Our weekly listen and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online. (The “click picks” category at the bottom of this post isn’t working, but you can revisit all the previous “click picks” by clicking this link: https://www.sequenza21.com/index.php/?cat=29)

Soteria Bell (AU)

From Australia’s Time Off newspaper: If you’ve seen the latest Ray Lawrence flick Jindabyne, no doubt you’ve been entranced by the ethereal soundtrack. Written by Paul Kelly and Dan Luscombe, Kelly hand picked the Melbourne duo Soteria Bell, featuring Mia Shaw and Linda Laasi, to join him in creating the unnerving atmosphere the film’s score creates. “We had seen the film without music before the sessions began and in some cases Paul [Kelly] would remind us of a scene in the film, and then it was a matter of remembering that scene and trying to convey the emotion that was felt during it with our voices,” Mia Shaw says. “It was challenging, and a fantastic experience.” After collaborating on highly-acclaimed harmonic throat singer Dean Frenkel’s album Cosmosis, the duo are currently working on their debut 44 Sunsets, with first single ‘Dragma’ released soon. “The album is coming along really well,” she says. “We are working with great, creative people [and] we have a lot of special guests such as Frenkel on the album. “The album is varied, with an instrumental track, purely vocal layered tracks, and everything in between — we have had no boundaries for it! Also [we had] no real pre-conceived idea of what it should sound like. “It is definitely an exploration of the voice and what the voice is capable of, both organically and in some cases having been processed a little and played around with by our co-producer Simon Bailey.” And after the record is finished? “Once the album is done, we’ll be concentrating on live shows. How [we’ll] translate it all over from the studio to stage will be interesting, and we are very much looking forward to it!”

David Fenech (b. 1969 — FR) / Ghedalia Tazartes (b. 1947 — FR) / Frank Pahl (b. 1958 — US) / Julia Holter (US)

Somewhere in the nether region between pop/folk and classical/tech, flying well under most folks’ radar, a genre has quietly developed around the world. Its means are often low-tech and lo-fi, its sound like something born out of “the people”. But which “people” makes all the difference… This music isn’t the simple borrowing and mixing of this or that pop/art thread into the other; the imaginings of these folk take their work past the merely Synthetic, to a genuinely new Authentic. So, a music of “the people”, but a people that that these musicians’ own inner necessity had to invent. Naive, simple and direct… but really smart, complex, and purposely ambiguous. In that is every bit as much art as any with “classical” composer working today.

There are so many places I could point you to hear stuff from all over, both pioneers and fresh faces. But screw the history lesson; just listen to a couple of my own faves to get the idea.

And what better place to start than with David Fenech and his Demosaurus website? I can give you three artists to hear, each born in a different decade, all gathered in one place. I’ll let David introduce himself:

“David Fenech has been an active composer, performer, and improviser for over ten years in France. His works include acoustic, electronic, tape, and digital media, including sound installations and film scores. After creating the musical collective peu importe in Grenoble in 1991 (free improvisation and songs – many gigs in Europe) his music has shifted to more personal and strange areas, mainly using voice as an instrument. In 2000 he released his first solo CD, called Grand Huit. As a soloist, David plays guitar and ukulele as well as small instruments such as melodica, cavaquinho, toy piano and xylophone. He recorded concrete music at la Muse en Circuit with Laurent Sellier, at the Coream studio with Claude Hermitte. He also wrote the score for Tant de chiens, a short movie by Stephane Ricard; they then worked together on an interactive installation called Eloise, based on the idea of a musical tamagotchi.”

From the Forced Exposure website: Ghedalia Tazartes is a nomad. He wanders through music from chant to rhythm, from one voice to another. He paves the way for the electric and the vocal paths, between the muezzin psalmody and the screaming of a rocker. He traces vague landscapes where the mitre of the white clown, the plumes of the sorcerer, the helmet of a cop and Parisian anhydride collide into polyphonic ceremonies…. The greatest trips are made in the deep end of the throat: the extra-European music opens the ear to Ghedalia’s intra-European exoticism. Where was music before music halls? Where was the voice before it learned how to speak? Ghedalia is the orchestra and a pop group all in one person…. The author and his doubles work without a net, freely connecting the sounds, the rhythms, his voice, his voices.

