Author: Jerry Bowles

Contemporary Classical

The Woodstock Summer 2011 Mostly Girl Front Porch Chill Mix

Summer’s here and the time is right for dancing in the streets.  Or, making playlists.   Or something.   Some friends who just got themselves a screened-in porch for their  house up in Willow asked me to come up with an iPod playlist for sitting around at dusk smoking cigars and sipping brandy.  Mostly pop-stuff  but offbeat.   I decided to go  all-female..well, okay, there is one boy-girl duet…because I like girl singers.  But, I digress, I had so much fun putting the list together that I thought we ought to have a little playlist contest here.  Any genre is ok. You can add to my list or, even better, make your own.   Don’t know what the prize will be but I’ll think of something.   So, da da, here’s my Woodstock Summer 2011 Mostly Girl Front Porch Chill Mix:

  1. Én Csak Azt Csodálom (Lullabye For Katherine) Márta Sebestyén
  2. Ghost of a Dog   Edie Brickell
  3. Things We Said Today   Joy Askew
  4. If I Fell   Evan Rachel Wood
  5. Walk Away Renee        Ann Savoy, Linda Ronstadt
  6. Heart Like a Wheel Kate & Anna McGarrigle
  7. Old Fashioned Morphine   Jolie Holland
  8. Blues in D            Kate and Anna McGarrigle
  9. House of the Rising Sun   Sinead O’Connor
  10. Straight Out of Compton   Nina Gordon
  11. Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us     Alison Krauss
  12. All Night   Sam Phillips
  13. Waiting Around to Die   Be Good Tanyas
  14. In Every Dream Home A Heartache   Bryan Ferry/Jane Birkin
  15. Song for Ireland   Mary Black
  16. Reflecting Light  Sam Phillips
  17. Llorando   Rebekah Del Rio
  18. Je Reviens Autour De Lucie
  19. Quelqu’un m’a dit   Carla Bruni
  20. Mo Ghile Mar       Mary Black
  21. Tus Ojas Trieste   Rebekah Del Rio
  22. Wayfaring Stranger   Anonymous 4
  23. Adieu False Heart   Ann Savoy. Linda Ronstadt
  24. Talk to me of Mendocino  Kate & Anna McGarrigle
  25. Szerelem, Szerelem (Love, Love)  Muzsikás
  26. Blackbird  Evan Rachel Wood
  27. The Littlest Birds   Be Good Tanyas
  28. Complainte Pour Ste. Cathrine   Kate & Anna McGarrigle
  29. Falling (Twin Peaks Theme)  Julee Cruise
  30. Riders on the Storm  Ahn Trio
  31. Didn’t Leave Nobody But the Baby  Juice

I might add that you can listen to any or all of these songs free at Grooveshark.  I don’t know how they get away with it so don’t tell anyone.

Contemporary Classical

You Know You’re a Heartbreaker…

If you read S21 regularly (and why wouldn’t you) you probably know that my all-time favorite composer Leoš Janáček had one of the greatest third acts in the history of musical composition.  Most of  his extraordinary late-life production was inspired by a certain sly and aloof–but nonetheless foxy–married lady half his age named Kamila Stösslová.  One of the works that she inspired is the opera The Cunning Little Vixen which, as fate would have it, the New York Philharmonic is doing a fully-staged production of on June 22-25.   The Vixen is being sung by the stunning and incredibly talented Isabel Bayrakdarian on whom I have a late life crush.  You can win a pair of very good tickets to CLV by simply naming four other works inspired by the elusive Kamila. Googling is a hanging offense.   Special bonus question:  What Janáček piano piece do I want somebody good to play at my memorial service.  Oh, don’t forget to leave an e-mail address so I can contact you if you’re the winner.

Awards

ASCAP, League of American Orchestras Present 26 Adventurous Programming Awards

ASCAP and the League of American Orchestras presented 26 Adventurous Programming awards to orchestras who have demonstrated exceptional commitment to contemporary composers at a special Awards Presentation held today during the League’s 66th National Conference in Minneapolis.

