Click Picks

Broadcast, Click Picks, Composers, Contemporary Classical

Heading North

clockwise from top left: John Rea, Claude Vivier, Emily Hall, Aaron GervaisMaybe it’s all that cold, dark and ice; stuck inside with nothing else to do for a lot of days must be conducive to composition. At least it feels that way with regard to Canada, since this huge but relatively sparsely-populated space has what seems a disproportionate number of composers that I just love.

And now the Canadian Music Centre has made it awfully easy for YOU to love them as well; at their site you’ll now find a service called CentreStreams, which offers streaming access to the Ann Southam Audio Archive. This comprises a huge number of concert and radio recordings made by the CBC, of Canadian composers A to Zed. Not only that: where else could you find 41 (!) archival recordings of seminal Canadian composer Claude Vivier‘s music — with no less than 6 (!!) different versions of Pulau dewata — all at your computer’s beck and call? They also have a nifty feature that can give you a random paylist by genre (piano, orchestra, vocal, etc.), so your listening experience is never the same twice. Many composers even have the scores of works freely available as PDF files.

You do have to register (free) to get the streams, but it’s quick and painless. CentreStreams is accessible from the CMC homepage, but even easier is heading to the “find a composer” section and browsing the alphabet. Besides the established names there’s also a fair collection of the young guns as well, so you can be right expert on contemporary Canadian music in no time! Personal favorites old and new, that I can pretty well guarantee for excellence, are John Rea, Claude Vivier, Emily Hall, Aaron Gervais (all four pictured above), José Evangelista, R. Murray Schafer, Melissa Hui, John Mark Sherlock, Linda Catlin Smith, Allison Cameron, Rodney Sharman, Monique Jean, Gyula Csapo, Louis Dufort, Gilles Tremblay, John Kosrud, Chiyoko Szlavnics… the list goes on and on. What better way to pass a little of your own closed-in winter days, than discovering some new favorite piece or composer?

by Steve Layton
Broadcast, Chamber Music, Click Picks, Contemporary Classical, Downtown, Improv, Video

A Tale of Two Riffs and Two Rituals

What better way to ring in the year than to take in a couple ensembles, from opposite ends of the spectrum, showing in much the same way what the whole point of playing is?

Wojciech Kilar is a Polish composer from the same 60’s group that gave us Penderecki and Gorecki, but is notable for his detour into film music (Like Coppola’s Dracula). This is his utterly simple/hard 1988 piece Orawa (there are a bunch of other video performances of this on YouTube, but this one with Agnieszka Duczmal conducting the Chamber Orchestra “Amadeus” has them all beat for pacing and enthusiasm. Just ignore that couple-second blast of other music at the start):

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri-RNT03DL8[/youtube]

 

For all his jazz-lite leanings, David Sanborn (with Hal Willner’s savvy music coordination) has always had my eternal gratitude for hosting one of the most phenomenal major-network music offerings, NBC’s Night Music, which ran between 1988 and 1990. Not least for this wonderful clip of Sun Ra and the Arkestra taking us all to a higher plane:

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

Two really different approaches perhaps, but both seem to work some of the same ground and head to the same place in the end. May what we attempt in the coming year get lucky enough to find that place too, at least once or twice…

by Steve Layton
Click Picks, Performers, Video

Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow

I know, almost everyone’s felt stuck in the icebox as of late, and probably getting a little stir-crazy. Well, why not take a cue from the good folk of Nunavut and cheer up with a bit of throat singing? Let Lois Suluk-Locke and Karen Panigoniak from Arviat (pop. 2000 and some spare change) show you how it’s done:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1YkYh43V_Y[/youtube]

