Month: November 2009

Awards, Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

York Höller wins 2010 Grawemeyer

It’s hard enough delivering an orchestra commission when you’re hale and hearty; but despite losing most of his vision during the course of its lengthy gestation (2001-06) York Höller managed to complete his work Sphären. His efforts amidst considerable adversity have garnered him the 2010 Grawemeyer Award.

Although now almost completely blind, Höller continues to compose. Abetted by assistants, samplers, and a new software called Jaws, he is soldiering on. One hopes that the Grawemeyer’s $200,000 prize will assist in this endeavor.

So, composers,  next time you’re planning to tell your commissioner why the piece isn’t done, you’ll need a pretty good excuse:  Höller has upped the ante!

Hear Sphären at Boosey’s website.


by Christian Carey
ACO, Commissions, Composers, Concerts, Premieres

Traditions & Transmigrations

deChellywebDoes anyone remember the early August announcement that the American Composers Orchestra was going to begin a partnership with LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton to “Commission and Premiere New Music by Emerging American Composers”?  Well, whether you can wrap your head around that pairing or not, the first concert is happening on Monday night (November 30th) in Zankel Hall with Erin Gee’s Mouthpiece XIII: Mathilde of Loci, Part 1. Erin is the lucky recipient of the first commission through this new partnership.

There are two other world premieres on the program:

1)    Donal Fox: Peace Out for Improvised Piano and Orchestra.  Mr. Fox was the first African-American composer-in-residence with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and he will perform as soloist, improvising his part along with a fully composed score for the orchestra.
2)    Curt Cacioppo: When the Orchard Dances Ceased. The work includes parts for Native American folk voice and percussion instruments, both of which will be performed by the composer.

And, of course, there’s more… there will also be two New York premieres:

1)    Huang Ruo’s piece, Leaving Sao, is written for soprano or high male voice in folk style and chamber orchestra in memory of his grandmother. Sao in Chinese means sorrowful predicament.  I’m not totally sure, but I think he will also be the one singing this vocal part.
2)    Charles Ives: Tone Roads Nos. 1 & 3.  It looks like this will be the only piece on the program in which the composer is not also performing.  Couldn’t the ACO find a way to get Charles there as well?!

You can also find lots of video and audio content about all of these works here.

by James Holt
BAM, Minimalism, Opera

Order, Not Chance, Reigns in Philip Glass’ Kepler

keplerPhilip Glass always does the unexpected. Or, as he said to me when we were talking on the phone about his subsequently Oscar-nominated score for Errol Morris’ 2003 The Fog of War, “I’m a bad person to interview because I never stay on the subject.”  Well, yes and no. Yes, because Glass’s  focus on the work in front of him is unflinching, and no, because his instincts always lead him to surprising solutions. His two-act 155 minute intermission-less new opera Kepler is yet another example of Glass’s wandering, yet disciplined, mind.  Premiered at the Linz Opera by  American conductor Dennis Russell Davies and his Bruckner Orchester Linz on September 20 2009 as part of that  city’s celebrations as this year’s Cultural Capital of Europe, Kepler made the trip to Brooklyn smoothly, carrying a bit of history.  Kepler lived in Linz,  Mozart’s Symphony #36  was dedicated to it, Bruckner was choir director there — and two of the Nazis’ death camps — Mauthausen and Gusen, whose specialty was getting rid of the intelligentsia, were scant kilometres from its city limits. But then darkness is rarely far from light.

And darkness, as distinct, or in contrast/opposition  to — light –is the motor that drives Glass’s Kepler, but not in a Manichean way.  Glass is far too subtle to put his cards on one table.  Instead, being a practical and practicing Buddhist, he seems to have chosen the unglamorous “Middle Way” which means seeing “things as they are” and in Kepler’s case this is war, strife, and people who dared question him. The mathematician-teacher-astronomer-astrologer and all-round provocateur, who lived from 1571 to 1630, seems to have been at the epicenter of cultural ferment, and of course, the first decade or so of  The Thirty Years War (1618-1648), which began more or less as a conflict between Catholics and Protestants  and ended up devastating much of Europe, with a death toll as high as 11.5 million people.