“For the past 54 years, the members of ASCAP have presented adventurous programming awards to orchestras whose mission not only perpetuates the great orchestral tradition of the past, but insures that concert music in America remains relevant, vibrant and alive,” said  Frances Richard, ASCAP Vice President & Director of Concert Music,  “We salute those orchestras who have a commitment to the music creators of our time.”

Cia Toscanini, ASCAP Assistant Vice President of Concert Music, presented the awards to American orchestras whose past season prominently featured music written within the last 25 years.

The winners are:

John S. Edwards Award for Strongest Commitment to New American Music:
Alabama Symphony Orchestra, Justin Brown, Musical Director and Principal Conductor

Morton Gould Award for Innovative Programming:
Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel, Music Director

Leonard Bernstein Award for Educational Programming:
Minnesota Orchestra, Osmo Vänskä, Music Director

Awards for Programming of Contemporary Music:

Group 1 Orchestras (expenses more than $15.9 million):
First Place: New York Philharmonic, Alan Gilbert, Music Director
Second Place: The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra
Third Place: Nashville Symphony Orchestra, Giancarlo Guerrero, Music Director

Group 2 Orchestras (expenses $7.5 million – $15.9 million):
First Place: New World Symphony, America’s Orchestral Academy, Michael Tilson Thomas, Artistic Director
Second Place: Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, JoAnn Falletta, Music Director
Third Place: Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Jeffrey Kahane, Music Director

Group 3/4 Orchestras (expenses $2.0 million – $7.5 million):
First Place: Albany Symphony Orchestra (NY), David Alan Miller, Music Director and Conductor
Second Place: The New Haven Symphony Orchestra, William Boughton, Music Director
Third Place: Dayton Philharmonic, Neal Gittleman, Music Director and Conductor

Group 5/6 Orchestras (expenses $550,000 – $2.0 million):
First Place: American Composers Orchestra, Robert Beaser, Artistic Director/George Manahan, Music Director, Derek Bermel, Creative  Advisor
Second Place: Berkeley Symphony, Joana Carneiro, Music Director
Third Place: Princeton Symphony Orchestra, Rossen Milanov, Music Director, Princeton Symphony Orchestra

Group 7/8 Orchestras (expenses less than $550,000):
First Place: The New England Philharmonic, Richard Pittman, Music Director and Conductor
Second Place: Yakima Symphony Orchestra, Lawrence Golan, The Helen N. Jewett Music Director
Third Place: Pioneer Valley Symphony, Paul Phillips, Music Director and Conductor

Collegiate Orchestras:
First Place: Ithaca College Symphony Orchestra, Jeffery Meyer, Director of Orchestras
Second Place: Lamont Symphony Orchestra, Lawrence Golan, Music Director and Conductor
Third Place: Cornell University Orchestras, Chris Younghoon Kim, Director of Orchestras

Youth Orchestras:
First Place: Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestras, Allen Tinkham, Music Director
Second Place: Empire State Youth Orchestras, Helen Cha-Pyo, Music Director and Youth Orchestra Conductor
Third Place: New York Youth Symphony, Ryan McAdams, Music Director

Festivals:
First Place: Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, Marin Alsop, Music Director and Conductor
Second Place: Aspen Music Festival and School, Asadour Santourian, Vice President for Artistic Administration and Artistic Advisor

Contemporary Classical

One Singer, One Act – Hold the Erwartung

David Robertson will lead the New York Philharmonic in Shostakovich‘s Symphony No. 1, Rachmaninoff‘s The Isle of the Dead, and Schoenberg‘s Erwartung, with the commodious soprano  Deborah Voigt as soloist, on Thursday, June 9, 2011, at 7:30 p.m., Friday, June 10, at 8:00  p.m., and Saturday, June 11, at 8:00 p.m.  You can win a pair of tickets for the June 10 performance;  Just name all the one singer, one act operas you can think of.  The person, or maybe persons, with the most wins the tickets.  You are on the honor system not to Google.

