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Latest Posts
Sunday, June 25, 2006 at 5:30 PM
Downtown Music Productions Presents June 18 Music and Satire Concert
Composer Darcy Reynolds Cloven Dreams to Be Performed by Sontonga Quartet in Grass Valley, California on June 17
Weaving Japanese Sounds, Music of Modern Japan on June 18 at Klavierhaus, New York, Featuring Japanese and Japan Inspired Works
Ensemble Pamplemousse @ the stone, july 6th 8pm
RAMBOX - Rama Gottfried's free audio mail project
Numinous+ presents Vipassana on Thursday June 22nd at 8:00 PM-Puffin Room Gallery, SoHo
The Moon of the Floating World by American Composer Charles Griffin to be Performed in Riga, Latvia on June 16 by Putni Female Vocal Ensemble
Soprano Melanie Mitrano to Perform as Part of Evening of Songs and Rags on June 14 at New York Mercantile Library
Argentinean Pianist Mirian Conti in Concert at Merkin Concert Hall on June 15 – Featured Works Include Three World Premieres and Argentine Piano Music
Record companies, artists and publicists are invited to submit CDs to be considered for our Editor's Pick's of the month. Send to: Jerry Bowles, Editor, Sequenza 21, 340 W. 57th Street, 12B, New York, NY 10019
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Record companies, artists and publicists are invited to submit CDs to be considered for our Editor's Pick's of the month. Send to: Jerry Bowles, Editor, Sequenza 21, 340 W. 57th Street, 12B, New York, NY 10019
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Friday, April 22, 2005
NEC Percussion Ensemble Presents Velcro Tap-Dancing, World Premieres, May 1 in Jordan Hall
Just what is Velcro tap-dancing? Everyone burning to know should check out the New England Conservatory Percussion Ensemble’s May 1 FREE concert at 7 p.m. in NEC’s Jordan Hall. On an evening of world and local premieres, the musicians will present the first Boston performance of Paul Elwood’s avant-garde music theatre work, Edgard Varese in the Gobi Desert for percussion ensemble and Velcro tap-dancer.
Under the direction of Frank Epstein, a Boston Symphony percussionist and NEC chair of brass and percussion, the ensemble will also unveil two newly commissioned scores: Joan Huang’s The Pilgrimage to the West and David T. Little’s shapeshifter. Concluding the program is Mike Udow’s Afrikan Welcome Piece, which features a chorus of 200 Boston school children. That work will subsequently be recorded.
Epstein says he has wanted to program Paul Elwood’s Edgard Varese in the Gobi Desert for 20 years. The three-movement score takes its name from a chapter in Henry Miller’s book, The Air Conditioned Nightmare. Unusual sonic effects include bowed piano, bowed Styrofoam, and birdcalls. Perhaps the weirdest percussion instrument in the piece is the Velcro tap dancer or “negative tap dancer” who affixes Velcro strips to the soles of shoes and performs dance steps on a board covered with carpet. Sound is produced by raising the feet rather than striking the floor. The technique was pioneered by Kelly Werts, a partner with Elwood in the bluegrass trio known as The Sons of Rayon. On the NEC concert, percussionist Lacie Guyon will be the Velcro tap dancer.
Born in 1978, David T. Little, the composer of shapeshifter, has already received many honors and commissions. A two-time BMI Student Composer Award Winner, his composition Screamer: A Three-Ring Blur for Orchestra was selected by conductor David Zinman as winner of the 2004 Jacob Druckman Award for Orchestral Composition at the Aspen Music Festival. Little was also a 2003 Charles Ives Scholarship winner from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a 2001 ASCAP Leonard Bernstein Fellow in Composition at Tanglewood. A trained percussionist, Little’s performances as a rock drummer have been praised as “on fire, both crazed and surgically accurate.” His Sunday Morning Trepanation drew raves from Alex Ross of The New Yorker: “I was completely gripped” by this work “which equates contemporary religion with the drilling of holes in the skull. This ultra-dissonant composer, who doubles as a heavy-metal drummer, is coming to Princeton in the fall, and every bad-ass new-music ensemble in the city will want to play him.”
