Classical Music

Chamber Music, Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, New York, North/South

Viva Max!

For the past 27 years, the Mexican-born pianist and composer Max Lifchitz has been a tireless and resourceful promoter of new music (including his own) through live performances and recordings with the North/South Consonance Ensemble, the chamber group of the non-profit North/South Consonance organization. Many young composers, particularly those of the Neoclassic or New Romantic temperment (Larry Bell comes immediately to mind), have gotten a career boost from Lifchitz’s annual programs and recordings, which now number nearly 50. 

I mention all this because North/South Consonance’s  final concert of the current season is coming up on Sunday afternoon June 17 at 3 PM and will take place at Christ & St. Stephen’s Church (120 West 69th St, NYC) on Manhattan’s West Side. Admission is free (no tickets necessary).

The program will feature two compositions involving narration: Igor Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat and Lifchitz’s The Blood Orange.  I personally detest works that involve people talking while I’m trying to listen to music, but apparently some people like it and many famous composers have written works for ensemble and spoken word. 

Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale was written at the end of World War I and is one of those Faustian/Devil Goes Down to Georgia things about trading in your soul for a fiddle.  Lifchitz says the work is being performed to mark the 125th anniversary of the birth of the composer and, in fact, it is being performed on June 17, the exact day Stravinsky was born in 1882 in a town near St Petersburg.

Lifchitz’s The Blood Orange is a setting of a text by New York City writer Kathleen Masterson, written especially for the actress Norma Fire, who will perform it.  The narrative with music relates the story of Fire’s parents who emigrated to this country before the Holocaust, and of their relatives who did not. Fire will be supported by violinist Claudia Schaer and Lifchitz on piano. 

Today’s musical question is:  Name the best pieces ever written for music and narration (and let’s get Copland and Honegger out of the way quickly).

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, Covent Garden

If I Swallow Anything Evil, Put Your Finger Down My Throat

Not quite sure what to make of this, but the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden in London has bought Opus Arte,  a leading for-profit maker and producer of performance DVDs.  The economics of high music culture have changed and more and more music groups of all sizes are moving toward control of production and distribution of their artistic “products,” as traditional avenues like record labels go belly up.  Where is our friend Pliable on this one?  

Here’s an update on David Salvage’s piece at the Harvard Club on June 11.  Starting time is 7pm, not 7:30 as we reported here yesterday.  The requirement to dress “spiffy” remains in effect. 

Update:  EMI has joined the other three major record labels in distributing music videos on YouTube.  In addition to making available clips, EMI and YouTube plan to develop a system that provides for consumer-created content that uses EMI music and video. Additionally, thanks to some new Apple software, the clips won’t just be available online but also on Apple TV — the device that lets people watch Internet video on TV screens

by Jerry Bowles
Chamber Music, Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical

David Does Harvard

dsheadsht.pngAttention Boston (and NY) shoppers!  The world-premiere run of David Salvage’s String Quartet No. 2 is at hand.  The Arcturus Chamber Ensemble will do the honors, starting this Friday, June 1, at 8pm, at Adams House JCR, Harvard University.  They’ll do it again on Saturday night at 7:30 at the First Religious Society, Carlisle and, just to be on the safe side, one more time on Monday, June 11 at 7:30pm, at the Harvard Club, here in the Center of the Universe. 

There will be other works on all the programs, probably by dead white guys.  The concerts are free and open to the public although the Harvard Club requires you to “look spiffy,” according to Master Salvage.  I used to go there years ago with my old buddy Whit Stillman (whatever happened to him anyway) and it was pretty tight-assed then.  Probably hasn’t changed much.

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical

Born in the U.S.A.

Composers, painters, writers, the whole motley lot–have always depended upon the kindness of strangers. Timely financial interventions of the Lorenzo de’ Medici here, the Nadezda von Meck there, the Paul Sacher over there have greased the skids for the makers of many of the world’s great masterpieces.  Alas, those sort of patrons aren’t that plentiful nowadays and so a new “community” model of patronage has sprung up in which arts organizations pool their resources to commission new works.  I call it the “Biegel” method after S21 blogger and pianist Jeffrey Biegel.  I suspect he wasn’t the first to do it but he has turned joint financing of commissions into an art and a bustling career.

Joan Tower’s Made in America, which will be released by Naxos next Tuesday, is the latest example of the art of the deal, new music-style, and it adds an intriquing new wrinkle–a corporate sponsor. The project began as an attempt by 65 small orchestras from around the United States to pool their resources to commission a new work by a major American composer. With the help of the American Symphony Orchestra League, Meet The Composer, and Ford Motor Company Fund, (the latter patronage leading to the fortuitous branding, Ford Made in America), the project has brought Tower’s piece to towns nationwide.

Made in America, premiered in Glens Falls, New York in October 2005, and has received over 80 performances—making it perhaps the most-performed piece of new music in recent history—and is still making the rounds on the concert circuit.        

The new Naxos recording marks the first appearance of new Music Advisor Leonard Slatkin on record with the Nashville Symphony.

As for the music itself:  it’s not Ligeti but you knew that.  Made in America is more like a Copland chocolate plucked from a Whitman Americana Sampler.  Gooey and slightly pre-chewed, but you kind of like it.  

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Contemporary Classical

Ranking the Music Blogs

Scott Spiegelberg of Musical Perceptions is a very brave man who obviously doesn’t have enough abuse going on in his life.  (By the way, we should have been number four, not number five.  Scott’s methodology in adding two numbers is whacked–he should have averaged the two numbers for Opera Chic, not added them together.)

