Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Think Different

counter)induction is playing its final concert of the season tonight at 8pm, at the Tenri Cultural Institute. Blair McMillan assures us that it's going to be a great one - pieces chosen from the group's ongoing call for scores, as well as works by Caroline Mallonee and Suzanne Sorkin, co-winners of its first annual Composition Competition. The program is called Message in a Bottle.

And, speaking of competitions, the Quey Percusssion Duo is (or "are," if you live in England) sponsoring its or their second annual Percussion Competition Contest. Full details..

Who do we like in the World Cup? What's the "song" this year? I'm going with Germany, the home country which always has an advantage.

posted by Jerry Bowles 6/10/2006

Last Night in Ojai: Great Golijov

The 60th Ojai Music Festival had a major success last night with the performance of Osvaldo Golijov's Ainadamar. The opera we saw in 2003 at Disney Hall was a praise-worthy effort by an interesting contemporary composer, but it wasn't a compelling work. The revised version performed last night, introduced last summer in Santa Fe, was a great opera. The revised version simplifies the plot and expands the role of Lorca. Golijov created a compelling duet between Lorca and Margarita Xirgu, a duet in which the two sing of escaping to Havana which is ended by Lorca deciding that he won't leave Spain. He also made a powerful emotional experience of the scene in which Lorca and his two cellmates, a bullfighter and a teacher, prepare for their execution. With the added focus and strength in the story, the unique musical voice of Golijov becomes stronger.

Dawn Upshaw was splendid as Margarita Xirgu in the opera's major role. But Kelly O'Connor was her equal as Federico Garcia Lorca, inhabiting the character while using her rare vocal instrument, as a mezzo with the low voice of a contralto, very effectively. While I can imagine other singers eventually singing the role of Margarita, finding another singer for Lorca may well be more difficult. Jessica Rivera rose to her colleagues' levels in the smaller role, new to this version, of Margarita's student. Robert Spano led the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, which sounded like a major group last night. I'm getting the recording.

The evening began with Eighth Blackbird performing their version of Frederic Rzewski's Coming Together. As sharp-eyed Sequenza21 readers pointed out, this was not the first West Coast performance of the work; it wasn't even the first performance at Ojai for that matter. It was a good performance.

Thursday night's short opening concert had Robert Spano reading/performing John Cage's Lecture on Nothing. While no one in the Ojai audience ran screaming from the audience, the constructed silence between the fourth and fifth "movements" of the speech led two brave souls to begin persistant clapping. But most of the audience waited for the final allegro. Cage's words did, indeed, create the silences, and we heard the sounds around the park more clearly.

The high spot of Thursday night was Trimpin presenting seven of Conlon Nancarrow's studies for player piano, followed by an eighth as an encore. The music was played on a grand piano by Trimpin's "contraption" with drivers for each key controlled by a laptop computer following Nancarrow's music notation, transcribed from piano rolls to computer files. After the first applause from the audience, Trimpin stood and told the audience that the applause was really for Nancarrow's music since he, Trimpin, was merely pressing a button to re-play the composer's music. Nancarrow's widow was also in the audience. Trimpin's selections from among the studies were well-chosen to present the range of Nancarrow's interests, more than just playing tricks with tempo, in his experiments. It takes my ears a little time to adjust to what he was doing and to begin hearing his separate voices. I'm ready to try some more.

posted by Jerry Zinser 6/10/2006

Friday, June 09, 2006

Film Scores Out of the Box

Nothing like waking up in the morning and finding that you're even more irrelevant than you were yesterday. Well, not me; I've been there for awhile, but those of you who aspire to compose music for money have a new competitor. Sony has just announced the release of its new Cinescore automated soundtrack creation software, which it describes as "a breakthrough in professional soundtrack creation, automatically generating fully composed, multigenre, production music perfect for movies, slideshows, commercials, and radio productions." And, get this, the software retails for $249.00, with an academic version available for $145.00.

Obviously what we need is a volunteer "John Henry" to take on this "score-drivin' machine" and smash it to a bloody pulp. Maybe our friend and pen pal Daniel Roumain--who kindly passed along the tip--is the man for the job. Blogger Mark Northam has a report on what Cinescore means to film composers.