Little says shapeshifter is about “changing the perception of an object without actually changing the object itself. That is, taking a melodic or rhythmic idea and, without putting it through any sort of traditional variation…varying the material…The result is a compositional world of concurrently stark homophony and drastic heterophony, full of pulses, grooves and riffs that feel ‘right’ in a way that is, in fact, very wrong.”
Born in Shanghai, China, Joan Huang received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Shanghai Conservatory only after being “reeducated” through heavy manual labor on a farm during the Cultural Revolution. She came to the United States in 1986 and studied at UCLA where she received her Ph.D. Her music, like that of Tan Dun, offers a fusion of Chinese traditional idioms and western techniques. Huang’s works have been played by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, Boston Musica Viva, Boston Artists Ensemble, Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, the Ying Quartet and Aspen Contemporary Ensemble. Her new piece, The Pilgrimage to the West, was commissioned by Epstein and the NEC Percussion Ensemble.
Finally, the ensemble will reprise Mike Udow’s Afrikan Welcome Piece, which it performed at the March convention of the Organization of American Kodaly Educators in Springfield. The performance will include a select chorus of Boston school children numbering 200 singers.
The concert is free and open to the public.
For more information, call the NEC Concert Line at (617) 585-1122 or visit NEC on the web at www.newenglandconservatory.edu/concerts
ABOUT NEW ENGLAND CONSERVATORY
Recognized nationally and internationally as a leader among music schools, New England Conservatory offers rigorous training in an intimate, nurturing community to 750 undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral music students from around the world. Its faculty of 225 boasts internationally esteemed artist-teachers and scholars. Its alumni go on to fill orchestra chairs, concert hall stages, jazz clubs, recording studios, and arts management positions worldwide. Nearly half of the Boston Symphony Orchestra is composed of NEC trained musicians and faculty.
The oldest independent school of music in the United States, NEC was founded in 1867 by Eben Tourjee. Its curriculum is remarkable for its wide range of styles and traditions. On the college level, it features training in classical, jazz, Contemporary Improvisation, world and early music. Through its Preparatory School, School of Continuing Education, and Community Collaboration Programs, it provides training and performance opportunities for children, pre-college students, adults, and seniors. Through its outreach projects, it allows young musicians to engage with non-traditional audiences in schools, hospitals, and nursing homes—thereby bringing pleasure to new listeners and enlarging the universe for classical music and jazz.
NEC presents more than 600 free concerts each year, many of them in Jordan Hall, its world- renowned, 100-year old, beautifully restored concert hall. These programs range from solo recitals to chamber music to orchestral programs to jazz and opera scenes. Every year, NEC’s opera studies department also presents two fully staged opera productions at the Cutler Majestic Theatre in Boston.
NEC is co-founder and educational partner of “From the Top,” a weekly radio program that celebrates outstanding young classical musicians from the entire country. With its broadcast home in Jordan Hall, the show is now carried by more than two hundred stations throughout the United States.
posted by Ellen C. Pfeifer
10:57 AM
Steve Drury: Zorn, Ligeti, Lachenmann, May 4 at NEC's Jordan Hall
Boston--Pianist Stephen Drury will mix it up in a FREE faculty recital that juxtaposes music from many periods and styles, Wednesday May 4 at 8 p.m. in New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall. A musician of wide-ranging tastes, Drury will play Ravel's Valses nobles et sentimentales, Beethoven's Eroica Variations, and works by Ligeti, Lachenmann, Feldman, and Cage. As a kind of summary, he will conclude with John Zorn’s Carny, a phantasmagoria of musical quotations and references that was composed for Drury and two other pianists, Yvar Mikhashoff, and Anthony deMare under a grant from Meet the Composer.