And, hey, Teachout doesn’t write that much about music so let’s throw him out of mix, too.  So, let’s see; that makes us number 3. 

Not that we’re competitive or anything.

by Jerry Bowles
Chamber Music, Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical

Down, Cujo. Down.

Okay, sports fans, here’s something you’ll like.  Today, beginning at 6 pm PST and running through midnight (That would be 9 pm to 3 am {thanks, Andrea for straightening me out} here in the Center of the Universe), KFJC radio in Los Altos Hills, CA is doing a 6-hour special focusing on Berio’s Sequenzas.

Cujo, a dj on KFJC and Sequenza21 peruser, has lined up some stellar color commentary for this one.  In addition to a live performance on flute, you’ll hear from from David Osmond-Smith, author of the only existing English Berio book (with more to come), Janet Halfyard, editor of the forthcoming Berio Sequenzas, and Brian Brandt, chief of Mode Records. (I believe I was invited to participate in some way but forgot about it–one of the hazards of being 64.) 

Cujo provides several good reasons why we should all listen.  We will:

o learn why you should be disgusted when the trombone sequenza is played in a clown costume

o learn about the beef between Rostropovich and Berio

o understand exactly how Berio learned to write so virtuosically for such uncommon instruments.  (Seriously, accordion?).

If you continue to listen beyond midnight, you will be treated to KFJC’s annual Night and Day of the Sun, a 24-hour tribute to Sun Ra on his birthday.

Chances are you don’t get KFJC on your radio, but thanks to the miracle of the Internets you can listen online here.  As it says on the station’s Netcast page, “Ain’t technology wonderful.”

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Music Events, New York

Blue Jeff

The Composers Concordance is having a concert tomorrow night at 8PM at the Greenwich House Music School Renee Weiler Concert Hall, 46 Barrow Street which will star our very own Jeff Harrington.  Okay, there are some other composers on the program, too, but none as adventuresome or all-round lovable as our favorite geek-composer.  Paul Hoffmann will perform the New York premiere of Jeff’s brilliant Big Easy mashup, Blue Strider.  You’ll find the full schedule for the program here. 

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Music Events, New York

Multi-Culti

Marco 004.JPG                           Marco Antonio Mazzini is a Peruvian clarinetist with an Italian name who lives in Belgium and plays with a Czech orchestra called the Ostravska Banda which–as fate would have it–is joining the Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble for a good-looking program (Brown, Wolpe, Stockhausen, Xenakis) of modern music at Zankel Hall Monday night.  There will be a preview performance Sunday night at the Willow Place Auditorium in Brooklyn Heights. Marco would be up for organizing a Sequenza21 concert in Ghent sometime if we have some Euro-interest.

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Other Minds, San Francisco

All We Hear is Radio Ga-Ga

Our West Coast colleagues at Other Minds marked what would have been Lou Harrison’s 90th birthday on Monday by relaunching radiOM.org, their amazing, free treasure trove of streaming audio and video programs that span the history of new music. 

The still expanding Other Minds Archive contains 4,500 hours of recorded materials, which includes 3,500 hours of audiotape recordings from the KPFA Radio Music Department collection; highlights from past Other Minds Music Festivals; materials from the private archive of composer George Antheil; selected programs from the Cabrillo Music Festival, and other rare and unusual recordings of classical music, jazz, and experimental forms.  This unparalleled collection of on-air performances, interviews, concerts, rehearsals, conversations and more, is now available completely free of charge at www.radiOM.org.

Artists represented in the collection include John Adams, Laurie Anderson, Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, John Cage, Lou Harrison, Henry Kaiser, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Igor Stravinsky, Virgil Thomson, and Frank Zappa, among hundreds of others.

Elsewhere, here’s some film of a fist fight at the Boston Pops.

And this is pretty amazing.

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Contemporary Classical

Will You Still Need Me, Will You Still Feed Me?

We’ve gotten a lot (actually, three) requests for a “media kit” from potential advertisers recently.  We don’t actually have such a thing because we don’t actively look for advertising (the Lincoln Center folks and a couple of record companies sometimes contact me when they want to promote something and I charge them a few bucks–if I remember to send an invoice).  Sequenza21 is my hobby, my love and–thanks to all you nice folks who create an enormous amount of entertaining content in your comments, posts and forums–it is a remarkably inexpensive and low maintenance undertaking.

It occurs to me, though, that if we were a little more active in looking for sponsors or advertisers we might be able to do a few more things as a community–more S21 concerts, for example, perhaps in other cities or maybe a commissioning fund.  Maybe we could team up with a performing group.  (How about the Sequenza21 All-Stars?) 

So, here’s our media kit.  We get about 30,000 unique visitors a month and 60,000 page views–nearly all of them musicians or composers. In terms of influence, we rank near the top (Alex Ross) in the Technorati “classical music” rankings.  We have an extremely loyal following–more than 70% of the people who come here are returning visitors. 

We charge $150 a month for up to 145×145 pixels ad and $250 a month for a 145×290 pixels ad in the right sidebar.

If you’d like to become a $1,000 a year sponsor, you can have a
permanent 145×145 pixel ad (which you can change as often as you like); $1,500 gets you a permanent 145×190 ad for 12 months.  $2,500 gets you that–plus a blog@sequenza21 that you get to write yourself.

Of course, if you’re a regular and have no funding I’m happy to help you promote your project free.  I owe you nice folks more than you know.

by Jerry Bowles