Now Playing:

The Adventures of Hippocrates
Chick Corea, John Harbison, Marc Neikrug
Orion String Quartet
Koch International

As Edward Ellington so famously remarked: it doesn't mean anything unless it has that certain syncopation. That is a lesson seldom forgotten by jazz musicians when they decide to write "serious" music and Chick Corea proves true to form in the title piece of this CD comprised of works commissioned for the Orion Quartet by the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, where the group is in residence. Corea's five-part work isn't really a string quartet but it is delightfully whimsical; sounding, in places, like some of Beth Anderson's hipper "Swales." And, man, does it swing. Harbison's four-movement Quartet No. 4 is the most conventional piece on the recording, relentlessly post-tonal and "modern," yet oddly user-friendly. Harbison has a talent for writing difficult music that is also highly listenable. Marc Neikrug's piano quintet, with the composer himself at the keyboard, is the most concentrated, intense and ultimately powerful of the three pieces on the disk although it could be a bit shorter. The Orion Quartet plays with amazing clarity and resonance. These guys are fabulous players who perform new music with great skill and empathy.

UPDATE: Drew McManus at Adaptistraton links today to the ongoing discussion about composers and orchestras in the Composers Forum. Check it out.

posted by Jerry Bowles 6/09/2006

Thursday, June 08, 2006

A-be, a-be, a-be. That's All, Folks

The big music world news of the day is that Warner Classics has gone to the great remainder bin in the sky. The announcement will not likely affect anyone who reads S21 (unless we have some readers who work in the shipping department) and in the overall shifting digital paradigm (downloads in, record stores out), I'm not sure it means a whole lot. Maybe it means there will be fewer Charlotte Church and Sarah Brightman and Andrea Bocelli recordings. That would be nice, wouldn't it. Now we have only to wait for EMI, Universal and Sony-BMG to expire and the revolution will be complete. (Thanks to Glenn Freedman for the tip.)

Here's something you don't want to miss. C4, the world's first Choral Composer/Conductor Collective, will perform 10 pieces, all by living composers, at the ensemble's inaugural concert on tomorrow night, June 9, at the Norwegian Seamen's Church at 317 East 52nd Street, NYC. Anchored by Eric Whitacre's stunning setting of "When David Heard," which features the chorus singing in 18-part harmony at several points, the program also marks the world premiere performances of four brand-new works by Paul Carey , Frances Geller, Eddie Rubeiz, and Karen Siegel.

Our regular contributor Ian Moss is involved in the project and tells us that C4 is "a unique new chorus that is directed and operated collectively by its singing members, functioning not only as a presenting ensemble in its own right but also as an ongoing workshop and recital chorus for the emerging composers and conductors who form the core of the group." There's a web page with details here.

posted by Jerry Bowles 6/08/2006

Birthday Boy Gets The Billboard Treatment

Robert Schumann was born on 8th June 1810, and died on July 29th 1856. In his birthplace, Zwickau in the former East Germany, composers get the profile they deserve, and my photo above shows the huge billboard in the city centre featuring Schumann and his wife Clara. To celebrate his anniversary year On An Overgrown Path travelled to Zwickau in search of the real Robert Schumann, and found a few Trabants and a rare pedal piano recording en route. Join the journey at I am a camera- Robert Schumann's Zwickau.

Image credit and copyright - On An Overgrown Path. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included in "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 other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

posted by Pliable 6/08/2006

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

An American Original

In one of my past lives, I worked with some of the world's best and most famous photographers. They all had several traits in common; one was a deep and incurable insecurity, perhaps a natural reaction to a trade that in the not-so-long-ago days of film required you to wait until the picture opportunity was long gone to see if you'd captured it or not. Another was a kind of childlike ability to see each day and each new shoot with a fresh set of eyes although, in fact, professional photographers basically do the same kind of setups over and over again. The final character trait was a talent for seduction--the ability to charm the pants off anybody, male or female, who found themselves in front of their lenses.

Arnold Newman, who took the iconic photograph of Igor Stravinsky above, had all of these traits, in spades. I worked with him several times and once you got past the insecurity (Within two minutes of meeting you he would drop at least 20 names of famous people he had photographed) he was a delight to work with. Even as an older man, he had the freshest set of eyes in portraiture. Every picture was unique. And he could reduce the hardest-boiled CEO to an Arnold-groupie in a half-hour session. Like the man in the photograph, Newman was an original.

posted by Jerry Bowles 6/07/2006

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

More proof that Philip Glass is the best-known living American composer

In the middle of dissing Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Coldplay, Snoop Doggy Dog, Eminem, and just about every other pop music dignitary, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog gives a shout out to Phil on his rap song/video "I Keed":

Philip Glass
You atonal ass
You’re not immune, write a song with a f*@#ing tune!

Yeah, we all know atonal is probably the worst description of his music, but Robert Smigel is a comedian, not a music historian.....