Contemporary Classical

Trade you a Phil Glass for a Billy Bolcom and a composer to be named later

As a boy, Joe Polisi dreamed of being a major league baseball player.  Alas, not everyone grows up to be Derek Jeter so Joe “settled” for becoming Dr. Joseph William Polisi, president of The Juilliard School since September 1984, bringing to that position his previous experience as a college administrator, a writer in the fields of music, public policy and the arts, and an accomplished bassoonist.  And, Wednesday, he made it into the Hall of Fame–not the one in Cooperstown, but the The American Classical Music Hall of Fame, a national institution, based in Cincinnati, the biggest little town in America IMHO,  that aspires to sustain and build interest in classical music by recognizing people and institutions that have made a significant contribution to the field.

Dr. Polisi was honored at a luncheon at Juilliard  (attended by your correspondent in a rare public appearance), along with six other 2010 inductees– Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Conductor Marin Alsop, composers William Bolcom and Philip Glass, the Emerson String Quartet (pictured above), and the music service organizations ASCAP and BMI.  On hand to accept their awards were the Emerson String Quartet, Dr. Polisi, ASCAP and BMI. Philip Glass will be honored in Cincinnati this fall, William Bolcom in Ann Arbor and Marin Alsop at a location and time to be determined.

The Classical Music Hall of Fame is the brainchild of Cincinnati businessman and civic leader David A. Klingshirn and inducted its first members in 1998.  It is located in historic Memorial Hall, which is next door to Music Hall, home of the Cincinnati Symphony and the Cincinnati Opera.  The  Inductees to the Hall of Fame are nominated by a specialist field of musicians, music educators, leaders in the music industry and its living inductees.  Nominations are made in six categories:  composer, conductor, performer, educator, performing ensemble and institution devoted to music.  Nominations are reviewed by the distinguished National Artistic Directorate members who recommend a final slate for endorsement by the Board of Trustees of the American Classical Music Hall of Fame.

Among the highlights of  Wednesday’s lunch and ceremony: composer John Corigliano spoke affectionately of the “human” side of ASCAP and its concert division’s work with classical composers.  Fellow composer Bruce Adolphe spoke eloquently of BMI and its relationship with classical music.  And Ara Guzelimian, dean and provost of Juilliard, introduced the Emersons with a brilliant historical review of recorded chamber music that was so eloquent it made me wish I hadn’t forgotten to bring my tape recorder.

Oh, also had a chance to meet and chat with human dynamo and exceptionally cute person Nina Perlove, who is the recently appointed executive director of the ACMHF, in addition to teaching flute at nearby Northern Kentucky University and polishing her image as “the internet flutist” with videos that have been viewed more than 7 million times on YouTube.   Look for the Classical Music Hall of Fame to become much more visible in social media spaces.  And don’t leave a huffy comment about the “cute person” crack.  I’m old (68 this week) and mostly harmless.

Contemporary Classical

Chat with Steven Stucky Live at Noon Today (Thursday)

Spring for Music, an annual festival of concerts by North American symphony and chamber orchestras at Carnegie Hall, was created in part to start a conversation about repertoire, about audience expectations, and about orchestral programming in general. To help continue this conversation, the festival is hosting a series of online events allowing participants to interact with members of the team in an open dialogue.

The second of these chats is today (Thursday) at noon with composer Steven Stucky, whose evening-long concert drama August 4, 1964 will be performed by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on May 11 as part of the Spring for Music festival. This is Steven’s conversation starter:

“How does a composer write a work about a failed President (Johnson) and a probable war criminal (McNamarra) without lapsing into propaganda? Does he have to check his personal opinions at the door? If a middle-class white composer writes music about the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, does he risk being patronizing? In writing a historical symphony does he steal the voices of those who actually went through the struggles of the movement, fought and died in Vietnam?”