And back to David: “Frank Pahl is a fantastic musician…. a one man band, also known as a member of Only a Mother, playing a raw music on acoustic instruments (we can hear ukuleles, prepared piano, clarinets, euphonium). Beautiful melodies seem to come out from nowhere…. the unknown world of inventive folklore. With Brian Poole (Renaldo and the Loaf), Dennis Palmer (Shaking Ray Levi), Nick Didkovsky (Dr. Nerve , Fred Frith guitar quartet), Doug Gourlay, Tim Holmes and Eugene Chadbourne.”

About Julia Holter, I can tell you almost nothing, except: She’s pretty young, studies music (first in Michigan, now in California), has a penchant for giving small intimate concerts in her own home and likes to collaborate in all kinds of settings. Her open ears let all kinds of influences freely mingle, which are then shaped into wonderfully sensitive, naive-yet-waaay-smart miniatures. She doesn’t have an official website, only her Myspace page, and it only allows four tracks at any moment. But Julia changes the four out regularly, so drop by now and then to see what new treat has shown up. (I have ten great tracks now; be the first on *your* block to collect them all!)

Our weekly listen and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online:

John Mark Sherlock (b. 1970 — Canada)

I first discovered John’s work years ago on the venerable MP3 site Vitaminic. It’s often intimate, long, subtle and irrational; from some other things I’ve heard out of there, I think the breath of Feldman blew out of Buffalo, took a detour around Montréal, and ended up finding a home in Toronto. From an article by Michael Maclean: ….John Mark Sherlock is connecting to the music as well. The Toronto composer toils happily, if somewhat obscurely, in the city’s contemporary music scene, writing commissioned pieces for performers and small dance companies. He is in love with old electronic keyboards: Hammond organs, Rhodes pianos. His music blends their sounds with traditional orchestral instruments. His works are a response to the music he loves, from pop songs to classical works to jazz. Composing for him begins with what he envisions as a kind of musical shipwreck, “with all this flotsam and jetsam floating around on the surface, and I’m just hanging on to a piece of something”. A generous selection of listening awaits under the “audio” button.

Ava Mendoza (US)

I’ll just let Ava’s own direct, no-B.S. words do the talking:

“I am a guitar player, composer and quasi-electronic musician in Oakland, CA. I play improvised music/weird rock/original compositions. Improvised music was the first type of music that I got seriously interested in as a teenager, and I suppose any musical roots I have are in free improvisation.. That said, some of my music does not involve any improvisation at all — I indulge the anal retentive side of my personality by composing tape (fixed media electronic) pieces, and also sometimes very through-composed instrumental pieces. Some of my solo guitar compositions draw a lot from early country and blues music, sort of reworked in my own way. I am an extremely curious person and love a lot of very different sorts of music. I started improvising as a teenager, when I luckily met some socially-ostracized kids who introduced me to free jazz. At the time I was at Interlochen Arts Academy studying classical guitar. Soon after, I happily abandoned the classical guitar and began improvising on electric guitar. (My first electric guitar was a Peavey Raptor, which is not a very good guitar at all.) I graduated from Mills College, where I studied electronic music with John Bischoff and Maggi Payne. I spent a lot of my time at Mills ignoring my guitar and focusing on tape (electronic) composition. I call myself a quasi-electronic musician because I really don’t do much with electronics live, I though I’ve worked intensively on tape pieces. My recent focus has been on playing amplified acoustic guitar and trying to get a range of electronic-like textures out of the instrument without using many effects. I’ve been working a lot on playing solo, both fixed compositions and freely improvised.”

Don’t visit expecting to hear chamber concertos, but do expect some young, unafraid and vital soundplay.

Federico Rueben (b. 1978 — Costa Rica / EU) & Mauricio Pauly (b. 1976 — Costa Rica / EU)

Two composers, both native to Costa Rica but currently living in Europe (Rueben in the Netherlands and Pauly in England), team up to share this website. Quick bio sketches:

Federico Reuben trained as a pianist since the age of 9. He studied politics for two years at the Universidad de Costa Rica in San José before leaving to the United States in 1999 to study composition with Lawrence Moss at the University of Maryland. Since September 2002 he has been living in The Netherlands and studying at the Koninklijk Conservatorium with Gilius van Bergeijk and Martijn Padding where he earned his Bachelors Degree in 2003. Currently he is enrolled as a postgraduate student at the same institution studying composition with Louis Andriessen and Richard Ayres.

