Author: Jay Batzner

Chamber Music, Classical Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Music Events, New York

RighteousGIRLS CD release party

RighteousGIRLS will be celebrating their new disc gathering blue with a release party at Joe’s Pub at 7 P.M. this Friday, August 7th. Flutist Gina Izzo and pianist Erika Dohi will, of course, be there to throw down with their exciting and inventive program and they will be joined by Kendrick Scott & Andy Akiho as well!

RighteousGIRLS collected an exceptional collection of genre-blending works using flute, piano, electronics, guest performers, improvisation, and all the things that make today’s contemporary music engaging and exciting.

A video of Pascal Le Boeuf’s piece GIRLS as well as audio of Andy Akiho’s KARakurENAI can all be found on the gathering blue site.

Composers featured on the disc are:

  • Andy Akiho
  • Ambrose Akinmusire
  • Pascal Le Boeuf
  • Christian Carey (Sequenza21’s own!)
  • Vijay Iyer
  • Dave Molk
  • Mike Perdue
  • Jonathan Ragonese
  • Randy Woolf

Tickets are $15 in advance or $20 at the door.

by Jay Batzner
Classical Music, Composers, Resources, Websites

Online Score Distribution Options

The common plight of the self-publisher is the issue of distribution. Sure, we all have access to professional-grade notation software and binding equipment but these tools do not help us get our work into the hands of performers nor do these tools help us find potential interested groups and expand our music into the larger world. The internet has been a boon for distributing other self-developed media, be it Bandcamp, Tunecore, CD Baby, Soundcloud, Vimeo, or YouTube. In recent years similar sites have been popping up to assist with the distribution of printed materials. Lulu.com is marketed towards self-published authors and provides storefront tools for selling any bound printed materials. Music is certainly possible on this site but two sites are interested in selling their services to self-published composers. The publishing firm JW Pepper launched its “MyScore” service about a year ago and more recently the site ScoreStreet.net has popped up to offer a similar service: give composers a place to distribute and sell their scores with the promise of reaching a larger audience.

MyScore and ScoreStreet both describe their services as ways to get your music to more people with less hands-on fuss. Each place takes over the printing and shipping of printed material, both offer digital sales, and neither site requires an exclusive contract with them. In other words, if you want to put some of your scores up on MyScore, some on ScoreStreet, and see which one works best for you then you are encouraged to do it. (more…)

by Jay Batzner
Composers, Conductors, Interviews, Media, Orchestras, Performers, The Business

TwtrSymphony: an Interview with Chip Michael

TwtrSymphony is an intriguing ensemble of musicians connected via social networking. Instead of working together to simply promote and distribute news about contemporary music, TwtrSymphony is a fully functional new music ensemble in absentia. The individual members of this orchestra never meet and rehearse as a group. Instead, the performers record their parts in isolation from each other, in widely different settings, and Musical Director Chip Michael and his merry band of engineers then assemble these recordings into cohesive works all 140 seconds in duration. Right now, TwtrSymphony is working on Chip Michael’s Second Symphony, Birds of a Feather, and the first movement “The Hawk Goes Hunting” was released on July 17.

While their website has a wealth of information including a recording, video, and thorough blog, I sat down with Chip on Monday night and chatted with him about the ensemble. While I should have kept a certain journalistic verisimilitude and had the exchange via Twitter, we opted for a slightly longer format (Skype).

Jay C. Batzner: Let’s start with the basics: what do you do in your role as Musical Director? Who else is involved (other than performers)?

Chip Michael: My role of Music Director is very organizational, pointing TwtrSymphony in the direction I think it needs to head and keeping the focus on what we need to do to get where we’re going. I am also the composer as that is a good portion of why TwtrSymphony got started.

I was looking for an orchestra to play my music and some of my Twitter friends suggested I start my own – a Twitter Symphony… and TwtrSymphony was born.

But, I want TwtrSymphony to be more than just a show case for my music. It’s a great concept, musicians from all around the world playing together. Musicians who might never get to play with other musicians making music. That’s cool. So, while I’ve written the first piece that we’re doing, Symphony No. 2 “Birds of a Feather,” I imagine a future when other composers can avail themselves of our ensemble.

As Music Director, I’m thinking about how the process works (and what doesn’t), what it means to be a symphony orchestra and how to get the pieces to fit together… so, when the time comes for us to have other composers work with the ensemble, we have the tools and setup to make sure it works right for both the musicians and the composer.

Nothing would be worse than for us to invite a composer to write something and have the end result be a horrible failure. So, in essence we’re using my music to test the waters.

We’re also in the process of re-designing the organization of TwtrSymphony. There is nothing formal to announce at this point, but the way we do things now isn’t the best way. Integrating the best crypto wallet into our operations will streamline our financial transactions, making it easier to distribute funds to artists and collaborators efficiently. This change addresses the current process of getting recordings out, which is time-consuming and requires a lot of engineering effort. A simple re-org should help that. As MD, I’m thinking about what’s best for the music and ways we can achieve quality and still maintain our global nature.

JCB: The idea behind TwtrSymphony, the idea of crowd-sourcing performers, is something that we’ve seen taking off recently. I think of Tan Dun’s and Eric Whitacre’s YouTube-based performances. This seems to be a logical technological outgrowth of the “write for your friends” mentality that a lot of composers use (and rightfully so).

CM: Yes… the concept of crowd-sourcing performers is nothing new. Neither is the idea of remote recording sessions to put together an ensemble. However, I’m not aware of any instrumental ensemble to the scale of TwtrSymphony that’s been done. 60+ musicians with 90+ tracks is a lot to manage when the recordings were done in different places, using different equipment…Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir comes the closest to what we’re doing. (more…)

by Jay Batzner