You can join the conversation right here:

Contemporary Classical

Chat Live with Melinda Wagner Today at Noon

Spring for Music, an annual festival of concerts by North American symphony and chamber orchestras at Carnegie Hall, was created in part to start a conversation about repertoire, about audience expectations, and about orchestral programming in general. To help continue this conversation, the festival is hosting a series of online events allowing participants to interact with members of the team in an open dialogue.

The first of these chats is today (Monday) at noon with composer Melinda Wagner.  This is Melinda’s conversation starter:

“Composers do not work in a vacuum. Every kind of music we hear, old or new, ‘serious’, ‘popular’, colloquial or vernacular – every note is a part of our sound world, even those we don’t like very much. Embracing, even celebrating our influences while striving to create something personal- well, that is the challenge with every new piece. With something as incredible as Bach’s Brandenbergs, though, the challenges are much greater. I can we rid ourselves of any apprehension associated with ‘living up’ a composer of such great stature? How can we engage with the past without lapsing into parody and pastiche?”

You can join the conversation right here:

Contemporary Classical

The New Synthetists

There’s something happening here.  What it is has become a bit clearer (to me, at least) with the simultaneous arrival on my desk of new CDs by Todd Reynolds, the Kronos Quartet, the Now Ensemble and Build. Listened to back to back, ther family kinship is easily recognized. They have lots of cousins out there in the marketplace already and each month brings new examples.  So, what’s happening here?  Is it a new…sound? Impulse? Musical category? Dare we call it a “movement?”

But, wait, let’s back up for a moment.  There hasn’t been a major new music movement since minimalism and, let’s face it, those cats are getting a little gray around the whiskers. For the past few decades, “contemporary classical” (our favorite oxymoron) has been pretty much a free-for-all. Even more so since the Internet came along and provided an inexpensive distribution platform.  There have been only a relative handful of composers who have broken through to the commerical mainstream–spirtualists like Arvo Part, John Taverner, Eric Whitacre, Morton Lauridsen, world travelers like Osvaldo Golijov and Tan Dun, new romantics like Aaron Jay Kernis, flavor of the months like Nico Muhly.  But, what they have in common is that the music they create has little in common with each other.

Not so, the new…what shall we call them?  Let’s borrow a word from the post-impressionists who wanted to distinguish themselves from the original impressionists:  synthetism.  The New Synthetists are all searching for the same Holy Grail:  a blend of classical, rock, electronics, pop and world music that is both serious and fun and will build an audience for the future. They are mostly young, conservatory-trained musicians and composers, and they frequently work in collectives designed to bring players and composers–quite often they are both–together. What they write and play is mainly a new form of chamber music that is often amplified, played on “hybrid” instruments, and has a contagious melody, or hook, and a backbeat you can’t lose.  It is music designed for people who grew up on rock and is designed to sound as good in a roadhouse beer joint as in a concert hall.

Many of the Synthetists are entrepreneurs and marketers and their godparents are the Bang on a Can founders–David Lang, Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe–who realized many years ago that if they wanted to hear their music played they were going to have to build the production and marketing infrastructure to do it themselves.  Basically, BOAC succeeded by working around the record company/concert hall music establishment.  That is the model many of the new kids want to take.  The “hot” new record label–New Amsterdam, founded three years ago by composer Judd Greenstein and members of the Now Ensemble–describes itself as:  “…a non-profit-model record label and artists’ service organization that supports the public’s engagement with new music by composers and performers whose work grows from the fertile ground between genres.”

This sort of “between genre” music is frequenty played by established supergroups like Ethel, eighth blackbird, Alarm Will Sound and Kronos Quartet, which has been plundering sounds from the Third World for nearly 40 years now and always seems to be where the action is. It is played even more regularly by So Percussion, Now Ensemble, Newspeak, Icebreaker, JACK Quartet, Chiara Quartet, Victoire, Build and many others.