Mauricio Pauly studied composition in San José (Costa Rica), Miami and Boston (USA) with Lukas Foss, Richard Cornell, Fredrick Kaufman and others. As a bass player, Mauricio recorded two live albums with Costarican pianist Manuel Obregón and toured most of Central America with the legendary José Capmany and Café con Leche. In the US, he worked as a free-lance bassist and teacher. Currently is in the process of moving to the UK to begin a research-based PhD at the University of York. He is a founding member of the áltaVoz ensemble, a group of five composers of Latin-American origin who are now spread around America and Europe, organizing concerts in collaboration with other ensembles and performers, for the promotion of their music.

Don’t let the quirky website (navigation on the right half calls up stuff on the left) defeat you; each has a link to “works” that will give you lots of listening to highly varied and imaginative pieces. (Rueben’s are marked as MP3s; Pauly’s recordings are found as ZIP files by clicking on the work’s title). The site also chronicles other projects they’re involved with, with some further listening.

Our weekly listen and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening right online:

Andrew McKenna Lee (US)

A native of Charleston, South Carolina, Andrew began his musical studies on the guitar at age twelve, going on to pursue composition in his late teens. He completed his undergraduate work at Carnegie Mellon University in 1997 and finished his Masters degree in 2000 at the Manhattan School of Music. His teachers have included Leonardo Balada, Richard Danielpour, Louis Andriessen, Magnus Lindberg, David Del Tredici and Steven Mackey. He’s currently in the Ph.D. program in composition at Princeton University.

As a guitarist, he’s studied privately with James Ferla and David Leisner, and is currently a student of Laura Oltman at Princeton University. In recent years, his music’s been performed by the Brentano String Quartet, ensemble ereprijs, Talujon, the New Jersey Symphony, Kroumata, Proteus, Janus, and eighth blackbird. He’s participated in numerous festivals, including the International Music Festival of Toroella de Montgrí, Spain, International Gaudeamus Week of the Netherlands, the Stockholm Arts and Sciences Festival, and the Aspen and Norfolk Chamber Music Festivals. His music has also been heard on WNYC’s New Sounds series with host Jonathan Schaefer.

Take a long and leisurely browse through the “Music” link on his sharp-looking site. There are recordings for many, many of his excellent works, and Lee’s own performances on guitar are just phenomenal (for a stunning combination of the two, find his Variation, Fixation, and Fantasy after a Prelude by Bach or his Scordatura Suite).

Missy Mazzoli (b. 1980 — US)

Missy (Melissa) Mazzoli is one of the new wave of scarily smart young composers, who don’t see why their command of the “serious” side of modern classsical should have to sit behind any boundary between it and the culture we actually live in day-to-day. Born in Lansdale, Pennsylvania to a “wonderfully supportive and happily tone deaf family”, she began playing piano at age 7, and composing at age 10. During high school she played piano and percussion with local orchestras and guitar with several punk bands. From 1998 to 2002 she attended Boston University, studying composition with John Harbison, Richard Cornell, Charles Fussell and Martin Amlin, and piano with Maria Clodes-Jaguaribe. In 2002 Missy received a Fulbright grant and traveled to the Netherlands, where she studied with Louis Andriessen, Martijn Padding and Richard Ayres at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague. In 2004 she was composer-in-residence at STEIM, Amsterdam’s center for electronic music, where she created electro-acoustic works for the Utrecht-based Insomnio Ensemble. In May, 2006 she received her Master’s degree from the Yale School of Music, where she studied composition with Aaron Kernis, Martin Bresnick and David Lang. At the “audio” link under her “Contents” menu, you’ll find a number of MP3s well worth your while.

Steve Peters (b. 1959 — US)

Long a force in the new-music scene in New Mexico but relocated to Seattle these last couple years, Steve creates music and sound for galleries, museums, public places, dance, theater, film/video, radio, recordings, and concerts. The work is often site-specific, made with recorded sounds of the environment and found/natural objects, or through exploration of acoustic phenomena; instruments and spoken text occasionally make an appearance. He no longer performs live, except as a member of the Seattle Phonographers Union. Steve also works as a freelance producer, writer and curator, and runs a non-profit called Nonsequitur which presents a monthly series of events related to all of the above.