Go to Triumph's web site and click on Audio/Video to see/hear "I Keed":

www.triumphtheinsultcomicdog.com/

posted by Christian Hertzog 6/06/2006

Sierra's Sinfonia No. 2 premieres in Miami

The composer Roberto Sierra has made a good name for himself in recent years, drawing expansive praise from critics for his guitar and saxophone concerti, his orchestral pieces (Fandangos), and his Missa Latina.

The University of Miami's Frost Symphony Orchestra gave the world premiere April 21 of Sierra's Sinfonia No. 2 in a concert conducted by fellow composer Thomas Sleeper (the Brahms Fourth also was on the program). The symphony, commissioned by UM, proved to be a well-argued one-movement work of about 16 minutes, structured as a series of variations over a passacaglia.

Unlike many of his other pieces, Sierra's symphony does not draw on his Latin heritage — a native of Puerto Rico, he now teaches composition at Cornell — but instead is a piece out of the mid-20th-century tonal mainstream; I found it reminiscent at times of one or another of the Essays for Orchestra by Samuel Barber.

The Sinfonia No. 2, subtitled Gran Passacaglia, is essentially a concerto for orchestra in that Sierra makes virtuosic use of the various instrumental sections, with much whirling around of the woodwinds and the strings, and powerful statements from the brass and percussion. The work's overall tone is strident and aggressive, beginning with a granitic, Shostakovich-like opening that sets the stage for heavy drama to follow.

Sierra keeps narrative tension alive as he takes the theme through a variety of transformations — sometimes savage, with piano, brass and percussion hammering out a driving rhythm, and at other times serene, such as an early episode in which solo flute and horn do a gentle slow dance over the plucking of a harp.

Overall, Sierra brings a notable invention to the music, evoking a wide range of styles as the symphony progresses, all while keeping an essentially agitated profile. One of the several big climaxes in the piece sounds for a moment like no one so much as César Franck, thick scoring included.

Listening to Sierra’s other music on his Web site, you can hear a composer eager to use Latin and jazz influences that gives the excerpts I chose a sort of genial populism. This work is quite different, and written in a language reminiscent of the tonal style popular with the modernists of the 1940s or thereabouts.

It's a no-nonsense piece with a deadly serious heart, and while it doesn't bring anything particularly original or individual to the table, it is well-made, and it could serve as an attractive curtain-raiser on a program of new music. It's a strong, interesting composition by a man who knows how to manipulate basic material successfully and hold a listener's attention.

posted by Greg Stepanich 6/06/2006

Philadelphia Sounds: Relache's Season Closer

Relache closed its season with a survey of the exotic--music from, and influenced by, faraway places.

Tangoso (1993) by Claudio Triputti opened the program, and definitely did not resemble the traditional Argentine tango, or even the modern Piazzola versions. While the first movement features a melodic theme in viola, piano, bass and percussion, runs in different rhythms and winds interrupt discordantly. Except for an occasional piano and bass riff, there was no music to dance to here. The second movement contained a lovely viola melody line with staccato piano, but the rhythms were syncopated and staccato.

The program featured the world premiere of a Relache commission--Pleides by Sylvia Serghi, a composer from Cypress. Serghi explained that the Pleides constellation is not easily visible straight on, but needs to be seen from different angles, so this composition is in seven short movements that need to be heard together to form a whole. It starts with a lively section for winds and marimba. As textures vary, there is a melancholy viola solo; then a passage for contrabassoon, bass clarinet and oboe with drums and piccolo, which certainly sounds exotic; another passage for viola and piano stands on its own with melody and varied accompaniment. A passage for vibes and bass with oboe had a jazzy sound.

Music of Bali was reflected in Claude Vivier’s 1977 Pulaw Dewata. Piano and vibes provided the percussion, while the rest of the ensemble was mostly unison and delicate in flute and oboe.

Turquoise has been performed many times by Relache. This 1996 piece by Kamran Ince shows the influence of Turkish heterophony or primarily unison sound. The percussion is intense, and augmented by synth piano and electric bass; the seven-note motif repeats and mutates at very high pitch and appears in the bass in jagged rhythms. (Reposted from Penn Sounds 6/6/06.)