by Steve Layton
Choral Music, Click Picks, Composers, Contemporary Classical

Happy Birthday Already

Jean BergerYep, Elliott Carter has gotten (and is getting) his proper due, so time to jump ahead and perpare for some 2009 action… Though it’s a little sparse for 100th-year blockbusters, there’s always Elie Siegmeister, Grazyna Bacewicz, Harald Genzmer, Rodolfo Cornejo, Robin Orr, John Raynor, Thorleif Aamodt, Paul Constantinescu, Gianandrea Gavazzeni, Georgi Aleksandrovich Mushel, Sergius Kagen, Arwel Hughes, Ādolfs Skulte, Henk Bijvanck, and Vagn Holmboe. And the one I want to give a little shout out for, Jean Berger. One eventful (and as nearly long) life, that touched a lot of places and people. I’m pretty sure almost every kid in middle or high school choir remembers singing his “The Eyes of All Wait Upon Thee“. But far fewer tackled something like his “The Good of Contentment”, and far, far fewer still as part of such a stellar high school choir as the 1962 kids at Sanford H. Calhoun High in New York, under S. Talbot Thayer’s direction. Not a bad piece at all, for somebody to plan working up for next fall…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3LDrMYXLfw[/youtube]

by Steve Layton
Click Picks, Contemporary Classical, Performers, Video

What’s on the Tube? – #1

We’ve spent a lot of time at S21, spotlighting various composers and their recordings that can be found online. But what about all that video hanging around out there, that you might otherwise never catch? So I thought I’d start a semi-regular post showing off some of the interesting stuff that’s caught my eye and ear.

First up is a reminder that Sarah Palin is not what all Alaska is about… Shawn Savageau is studying percussion at UA Fairbanks (not far from the grubstake of that other diametric-Palin-opposite, the composer John Luther Adams). He was forward-thinking enough to upload videos to YouTube, of his Junior percussion recital in February of this past year, as well as his work with the student ensemble 64.8 (the latitude of Fairbanks, get it?). There’s a tasty smorgasbord of works from the likes of John Cage, Henry Cowell, Toru Takemitsu, Keiko Abe, Steve Reich, Bill Cahn, Morton Feldman… But it doesn’t get more basic than in Temazcal by Mexican-born composer Javier Alvarez:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k4-xDozVkk[/youtube]

As you can see in the link above, Shawn’s own website currently is just FaceBook. If you’re on there, add him, poke him, buy him, or just tell him thanks and wish him the bright future I’m sure he’s going to have.

by Steve Layton
Awards, Click Picks, Competitions, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Festivals

Dang, Beat Me to It.

He’s been on my list for a while now, to make famous (ha ha) as an S21 “click pick”. But before I get the chance to feature him, Huck Hodge goes and wins this year’s Gaudeamus Prize:

At the final concert of the International Gaudeamus Music Week 2008, which took place in Amsterdam from 1 to 7 September, the Gaudeamus Prize was awarded to the American composer Huck Hodge (1977).

The Gaudeamus Prize, an award of 4,550 Euros, is intended as a commission for a new work to be performed at the next edition of the International Gaudeamus Music Week. Hodge received the prize for Parallaxes, a composition for ensemble, performed on September 3 at the “Muziekgebouw aan ’t Y” by the Asko|Schönberg Ensemble conducted by Bas Wiegers.

His site will fill you in on his work, with plenty of good listening. From his C.V. it looks like he’s taking a post up in my old hometown of Seattle, teaching composition at the University of Washington. Bully for them, and bravo to Huck.

by Steve Layton
Click Picks, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, Online

An Other Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Other MindsLazy, hazy summer days… Not much really happening, unless you hoof it to some festival or other… Or, for the price of simply wearing out your finger clicking, you could spend the better part of the next couple weeks feasting on the treasure trove that is the Other Minds website.

Founded in 1993 by Jim Newman and Charles Amirkhanian, the Other Minds Festival has become a San Francisco Bay-area institution, supporting the exposure for and exchange between a vast array of new-music and musicians important these last twenty-plus years, on or off the beaten path. The festival doesn’t simply rely on the concert-hall, but spreads to initmate, open places where the audience and artists can truly feel free to interact. 