A long time champion of Zorn, Drury has written about Carny in Perspectives of New Music: …”Carny cannibalizes mouthfuls of previously existing piano music. In turn, the introduction to Carny cannibalizes the rest of the piece… Each fragment -- quote, genre reference, or abstract -- affects the way we hear what follows and what came before. Previously unimaginable connections appear between Mozart and bebop. Stockhausen negates Fats Waller… Brief chunks of music by composers from Mozart to Boulez appear note for note or under various degrees of transformation. (Chopin and Schoenberg, for example are quoted in reverse; Stockhausen is overlaid with Bartok; and a left hand passage from Elliott Carter’s Night Fantasies is paired with an entirely new right hand part.)…Phrases referring more generally to genres appear (a little New Orleans funk, some boogie-woogie, a bit of cocktail piano). And there are entirely original passages which have no outside source.
“Carny accelerates and hesitates in broad yet unpredictable outlines… now coming to points of near stasis, now revving up gradually, now scurrying off; now erupting in a frenzy. And what is the listener to make of the nuclear holocaust that occurs just before the coda…? What light does it cast on the preceding furious pile-up of Liszt, Carter, Nancarrow, cartoon music, Ives, and Art Tatum? Are we now paying dearly for the previous fun and games? Or is this apocalyptic climax just another cartoon mushroom cloud?…
“Ultimately, is there or can there be a justification within the artwork itself for all these references and quotations? I dunno. Art is always ahead of theory.”
The concert is free and open to the public.
For more information, call the NEC Concert Line at (617) 585-1122 or visit NEC on the web at www.newenglandconservatory.edu/concerts
ABOUT NEW ENGLAND CONSERVATORY
Recognized nationally and internationally as a leader among music schools, New England Conservatory offers rigorous training in an intimate, nurturing community to 750 undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral music students from around the world. Its faculty of 225 boasts internationally esteemed artist-teachers and scholars. Its alumni go on to fill orchestra chairs, concert hall stages, jazz clubs, recording studios, and arts management positions worldwide. Nearly half of the Boston Symphony Orchestra is composed of NEC trained musicians and faculty.
The oldest independent school of music in the United States, NEC was founded in 1867 by Eben Tourjee. Its curriculum is remarkable for its wide range of styles and traditions. On the college level, it features training in classical, jazz, Contemporary Improvisation, world and early music. Through its Preparatory School, School of Continuing Education, and Community Collaboration Programs, it provides training and performance opportunities for children, pre-college students, adults, and seniors. Through its outreach projects, it allows young musicians to engage with non-traditional audiences in schools, hospitals, and nursing homes—thereby bringing pleasure to new listeners and enlarging the universe for classical music and jazz.
NEC presents more than 600 free concerts each year, many of them in Jordan Hall, its world- renowned, 100-year old, beautifully restored concert hall. These programs range from solo recitals to chamber music to orchestral programs to jazz and opera scenes. Every year, NEC’s opera studies department also presents two fully staged opera productions at the Cutler Majestic Theatre in Boston.
NEC is co-founder and educational partner of “From the Top,” a weekly radio program that celebrates outstanding young classical musicians from the entire country. With its broadcast home in Jordan Hall, the show is now carried by more than two hundred stations throughout the United States.
posted by Ellen C. Pfeifer
10:44 AM
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Non-Zero, Tenri Cultural Institute, April 23
Brian Sacawa, saxophones & Timothy Feeney, percussion
Saturday, April 23
8pm - Tenri Cultural Institute
43A West 13th Street (between 5th & 6th Ave.)
New York, NY
PROGRAM:
Hillary Zipper, the time of insects
Keeril Makan, Voice Within Voice (world premiere)
John Cage, Three
David T. Little, Red Scare Sketchbook (world premiere)
Tickets are $10 at the door. For more information contact Tenri Cultural Institute at (212) 645-2800, nonzeroduo@yahoo.com, or visit http://www.tenri.org
Saxophonist Brian Sacawa and percussionist Timothy Feeney formed the duo Non-Zero to explore and expand the sonic possibilities of their instruments, and to perform music that treads the boundary between composition and improvisation. They develop their distinctive repertoire by commissioning and collaborating closely with both established and emerging young composers. Non-Zero works freely in acoustic and electronic sound worlds by using amplification, an array of pitched and unpitched traditional and homemade percussion, and pre-recorded or interactive electronic media. The result is music overflowing with intensity, from icy stillness to explosive energy.
posted by Jerry Bowles
9:24 PM
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