Glass dramatizes these stresses  in a direct and indirect way. And Glass’s German and Latin libretto, assembled by Austrian artist Martina Winkel, from Kepler’s theoretical writings on the laws of planetary motion and other major discoveries, his enemies list, passages from the Lutheran Bible, and poems by Andreas Gryphius (1616-1664), works both as reportage and evocation. The oratorio-like piece for the 79 member BOL was partially staged here with effective lighting and Karel van Laere’s costumes for its seven soloists — bass-baritone Martin Achrainer as Kepler is the only specified character with  Soprano 1 — Sadie Rosales who substituted for the indisposed Cassandra McConnell — Soprano 2 (Cheryl Lichter), Mezzo (Katherina Hebelkova), Tenor (Pedro Velazquez Diaz), Baritone (Seho Chang), and Bass (Florian Spiess) — who functioned as aspects of Kepler’s often beleaguered psyche. The 40 member Linz chorus moved incrementally through the work.

I’d have to agree with my “plus 1” friend that the first 20 or so minutes (after a wonderfully transparent orchestra only prologue with lovely chromatic figures for the strings) was pretty tough going. But things began to pick up when Kepler outlines his theories and his conflicts —  the notion that heaven’s not a place inhabited by “divine beings” but a “clockwork” – which, of course, suits Glass’s formal processes perfectly. The chorus, operating as both character and commentator, gave Kepler heft and vivid and enormously varied contrasts. Glass has always written superbly for massed voices — the choruses in Satyagraha (1979) are contemporary landmarks — and those here were both affecting and powerful, especially the “Vanitas! Vanitas!” , which the full vocal ensemble sang on the lip of the stage facing the audience, with the orchestra seated behind.  And wouldn’t you know it, my cell rang — being a neophyte in all things cell –which was the only sound in the house as the audience was completely spellbound — and how could they not be — by this arresting passage.  I promise to learn how to turn the damned thing off. (more…)

by Michael McDonagh
CDs, Contemporary Classical, Interviews, Violin

Talking with Jennifer Koh

Violinist Jennifer Koh has, since even before this past Spring showed its face, been pretty much living out of a suitcase or two. Crisscrossing this country and a couple other continents, She’s been playing everything from Antonio Vivaldi to John Zorn. Just last week she was beautifully acquitting herself at Miller Theatre, in a performance of Kaija Saariaho’s Graal Theatre. December is about all the break she’s getting, too, before it starts all over again.

In the middle of all this came her newest CD on Cedille, Rhapsodic Musings, a collection of solo violin music almost all composed within the last ten years: Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Lachen Verlernt (2002), Elliott Carter’s Four Lauds (1984-2000), Augusta Read Thomas’ Pulsar (2003), and John Zorn’s Goetia (2002). It’s an intensely involving and personal listen, definitely not simple showy fare, and the recording is close and crystalline. Here’s a short video of Jennifer talking about the genesis of the CD:

I recently had the chance to ask Jennifer a few questions via e-mail, and her answers follow:

S21: You’ve got quite a wide repertoire at your command, but when it’s come to recordings you haven’t gone with much in the way of the grand war-horses. The Szymanowski 1st is about as close as you’ve come, the rest delving back into lesser-known gems by Menotti, Martinu, Bartok… And then most recently lots of contemporary (and usually living) American and European composers. The pieces you choose — Higdon, Ruggles, Harrison, Salonen, Carter, Zorn — while often incredibly beautiful aren’t the stuff of easy crowd-pleasers. I get a bit of this feeling of you truly being taken deeply by something in each of these works, and bringing them to people almost like an excited kid shares their latest amazing discovery to their friends or parents. Am I getting warm here? …

JK: I just want to play music that I believe in!  This is true for music that is known or unknown, new or old.  When I play a piece, it means I will have lived with it in a very intimate and intense way for a long time and ultimately, I want to spend my life with music that I love and find meaningful.  If I discover a piece of music that I think is incredible but is not very well known, I do become fervently dedicated to it because I think it SHOULD be known to everyone and I want to share it with as many people as possible!  In the end, I don’t think I’m that different from the next person.  I’m just another member of society and I hope that if I find a piece of music to be compelling and interesting, then it will speak to other people as well.

S21:  These past few CDs you’ve gone from violin and orchestra, to violin and piano, to just solo violin. I know this can’t go much further (unless you toss the violin and just clap and sing!), but was that increasing intimacy and focus at all intentional? Does it feel any different when you make a CD where you know you’re responsible for every moment of sound on there?