Its composers mainly belong to the past two generations although they seem to have absorbed all of music history and quote from it liberally. The latest generation to emerge–musicians centered around New Amsterdam Records and the Estatic Festival–includes composers like Missy Mazzoli, Judd Greenstein, Jefferson Friedman, Bobby Previte, Darcy James Argue, William Brittele, Matt McBane,  Sara Kirkland Snider.  The mostly older and longer established generation is more connected to the Bang on a Can/Cantaloupe/Innova/Ethel bloodline and includes Caleb Burhams, Neil Rolnick, Phil Kline, Tristan Perich, Evan Ziporyn and Todd Reynolds.  Especially Reynolds.

The ageless (try to find it in his bio) Todd Reynolds is the Eric Clapton of the electronically souped up violin. As a founder of Ethel in 1998 and a soloist, he has been one of–if not the–driving force behind the growth of synthetism.  His debut 2CD album Outerborough (Innova) is a dazzling display of genre-bending music and individual virtuosity. CD1 is devoted to Reynolds’ own compositions; CD2 contains pieces by other composers, including David T. Little, Phil Kline, Michael Gordon, and the Books’ Nick Zammuto.  Click on the first cut on CD1–Transamerica–and you immediately find yourself dancing down trip-hop lane as Reynolds lays some magic riffs over a groove from beatboxer Kid Beyond. It only gets better. Smoking, contagious, make up your own adjective. Outerborough is Reynolds’ Layla.

The same sense of contagious, genre-bending optimism fills the room when you cue up the opening track of the Now Ensemble’s sophomore album Awake. Judd Greenstein’s Change opens the set with a seductive and insistent flute line that is gradually grabbed and mashed up by the entire ensemble. If you’re not smiling by the end, try Prozac.  Patrick Burke’s Awake melds Javanese gamelan music with Western harmonic and formal techniques and builds to a frenetic ending. In a piece titled Burst, guitarist/composer Mark Dancigers asks the age-old musical question: What would happen if you melded the pentatonic guitar patterns of Ali “Farka” Touré with the counterpoint of Mozart?   The answer, of course, is synthetism.

Build’s second album–Place is a more demanding and coherent effort which is to be expected since all of the pieces were written by the violinist/composer Matt McBane. McBane’s writing, and the band’s playing, have both gotten a lot tighter since their debut EP. McBane uses not only the group’s standard instrumentation of violin, cello, piano, bass and drums, but also a 3-part trio for cello, piano and drums (Swelter); and a quintet (Anchor) that uses extensive arco bass, and vibraphone and concert bass drum instead of a drum set. The kickass piece on the album is called Cleave in which what sounds like a siren drone floats above a simple, repeated piano line and a funereal march on the drums.

Finally, for now anyway, there is the venerable Kronos Quartet’s musicial tsunami Uniko (Ondine), a seven-part work by the Finnish composer/amplified accordian virtuoso Kimmo Pohjonen and percussionist/sampling guru Samuli Kosminen. (If Todd Reynolds is the Clapton of the souped up fiddle; Pohjonen is the Hendrix of the souped up accordian.) The piece was premiered at the Helsinki Festival in 2004 and has been performed by Kronos and its composers several times since but it has just now made it to a recording, mixed BTW by Bjork’s producer Valgeir Sigurðsson. (Are those old dudes in the Kronos cool or what?) You have to hear Uniko to believe it but imagine that Phil Spector exploded over the North Atlantic and sent a 90-foot wall of sound hurtling toward Brooklyn.  I don’t know what that means either but let’s keep going.

While there is a lot of stylistic variation in how each of the musicians and composers mentioned here write and play music, they are bound together by a common ambition to redefine “classical” music for the 21st century by speaking to new audiences in a language they understand.  The infrastructure is coming together.  Bridges are being built.  Great music is being created and heard.  I have not been this optimistic about new music’s future in a long time.

Note: I made a few edits to correct a couple of sloppy facts pointed out by Matt Marks in the comments.