More significant for us, early on Other Minds realized the value of the web for not just presenting but also archiving and sharing the music and ideas that flowed from the festival. They began to offer snippets, then entire concerts, from all of the festivals; added special articles and tributes to important musicians; and now even sell their own CDs, videos and books. I should also mention sometime-S21-visitor Richard Friedman’s related “Music from Other Minds” bay-area radio program, which also streams each broadcast and is linked at the OM site. There’s lots of news on their homepage, too, making well worth becoming one of your regular bookmarks.

It’s futile for me to even attempt to list all of the wonderful musicians documented at the site; so just go, see, hear, listen and learn. What else were you doing with your summer anyway? Maybe it’ll even get you thinking about how you can make it to next year’s festival…

by Steve Layton
Chamber Music, Click Picks, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, San Francisco

What Will $5 Get You in San Francisco?

Sure, a short latte, or a couple humbows & a coke… Or, just about any couple weeks through this year, that or even less will get you into any of a slew of great concerts in the sfSound series. Beginning tomorrow (!), when you can hear Steve Reich’s Four Organs (1970), Giacinto Scelsi’s Kya (1959), Salvatore Sciarrino’s Muro d’orizzonte (1997), Tom Dambly performing Mauricio Kagel’s Atem (1970) for trumpet and tape, violist Alexa Beattie performing Alan Hilario’s kibô (1997), and a new collaboratively-created piece by sfSoundGroup, directed by Matt Ingalls.

The sfSound Group consists of a central core (currently David Bithell – trumpet; Kyle Bruckmann – oboe; George Cremaschi – bass; Matt Ingalls – clarinet; John Ingle – saxophone; Christopher Jones – piano, conductor; Monica Scott – cello; Erik Ulman – violin) augmented by a whole constellation of Bay-Area-and-beyond collaborators. Together they put on a stellar (constellation-stellar… cute, huh?) series of concerts; some upcoming shows include:

  • A sampling of theatrical compositions from the 1960’s San Francisco Tape Music Center by Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick, Ramon Sender, Robert Moran and others; plus Brian Ferneyhough’s In nomine a 3, Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Intercommunicazione, Chris Burns’s Double Negative, and the premiere of a new work written for sfSound by local composer Erik Ulman.
  • Toyoji Tomita Memorial Concert (wonderful trombonist and sfSound collaborator who died this year) – work(s) by John Cage, improvisations, and more.
  • Morton Feldman’s 80+ minute composition For John Cage (1982), performed by violinist Graeme Jennings and pianist Christopher Jones.
  • sfSound’s saxophonist John Ingle in a recital of new solo and ensemble compositions, improvisations, and a concerto by local composer Josh Levine; plus, NYC-based percussion duo Hunter-Gatherer (Russell Greenberg and Ian Antonio) perform the West Coast premiere of a new work by David Lang, David Bithell’s Whistle From Above for percussion and robotics, and Gérard Grisey’s Stele for 2 bass drums.

Details & dates for all these and many more are listed on their series webpage. So spend that pocket change where it counts…

by Steve Layton
Broadcast, Click Picks, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Online

They’re Officially In The House

A little while back on S21, I mentioned the good news that the indomitable / indubitable / inscrutable / incontinent Kalvos & Damian were bringing back an online-only version of their (ASCAP Deems Taylor) award-winning broadcasts. Though the name has changed from New Music Bazaar  to In The House, The show retains all of its trademark off-the-wall storytelling, banter, and enthusiasm for sharing the music and thought of all kind of interesting NON-POP musicians at work today. Our duo may be out in the wilds of rural Vermont, but there isn’t anything backwoods about their awareness of the new-music scene. Each show is provided in both a high- and low-bandwidth version, so there’s just no excuse to not be listening, hear?

[Note: Happy as I am about this return, I’d be remiss not to also acknowledge the New Music Bazaar’s different yet fine replacement, Noizepunk and Das Krooner. Since 2005 Gene Pritsker and Charles Coleman have been running their own mostly-monthly show, with lots of the same type of K&D-worthy guests. All of their shows are archived for listening at the K&D site right along with the New Music Bazzar’s vast archive.]