JK: Everything about “Rhapsodic Musings” was intense and personal for me from the initial inspiration point for the program to the recording process to the actual compositions on this CD.  The idea for this CD came from a collective time of  shock and loss and I wanted to focus the CD into a personal  journey out of that collective experience.  During this same period of time, I saw the violin that one of my mentors, Felix Galimir played while he was alive.  Felix was a huge influence on me in so many ways especially because of the passionate relationship he had with the music that he worked on with the composers of his time which included Schoenberg, Berg and Webern.   When I played on Felix’s violin in the shop, I felt he was back with me because I heard him in that violin.  Violinists have very intense and intimate relationships with their instruments and it is almost impossible to separate the identity between violin and violinist because each lives in the other. I feel like my violin  is a part of me and I chose a solo violin program for “Rhapsodic Musings” because I wanted to express that personal relationship between violin and violinist. (more…)

by Steve Layton
Festivals, New York, Opportunities

Make yourself MATA

mataWord has reached us that NYC’s long-running MATA new-music festival is looking for an new Artistic Director, and maybe it could just be you:

The position requires a broad knowledge of contemporary musical practices and communities (local, national, and international), strong organizational and interpersonal skills, and a clear, inclusive artistic vision. Key to the AD position is the ability to maintain high visibility in the music community as both a participant and audience member. Attention will be paid most closely to applicants who are currently active in the New York music community as a composer and/or performer. Along with the ED, the AD serves on MATA’s Board, ex officio, thereby gaining access to invaluable opportunities to develop relationships potentially important to his/her own career. There is an annual salary of $10,000 for this part-time position.

The full info is in this PDF:

MATA Artistic Director Information.PDF

You’ve got until Jan. 4, 2010 to get off your tush and apply. If you’re a composer/performer who’s always saying “what these festivals really need to have is  XXX and YYY”, well here’s your chance!

by Steve Layton
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Los Angeles

Last Night in L.A.: Singing the West Coast

TheLeftCoastBetter[1]The Los Angeles Master Chorale gave the Phil’s West Coast, Left Coast Festival the opening it deserved: a joyous statement, a vibrant concert, and a rousing end that left us wanting more and looking forward to our next event. Regrettably, last night’s concert wasn’t the opening, but the second event. The opening occurred Saturday night in a hodge-podge concert that just drained away. But more on that, later. It’s much more fun to talk about the good things.

Grant Gershon and the LAMC put together a program of four works by four composers (all alive, present, and introduced at the concert) that certainly brought out one of the festival’s themes: to portray the sheer number and variety of traditions and styles present in our music. The program gave us a local premiere to begin, then brought out two LAMC favorites, and concluded with a reprise of a delightful LAMC commission from 2007. The work new to us was “Savage Altars” (1992) by Ingram Marshall; his notes on the work are here.

Morten Lauridsen has enriched our music, not merely through his own major compositions, but also through the other composers and colleagues he has mentored, challenged, and helped in composition at the USC Thornton School of Music. The program gave us his “Mid-Winter Songs” (1980, in this version with piano accompaniment). Lovely music. His notes are here.

The second half of the program moved forward a generation, to two composers still (barely) in their 30s: Eric Whitacre and David O. The LAMC performed a youthful work of Whitacre’s, “Cloudburst” (1992), written while he was still a music student at UNLV. Listening, and watching, the work is great fun. Here is the video of Whitacre conducted a group of mixed choruses and singers in Minnesota last April; I wish there were a video of last night’s performance.

Two years ago the Master Chorale had a great enabling them to commission works recognizing the diversity of Los Angeles, LA is the World. The hit of the year was David O’s “A Map of Los Angeles”, and this was given a reprise last night. The chorale gave some good program notes for each of the works in the concert, and I recommend reading those on David O’s work in particular (just scroll down through the notes). I hope that this music is not too location-specific, because this is so much fun to hear it should receive many performances. I think all of us in this full house left WDCH with a feeling of pleasure. A perfect opening.

riley_terry_175x175[1]But Saturday night’s official opening was a good program badly positioned and supported. Great ingredients: Terry Riley extemporizing on the WDCH organ, the Kronos Quartet in a new work, electronics/visual performances by Matmos, and a young composer in a performance of a new work inspired by the architecture of Disney Hall. The Phil’s web site has three interesting videos here. Perhaps for marketing purposes, perhaps to make this seem like a rock or hip-hop performance, the concert began at 9:30. It did bring in a younger audience (not more, just younger) than even the Green Umbrella series, but there were lots of late arrivals, which didn’t quite fit with the performance by Kronos of Thomas Newman‘s new work “It Got Dark” (2009); and while interesting, and worth really listening to, this didn’t seem quite right for a festival opening. But finding out what we were listening to was another of the problems: for some reason the program did not provide a summary listing of the works to be performed. You had to go through the text in the program to see what was named and then to try to match that with the sequence in the performance.

