At the suggestion of an admirer of Sequenza21, I filled out and submitted an application last night to A National Summit on Arts Journalism, a project of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the National Arts Journalism Program, which will feature five competitively-chosen projects at its annual conference on October 2. It would be great if S21 were one of them.

I hope the judges don’t take away too many points for typos. The form was one of those where you paste your stuff in but you can’t see it all while you’re working or fix it later and I’m getting a little senile besides.

Our application is now online here and you can leave comments which I hope some of you will do.

If you have a project of your own you want to submit, better hurry. Applications close Monday.

One fateful morning in the fall of 2004, I opened the door to pick up my New York Times and found instead a wooden basket containing a pale homo sapien wearing large black glasses who appeared, at first glance, to be a nerdish cousin of Edgar Winter but, as it turned out,  was a young  graduate student named David Salvage, fresh out of Sweet Apple, Ohio.   David was pursuing a Ph.D. at CCNY while earning a few bucks on the side as a loneliness counselor at the late, lamented Tower Records classical shop.

This is about the time that I had decided to transform Sequenza21 into something more substantial than a pretext to get some free CDs and began switching the site to a blogging community. I recognize free labor when I see it and David was eager to help. He began doing reviews and writing posts and bringing other bright young composers and musicians into the family.

By 2006, the site was doing pretty well and David (along with another odd young man named Galen Brown) took the lead in organizing the first ever Sequenza21 live concert, persuading CCNY to lend us a space, and organizing musicians and all that.  It was roaring success despite the fact that it ran so long we didn’t get to eat David’s mother’s cookies and I got stuck with a $300 post-concert bar/restaurant tab because nobody would go home.

David and Galen were also the prime organizers of two terrific Sequenza21 concerts last year, in partnership with the Lost City Ramblers…what?  Oh, the wonderful Lost Dog Ensemble–one in Queens and one Manhattan.  I am happy to report that none of the Sequenza21 concerts involved any effort from me other than mailing the occasional check.

I talked to David dad at this year’s Manhattan concert and got some sense of what it is like for a perfectly normal, non-musical, Frank and Dino-loving, middle-class family from Sweet Apple, Ohio to be invested with a spooky kid who climbs up on the piano bench and starts noodling Bach at five-years-old and whose piano teacher tells you after a few months of training that “he’s got to have a better piano.”  Dad is still reeling from the sticker shock.

Dad has reason to be pleased now because David finally has a real job.  After a couple of busy years of indentured servitude for CCNY in Brooklyn, David finished and successfully defended his dissertation (on the other Hungarian, not Ligeti), got his doctorate, and is leaving New York this week to begin his new tenure-track position as an instructor in theory and composition at Hampden-Sydney College, located, oddly enough, in Sweet Apple, Virginia.

He assures us that he is not abandoning Sequenza21 and will be contributing from time to time and possibly even organizing a Sequenza21 concert in Washington,  which is the closest civilization to Sweet Apple.  Any co-conspirators in the DC area are invited to co-conspire.

All kidding aside, I have come to love David.  He’s done terrific things for Sequenza21, the concerts would not have happened without him. We wish him all the best.

From:  Eve Beglarian

hi my friends,

some of you already know that I’ve developed an obsession with the Mississippi River and its place in American culture, politics, and geography. I’ve spent the last several months getting ready to journey down the river at a human-powered pace, investigating what the river means at this particular moment in our shared lives. I’ll be starting at the headwaters at Lake Itasca, Minnesota on August 1 and expect to arrive in New Orleans in late November or early December. I’ll make work in response to the journey, and then next season I imagine traveling back up the river retracing my path, performing the work I’ve made in response to the first trip.

I have designed the trip not as a solo journey but as a shifting set of collaborations with various friends and colleagues who will be traveling with me for shorter or longer periods, shaping my perspective in varying ways depending on their passions and interests. My first two collaborators are the linguist and historian Richard Steadman-Jones, with whom I will be working on a project called Archive of Exile, and Mac Walton, a musician and adventurer with whom I share many interests that will undoubtedly take shape in some fun way I can’t yet predict.

we will be making the trip by a combination of kayak and bicycle, with a backup car carrying our gear. the three of us just spent a couple of days in Minneapolis getting outfitted with a kayak, (see below for evidence) and we’re leaving tomorrow for Lake Itasca, and I am so excited about all this I can barely speak!

I won’t be sending email announcements like this very often if at all over the next few months, so before heading out, I’m inviting you to follow along with me on the blog I’ve set up at http://evbvd.com/riverblog/

I think it’d be really great if we can create a community of virtual wayfarers or something like that! you can also follow me on twitter (evbvd) and/or facebook (eve.beglarian) if that’s your thing. and if you want to meet up in person along the way, let me know! while part of this trip feels like some kind of quest or pilgrimage, I don’t imagine it as a retreat in any sense, but an engagement, a seeking, and I invite you to join me in whatever ways might be meaningful to you, whether vicarious or actual.

in the meantime, I hope you have a great rest of your summer!

xoxox

evb

Only if it’s not likely to

Can the believed-in happen.

                       James McMichael

And now, God help us, The Blues, Up and Down. One..two…

Sir Edward Downes, one of Britain’s most distinguished orchestra conductors, flew to Switzerland last week with his terminally-ill wife and joined her in drinking a lethal cocktail of barbiturates provided by an assisted-suicide clinic.  He was not ill.

I wish I had that kind of courage.

Almost everyone on the web has seen this by now but if you haven’t, take a look.  It’s a classic example of don’t-get-mad-get-even.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo[/youtube]

Seriously nasty review of the Bang on a Can Marathon over on the Huffington Post (HuffPo, to its friends) by somebody I don’t know named Jan Herman. The review is faint enough but the killer is the tacked on comment at the end:

“Look at these photos,” a friend writes, “and think of a bunch of dipshits making music with coffee grinders or Volan’s arty little piece appropriating South African tunes to make another of the limp-spined Left’s innocuous, feel-good, PC statements (and written about 30 years ago which makes its status as new music rather questionable). Beehive music is a good term for Bang on a Can. It’s a collective of yuppie drones and worker bees legitimizing blinkered Honkiness with cute Kultur.”

Why can’t we all just get along?