been voted sci-fi fans' favourite movie music. ...

and more »

UTC Music Department Has Faculty Concert Sunday - The Chattanoogan

UTC Music Department Has Faculty Concert Sunday
The Chattanoogan
Contemporary music for this combination of instruments is represented by the Lutoslawski Dance Preludes. Monte Coulter, UTC percussion instructor will join ...

'Star Wars' tops movie music poll - Digital Spy

'Star Wars' tops movie music poll
Digital Spy
Others on the list included Queen for their theme song to Flash Gordon, 2001: A Space Odyssey's Richard and Johann Strauss and György Ligeti, ...

and more »

Decibel and Debacle: Straddling the Chasm - TheStranger.com

TheStranger.com

Decibel and Debacle: Straddling the Chasm
TheStranger.com
Others makers of electronic music fight to sculpt every second of sound as Pierre Henry, Stockhausen, and other pioneers did in the 1950s, ...

'La Bohème' combines city's musical talent - Colorado Springs Gazette

'La Bohème' combines city's musical talent
Colorado Springs Gazette
Foremost, of course, is the music. This is not cerebral gristle for the conservatory set. Even tin ears can delight in the plumes of melody that erupt from ...

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 Sep 23, 2009 at 11:12 PM | Comments (0)

Nathaniel Stookey and Daniel Handler Raise the Dead

By Daniel J. Kushner
The Composer is Dead, composer Nathaniel Stookey's collaboration with celebrated children's book author Lemony Snicket (the pen name of Daniel Handler), is giving Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf and Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra some serious competition.

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 23, 2009 at 11:12 PM | Comments (0)

This Does Not Compute

By Colin Holter
The funny thing about studying linguistics after years of focusing almost entirely on music is that it was very quickly clear to me that one hand isn't always talking to the other in that field.

Originally from NewMusicBox, ReBlogged by newmusicrebloggers on Sep 23, 2009 at 11:12 PM | Comments (0)