Terry Riley came on stage for some improvising in the second half of the program, and then, at midnight, went to the center console of the WDCH organ, which he has named “Hurricane Mama”. He gave a solo concert last season, and through his midnight practices has developed quite a feeling for the organ and its capabilities. He began playing. Probably many in the audience had no idea of what to expect or what to listen for. There were no announcements nor descriptions of what he was doing. And it was late. The audience began leaving. The concert concluded near 1:00 a.m., with probably a quarter of the audience left.

by JerryZ
Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Interviews, San Francisco

Let’s Ask Matt Davignon

Matt Davignon

Experimental music impresario Matt Davignon is known all over the San Francisco Bay Area for organizing unusual music performances.  In addition to being responsible for such events as the San Francisco Found Objects Festival, he’s a member of the Outsound Presents Board of Directors and the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival Steering Committee.  This Thursday evening, November 19, at 8:00 PM, Matt will present one of his DroneShift concerts at the Luggage Store Gallery, where he curates regularly.  The gallery is located at 1007 Market Street near 6th Street in San Francisco, near Powell Street and Civic Center BART. Admission is $6.00 – $10.00 sliding scale, with no one turned away for lack of funds.

I lured Matt into conversation with the assurance that there would be no artichoke hearts involved.

S21:  So how did your geographical wanderings bring you to San Francisco?

MD:  I was raised in Western Massachusetts, and moved to Santa Rosa, California with my family as a teenager. I moved down to San Francisco as a college student because I wanted to encounter the experimental music scene.

S21:  And how about your musical wanderings?

MD:  I started as a teenage bass player, who aspired (but lacked the motor skills) to be in a prog rock band. After moving to California in the early 90s, I was increasingly influenced by industrial music and ambient music (both of the 1990s variety and the Brian Eno variety).

By 1994 I was improvising, but using many different sound sources such as turntables, tape collage, household objects and drum machine. In the early 2000s I most frequently performed with just a turntable and CD player, improvising music by layering irregular loops of pre-recorded music. In 2004, I decided I wanted to put all the things I learned from my previous musical wanderings into one instrument. I was surprised to find that drum machine was the best choice.  It not only comes with a wide variety of sounds, but it also has the potential to be used melodically. Most importantly, since the drum machine can be played with one hand, the other hand is free to operate devices that process the sound.
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by Polly Moller
Contemporary Classical, Los Angeles

Last Night in L.A.: Preludes to a Festival

This coming Saturday is the official opening concert of the L.A. Phil’s exciting new festival, West Coast, Left Coast, but performances introducing the concept have now begun. REDCAT showed a “re-interpretation” of a noted performance piece with music by Morton Subotnick and choreography by Anna Halprin, and Jacaranda Music had another full audience for its concert last night as a prelude to the festival itself.

Parades & Changes, the Halprin-Subotnick performance collaboration from 1965 is coming to New York, and it provides a fascinating hour. The use of electronics in music has advanced so much in the past forty years, and can now be heard so often, that Subotnick’s music no longer sounded as radical or disturbing as it must have seemed then, but it held its own and contributed to the performance, which didn’t seem at all dated. When I got home, however, I did a search to find my LP of Subotnick’s Silver Apples of the Moon, once played so often. Gone. I don’t know when, or how. Surely the California pioneers in electronics in music should have had a place in a West Coast, Left Coast Festival!

The Jacaranda concert Saturday night was pure delight, and perfectly aligned with the festival’s theme. The program opened and closed with John Adams: Road Movies (1995) for violin and piano to open, and Shaker Loops (1978) for string sextet to close. The Denali Quartet brought in two friends to round out the performance of “Loops”, and this was a pleasure to listen to. The hit, however, was early Lou Harrison: Solstice (1949-1950) for celesta, tack piano, and flute, oboe, trumpet, two cellos and bass (including an instrument on its back, providing its strings as the target of mallets). This was Harrison attracted by Eastern sounds, but not yet comfortable with how much use to make of them. But it’s a lovely work. The fourth work on the program was by Ingram Marshall, whose work I don’t know. The concerts by the Master Chorale and by the Phil’s New Music Ensemble in a Green Umbrella concert will also give us works by Marshall, and I’ll wait until I’ve heard more before commenting.

The West Coast, Left Coast Festival looks on paper as if it can be more exciting then the last festival, Minimalist Jukebox, curated by Adams. Here’s the listing of events. And the LA Times has an excellent essay on Adams, here.