….And truth told, he’s also a pal of mine from way back; we missed each other at the same college by only a year. He fell into some of my old circle of friends there, sent me a letter or two, and struck up a friendship that’s going on 25 years now. Many of Steve’s pieces of “music” are very long, meaning that the 10- or 15-minute MP3s here are often excerpts; still, they’ll give you a very good idea of his own particularly beautiful, enigmatic sound world.

Our weekly listen and look at composers and performers that you may not know yet, but should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer a good chunk of listening online:

Larry Polansky (b. 1954 — US)

Larry Polansky’s been a one-man compositional exploratorium for at least thirty years now. Audiences may not be too familiar with him or his work, but composers of all stripes are. He’s always moved easily between east-coast rationalism, digital-electro-geekdom, “downtown” experiments, and west-coast looseness, any and all of which can show up in his next piece. A happy champion of others’ work as well, besides performing he’s also known for his efforts to focus serious attention on such neglected 20th-century women composers as Ruth Crawford Seeger and Johanna M. Beyer. Polansky’s humble, no-frills website may look plain, but it hides a wealth of information, articles, scores, and recordings. (Speaking of recordings, just to make your life easier I’ll give you the direct link to the large sound archive. You’ll find not only individual pieces, but entire out-of-print CDs available for downloading, as well as a number of MP3s of works by friends and colleagues.)

Festival de Musica Clasica contemporanea de Lima, Peru

Clicking the link above will actually take you to the second festival, held in 2004, but there are also links to the first and third editions, too. One of the great things about the web is that it doesn’t have to all be about New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam or Darmstadt; people are working hard at every bit as hard creating vital scenes in many more out-the-way places. A great case in point is the yearly festival of Peruvian and other Hispanic new-music happening the last few years in Lima. If you think new-music has it hard in the States, it’s got to be nothing compared to the tough row these folks have to hoe. And yet here they are, not waiting for you to hop a plane down their way, or read a half-paragraph in some journal. They’ve taken the initiative to bring the concerts straight to your living room. The only excuse you have now for not being aware is simply that you’re too lazy to click your finger once on a link; you don’t want to fall into that camp, now do you?… The list of composers from these three concerts is long and mostly completely unfamiliar. But don’t let that stop you; there’s a lot of wonderful muci here. Some favorites of mine from this second festival are Jimmy Lopez’s La caricia del cuchillo, Marco Antonio Mazzini’s Imprevisto, and Cesar Villavicencio’s Mundos. The files are indentified by title only; for the composers’ names look for the JPG image of the concert poster, or a PDF file also on the same page. Google can help you out a bit, too. The best link to start with is the Peruvian new-music collective Circomper. The link takes you to their blog, where you can find information on the festival, composers and works, as well as a number of other articles (Spanish only, though).

Monique Buzzarté (b. 1960 — US)

Fearless wild-woman of all things trombone! ….O.K, that’s my own shameless blurb-bomb; for something a little more considered, Monique herself sums it up perfectly in her own bio: — “Monique Buzzarté is an avid proponent of contemporary music, commissioning and premiering many new works for trombone alone, with electronics, and in chamber ensembles. A former student of Stuart Dempster and Ned Meredith, she holds B.A. and B. Mus. degrees from the University of Washington and a M.M. from the Manhattan School of Music and is certified to teach the meditative improvisation practices of Deep Listening. She has been a guest artist at the International Trombone Festival (2005) and the Eastern Trombone Workshop (2004). Ms. Buzzarté composes and performs electro-acoustic chamber music for Zanana, and is also is a member of the New Circle Five with Pauline Oliveros and Ekko!, a contemporary music quartet of mixed instrumentation. She can be heard on Zanana’s Holding Patterns (Deep Listening 30), John Cage’s Five3 with the Arditti Quartet (Mode 75: John CAGE: Vol. 19 – The Number Pieces 2), and Dreaming Wide Awake with the New Circle Five (Deep Listening 20). Sorrel Hays’ Wake Up and Dream and John Cage’s Thirteen and Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning with Essential Music are forthcoming. Since 1983 her New Music from Women: Trombone project has supported the expansion of the trombone repertoire by commissioning new compositions from women composers in a variety of genres. An author, activist, and educator as well as a performer/composer/improvisor, Ms. Buzzarté has published research on the brass music of women composers and coordinated advocacy campaigns for women in music, including efforts that led to the admission of women members into the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1997.” — Whew! What all this means for your ears is generously illustrated by following the “clips” link at the top of her homepage. (Though it says “clips”, a lot of these MP3s are full-length recordings of complete pieces.)