posted by Deborah Kravetz 6/06/2006

Monday, June 05, 2006

I Know You Wanna Hit That

I have been wanting to go to the Bang on a Can Marathon for several years, but it was always in New York and I was always not, and it was always on a date when traveling wouldn't work out. Well, as a new New Yorker I was finally able to attend this year, and this past Sunday’s event did not disappoint. Bang on a Can began in 1987 with the first ever BoaC Marathon -- according to the program archived at the BoaC website, the program started at 2:00 PM on May 10th with Phil Niblock's "Held Tones." and they can't have begun the final piece, John Cage's "Ryoanji," until well after midnight. This was the same concert at which Milton Babbitt's "Vision and Prayer" and Steve Reich's "Four Organs" were played back-to-back and, according to Michael Gordon, ". . .Milton Babbitt came in and he talked, and his piece was played and there was this huge ovation. And then he walked out the back because he didn't want to hear Steve Reich's piece. [laughs] Steve Reich, who did not want to hear Milton's piece and had been waiting outside the building until it was over came in, and then he talked, and there was a huge ovation and then Steve left. And they didn't ever meet." Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe have organized a Marathon almost every year since, and the festival has had stints at the R.A.P.P. Arts Center, Alice Tully Hall, and BAM, among other venues.

This year's Marathon was at the World Financial Center's "Winter Garden," and as part of the River to River Festival it was free for the first time ever. The Winter Garden turned out to be in almost all respects an ideal location -- it's a huge atrium with two rows of palm trees running like columns through the middle, a 5 or 6 story high ceiling, and a gigantic curved staircase on one end, opposite the temporary stage. The only problem was the natural reverberation of the hall. Close to the stage it wasn't a problem, and many pieces on the program weren't harmed by excessive reverb, but much of the detail was lost in, say, the arrangement for two drum kits of Steve Reich's "Music For Pieces of Wood," especially from the balcony where I was sitting at the time.

With an eleven-hour concert, it would be foolish of me to attempt to review every piece, and my occasional forays out into the world to find food and my having had to depart after Michael Gordon's "Weather 1" mean that I didn't hear everything anyway. I will say generally that at most new-music concerts I like maybe 20% of the music and am uninterested in or dislike 80%, and on Sunday those figures were reversed. A few highlights from among the music that I did hear:

Gamelan Galak Tika (founded by Evan Zipporyn and based at MIT, where "we build robots in our spare time. . . actually, we really do.") teamed up with the Manhattan School of Music's "Tactus" ensemble to play Zipporyn's "Ngaben." The marriage of the Gamelan and the Western instruments was quite successful, and the piece itself was beautiful.

The Bang on a Can All-Stars played, among other things, an arrangement of Paul Lansky's originally electronic "As is for. . ." which features a recitation of the spellings of five-letter words beginning with "A" over the music. Some people sitting near me seemed not to like the spoken portion, and I can appreciate why they might have found it cheezy, but I didn't mind it and the music was fabulous, especially the variations-on-a-theme cello line.

A duo from Tuva called "Yat Kha" played an impressive set. Tuva is famous for its throat singers, men who can sing an octave or more below the range of a normal Bass singer, and one of these guys did it very impressively (the other guy had a beautiful high tenor voice). The second piece on their set was a traditional Scottish folk song "Wild Mountain Thyme," and the fourth was a rendition of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart Again." Both were sung about two octaves below where I'm used to hearing them sung. It was as if the great Slovenian industrial band Laibach were a folk act.

The last piece I heard was Michael Gordon's "Weather One" for strings, and it was magnificent. It clearly comes out of the Minimalist/Post-Minimalist tradition, but rather than the stereotypical same-thing-over-and-over of, say, Philip Glass's 3rd Symphony (which I love, and which I was reminded of) where you often know what will come next, it was _approximately_ the same thing followed by _approximately_ the same thing. I found myself trying and failing again and again to learn what seemed like a cell of an ostinato -- I could chase it but I could never catch up for more than a measure or so. Delightful technical inscrutability aside, it also simply spent most of its duration rocking out.

And those were merely the highlights from my taste among the music that I heard. With a little luck, next year it will be free again, and you won't have any excuse for missing it. Plus, next year will be the 20th anniversary -- I'm hoping for a 20 hour Marathon.

posted by Galen H. Brown 6/05/2006

It's Bash a Gay Person for Jesus Day. Are You Proud?

Here's something coolish. UCLA, Indiana University, Johns Hopkins University and Duke have gotten together to form the Sheet Music Consortium which describes itself as "a group of libraries working toward the goal of building an open collection of digitized sheet music using the Open Archives Initiative:Protocol for Metadata Harvesting." Whatever.

You can do a simple keyword search, or browse the collections using dropdown menus to choose criteria. Each entry contains the title of the music, the composer and lyricist, the publisher, date of publication, and the collection in which it is found. There's a "more info" link that gives you an expanded entry and provides subject terms. If you create an account, you can add a notation of your own and save the entry to your "virtual collection." You'll find even more great stuff by clicking on the link to "Sheet Music on the Web."