Today’s Philharmonic concert featured Luciano Berio and Franz Schubert, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. The concert opened with Berio’s commentary on the fragments left from Schubert’s ideas for his Tenth Symphony, Rendering (1989). Instead of developing a hybrid work “in the style of” Schubert, Berio supplemented the fragments with his own ideas, carefully orchestrated so that the listener could distinguish between real and restoration. We then ascended to the higher realms with Berio’s Folk Songs (1964, with the 1973 version for orchestral accompaniment). The singer? Dawn Upshaw. Dudamel closed the concert with Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. The Dude is gaining control of the audience; in today’s concert he got everyone to be silent for over a minute after the last notes as he slowly lowered his arms. Last week’s concert, Verdi’s Requiem, was the only concert so far without a major work written after 1900.

by JerryZ
Canada, Concerts, Contemporary Classical

Truly Canadian

Sunday, November 15th, the Esprit Orchestra and conductor Alex Pauk are giving what I think will be a really wonderful concert. It happens in Toronto, at 8PM in Koerner Hall at The Royal Conservatory (273 Bloor Street West, Toronto), with a 7:15Pm pre-concert chat with a composer and guest artists. That composer would be Alexina Louie, and my guess is the guest artists are Inuit throat singers Evie Mark and Akinisie Sivuarapik. First up on the bill is Louie’s work Take the Dog Sled, for two throat singers and ensemble.

Throat singing is an ancient traditional musical form/contest where two women join in a face-off, chanting back and forth in a rhythmic game. The point is for each to keep the rhythm going through all its elaborations; the one who either runs out of breath, misses, or starts laughing is the “loser” , but the loss is not nearly so important as the bonds formed. Louie here incorporates their singing into her piece for western ensemble, part of which you can preview in this clip from a documentary made about Kent Nagano and the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal‘s recent journey through the high north, to bring classical music and instruments to places that had never heard them live before:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCYQW57EVoI[/youtube]

Following that will be one of the great evocative experiences of my own teen years: a performance of R. Murray Schafer‘s mysterious North/White for snowmobile (!) and orchestra. I think it may have a couple different versions now, but I first heard this near its premiere in 1973: as a teen in an agricultural region of Washington State, my modern classical education consisted largely of late-night radio listening, to the swelling and fading signal of the CBC wafting over the border from Alberta. One of those nights came an utterly strange rustling of orchestral music, eventually mixed with menacing sounds that I could never quite place; but they were textures, harmonies and sonorities that stayed in my head to this day. All I knew at the end was that the announcer’s voice told me this was some composer named R. Murray Schafer, and the piece was called North/White. I was taping the radio with a little cassette placed just next to it, and even years later I would sometimes pop the tape in to hear that moment again. Well, here it is in the flesh once more, and I’d give a lot to be there to hear it. The concert’s site tells us that “North/White is the composer’s highly personal statement on how industrial forces impact on Canada’s Northern mythology”; I’ll take that, and add that it certainly impacted my own personal mythology. (And you just name me one other piece for snowmobile and orchestra, huh?)

Rounding out the program are two very much non-Canadian works, but both I think very much a fit with the sound world that came before, and are both among my all-time favorites: Gyorgy Ligeti‘s classic Atmospheres, and Toru Takemitsu‘s Green (November Steps II).

If you’re anywhere close (or what the hell, use that New-World pioneer spirit, jump in the car and drive all night!), this is a must-hear.

by Steve Layton
Concerts, jazz

Wolfgang Digs Newport

Wolfgang Grajonca that is, who is better-known to us old hippies as Bill Graham, the late impressario of the Fillmores East and West and the man who brought the music to a thousand purple-hazed nights of our misspent youths. Graham taped and saved everything and you can stream hundreds of full concerts free (downloading costs a little money) at a site called Wolfgang’s Vault. Want to hear that dead band’s song before they were dead? You got it. Catch Steppenwolf doing “God Damn, the Pusher Man?” Stevie Ray demonstrating why no one else should ever be allowed to touch a guitar ever again. Jimi, the real Jefferson Airplane, even early Bruce.

And, if that isn’t enough, today Wolfgang’s Vault began adding concerts from the 50 years of Newport Jazz Festivals. There are three up now–the Jazz Messengers, Dakota Staton and a 1959 Basie set that gave me goosebumps when I listened to it earlier this evening. Talk about minimalism, you ain’t heard shit until you dig Freddie Green and the Count sliding into a groove. Get yourself over there.

Random thought: When I went into Starbucks this afternoon, they were playing Jimmy Durante’s version of “You must remember dis…a kiss is still a kiss” and I thought to myself–Greatest Album Never Made? Jimmy Durante sings Tom Waits.

by Jerry Bowles