Our weekly listen and look at composers and performers that you may not know yet, but should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer a good chunk of listening online:

Johnny Chang (US / L.A.)

Violinist/composer/provocateur and eternally-hopeful Dodgers fanatic, Chang brings his amazing awareness and technique to everything from the toughest scores to the freest sonic explorations. Some of this exploration goes far enough to make you wonder “where’s the violin?”; but once you realize the point isn’t so much listening to the violin as it is to the violinist, you’ll be fine. This is ably documeted at his site, where under the “music” button you’ll find recordings of pieces by Cage, Brown, Pisaro, Saunders, Carter, Crane and Overton. Chang’s own inward-looking and intensely focused compositions can be heard on the same page. As a bonus, links on the main page will let you hear his collaboration with wonderful cellist Jessica Catron, called the Microscore Project. It’s whole slew of specifically-commissioned pieces, all running 30 seconds or less.

Alejandro Viñao (b. 1951)

Born and raised in Argentina, but long a British resident and citzen, Viñao’s work has been heard regularly across Europe and Asia, but fairly rarely here in the U.S. His own description of his music: “…characterised by the use of pulsed rhythmic structures to create large scale form, and by a melodic writing which — as in the case of much non-European music — develops through rhythm rather than harmony.” I’d call it “tough-lush”, a lot of color and propulsion, but also real “lines”. (A fun surprise is when exotic instruments show up in the thorny textures, no apologies offered!) The link “audio excerpts” will take you to good-sized excerpts of his work; don’t forget to follow the special link from that page, that takes you to an extensive taste of his opera “Rashomon”.

Laetitia Sonami (b. 1957 — France / US)

Cribbing her own bio for the basics: Laetitia Sonami was born in France and settled in the United States in 1975 to pursue her interest in the emerging field of electronic music. Her work combines text, music and “found sound” from the world, in compositions which have been descibed as “performance novels”. She is creating and utilizing some of the most sophisticated technologies in order to create an intimate, spontaneous art form which transcends technology…. If you have trouble picturing this, all I can do is tell you to listen. While Sonami’s site (linked above) has short audio clips to hear, where I really want to send you is to a complete recording of her work “She Came Back, Again“, courtesty of the Other Minds Archive at Archive.org (coincidentally, Other Minds just happened to announce their 12th festival program this week). This is a live performance from the Other Minds Festival #4, November 10th, 1997. Slightly surreal, austere, almost autistic yet strangely sensual, the piece is a waking dream, maybe a fairy tale, but I think just as much the musical equivalent of a David Lynch film.

Continuing our weekly listen to (and look at) a few composers and performers that you may not know yet, but should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer a good chunk of listening online:

Andreas Weixler (b. 1963 / Austria)

Composer, media artist and university lecturer, Weixler takes a strong interest in integrating digital and visual elements into his work, often in interactive, fluid situations. The site offers a good sampling of recordings (and some video), whether acoustic, electroacoustic, or multimedia (the last with plenty of description and images as well as sound).

Simon Steen Andersen (b. 1976 / Denmark)

A look at Simon’s site will show you a busy guy: the work list says he’s been extremely prolific, the concert list says a lot of people want to play his stuff, and there’s a half-dozen new works in progress as I write this. Much of what you’ll hear when you click that speaker graphic on his main page is pretty virtuostic, with a love for instrumental high-drama.

Nadia Sirota (b. 1982 / US, NY)

Nadia’s a young violist whose path seems almost ridiculously “fast-track”, throwing herself into as much in the last ten years than most do in two or three times that. Yet she’s never simply given herself over to the big-classics star-route; Nadia seems to be investing just as much energy and real enthusiasm in performing works by her close contemporaries. On her “sounds” page, new work by Ryan Streber, Nico Muhly, Marco Balter, Judd Greenstein and even another Sirota (Robert) stand every bit as proudly beside the Hindemith, Ligeti and Bergsma.