Good to see Elodie Lauten back. Her computer has been on the fritz for a few weeks which, I'll admit, is not always a bad thing.

Anybody interested in being a guest blogger for a week sometime this summer? Basically means you get up and find something (or make something up) to post in this space and I sleep in. Send me a note if you're interested.

Update: Terrific interview by Drew McManus with Frank J. Oteri in The Partial Observer.

posted by Jerry Bowles 6/05/2006

Sunday, June 04, 2006

Concerts under the Oaks at Ojai

The 60th Ojai Music Festival opens this Thursday, June 8, and runs through Sunday, June 10. As always, the focus is on contemporary (and near-contemporary) music. This year’s festival includes six concerts, a symposium, a tribute film, a music/art installation, plus an assortment of concert previews and a post-concert discussion.

The featured composer this season is Osvaldo Golijov and featured musicians include the Atlanta Symphony with Robert Spano, the Atlanta Chamber Chorus, Dawn Upshaw, Eighth Blackbird, and Trimpin. We have our usual tickets for the series, but the last I checked there were a few individual tickets left for seating or for admission to the grass lawn if you bring a blanket and lawn chairs. The rooms for overnight stays in Ojai itself are probably all booked, but it’s an easy drive from this inland valley to Santa Barbara, Ventura, or Oxnard where a lot of rooms are available. Here’s the schedule:

Thursday, June 8, 8:00 pm --- Cage and Nancarrow. Robert Spano will speak John Cage’s Lecture on Nothing. Trimpin will present Selected Studies for Player Piano by Conlon Nancarrow. You may have read the article in The New Yorker on Trimpin and several of his works; the article relates how Trimpin received Nancarrow’s authorization to convert his player-piano rolls to MIDI files for playing through a computer. Trimpin has also provided a music/art installation, Conloninpurple, at the Ojai Valley Museum. The work of sculpture is a five-octave instrument of 84 sources of acoustic sound, clustered into ten columns. The work is interactive. Trimpin will lead a demonstration of the instrument Saturday afternoon at 3:00 pm.

Friday, June 9, 2:00 pm --- Symposium. Robert Spano, Thomas Morris, and Osvaldo Golijov will lead a symposium starting with a discussion of music festivals (and Ojai) and leading into a discussion of the music of Golijov.

Friday, June 9, 8:00 pm --- Rzewski and Ainadamar. The evening will open with a performance of Rzewski’s Coming Together, being given its West Coast premiere, performed by the group Eighth Blackbird. The Santa Fe revision of Ainadamar will be performed with Dawn Upshaw, Kelley O’Connor, Jessica Rivera, and the Atlanta Symphony led by Spano.

Saturday, June 10, 11:00 am --- Choral Music. The Atlanta Symphony Chamber Chorus, a selected subset of the full chorus will perform an a capella program of 20th century music (Messiaen, Vaughn Williams, Tavener, Durufle, Copland) with a little Tallis thrown in for 16th century spice.

Saturday, June 10, 3:00 pm --- Trimpin. The demonstration of Trimpin’s Conloninpurple at the Ojai Valley Museum.

Saturday, June 10, 4:30 pm --- Tribute. The film Betty Freeman: A Life for the Unknown will be shown at the Ojai Playhouse in honor of this most outstanding of philanthropists of new music.

Saturday, June 10, 8:00 pm --- Spain and Brazil. Luciana Souza and Romero Lubambo will perform Brazilian music for vocalist and guitar. Spano will conduct the Atlanta in De Falla’s Harpsichord Concerto with Peter Marshall as soloist, followed by El Amor Brujo.

Sunday, June 11, 11:00 am --- Upshaw. The great one will sing Berio’s Folk Songs followed by Golijov’s Ayre with Eighth Blackbird.

Sunday, June 11, 5:30 pm --- A Nice Wrap-Up. Spano will conduct the Atlanta in the John Adams Chamber Symphony, in Berio’s Requie, in the Busoni/Adams Berceuse Elgaique, in the Bach/Berio Contrapunctur XIX from Art of the Fugue, and in Golijov’s Oceana cantata with Luciana Souza as vocal solist and the Atlanta Chamber Chorus.

If you’re within driving distance of Ojai, you really should make plans to come for at least a day to this enchanted valley of orchards and arts. Phone for tickets at (805) 646-2094.

posted by Jerry Zinser 6/04/2006