Art JarvinenThough Kalvos (Dennis Bathory-Kitsz) and Damian (David Gunn) last appeared in 2005, they more or less pick up just where they left off, with an fun interview of the muy importante left-coaster Art Jarvinen. Art has been a big factor in helping shape what’s come out of CalArts (and Cal, period) lately, and Art’s own music and interview heard in this show perfectly show off much of what California/West-Coast/Southwest music has been concerned with these last 30+ years (hint: it ain’t set-theory or the New Complexity… oh, they probably know it, but “thanks, no thanks”; life’s just too short and sweet…).

Shame on you if you’ve never bookmarked the K&D site; but all is forgiven if you do it now, and be sure to check back regularly for all the fun to come. …Oh, and send ’em a check every so often too, OK? Pure love and enthusiasm can’t pay those production costs and server bills, and Paypal couldn’t be simpler to use. They’re doing this for you, so do a little back.

by Steve Layton
Click Picks, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical

PBE/LA/OC

Paul Bailey EnsembleThe Paul Bailey Ensemble is a self-described “alternative / classical garage band” busy these last few years in and around Los Angeles. Though Bailey (The bulky but sharp-looking fella in the center of the photo, surrounded by some of the PBE posse) gets naming rights and creates a large amount of the featured music, the ensemble performs works by a number of other like-minded composers, too — most living, a few dead guys as well. That “like-mind” is post-minimal, with equal parts 1980s minimalism, 1680s Purcell, and heavy doses of the rock-band riff factor (though there’s usually no drumkit in the ensemble, there’s almost always electric bass and guitar).

The way Bailey tells it, he’s …had an eclectic musical career since moving to Los Angeles from Wichita, Kansas in 1989. A trained classical and jazz trombonist, he started his career as a staff musician at Disneyland. In 1995, he resurrected the music program at John Marshall High School in Los Angeles. During his tenure, the band won numerous awards and was recognized as one of the most outstanding music programs in the city of Los Angeles. He is now adjunct Professor of Music Education and Music Theory at California State University, Fullerton.

In 2005 Rex Reason interviewed Paul for the OC Weekly, and I can’t think of a better way to explain Bailey and his ensemble, than in few more of his own words:

OC Weekly : So you left Kansas to become a professional musician in California, and you ended up . . . at Disney. How was that?

Paul Bailey: It’s Disney. Anything anyone else has said? It’s true. I was trained to be a musician, I practiced very hard, and I got there, and I basically had to make farting noises on my trombone and play show tunes. At Disney, you don’t have a choice. We played the same 12 songs for four years.

OCW: Is that what drove you to become a teacher?

PB: Being a teacher is the only way I can be a composer and a musician and not have my soul taken out of me. Being paid to play trombone or being paid to write music, I have to worry about who’s going to pay me next. Now, in a sense, I have no filter. I can write whatever I want. It can be shitty, but at least it’s what I want.

OCW: So explain why you want to do what you do.

PB: I’m 36. Are people my age supposed to listen to pop music their whole lives? The whole music industry is set up to please a 17-year-old kid. I don’t mind listening to that stuff, but am I supposed to live my life through the eyes of a 17-year-old child?

OCW: But you told me earlier how much you like Weezer.

PB: I love Weezer. They’re one of my favorite bands, but it would be false of me to write pop songs or rock songs. Is rock and pop music the only way you can express yourself in today’s culture? If I had drums, we’d be a rock band. Right now, it’s very deliberate—I’m not a rock band, although I use rock instruments

OCW: So is this something closer to an orchestra?

PB: Fuck the orchestra. Let’s burn that puppy down and start over. The orchestra’s proper place is the museum. The idea you’re getting some cultural experience that’s going to make your life better and it’s going to expand your mind is total bullshit.

OCW: Then how do you reconcile the two forms?

PB: There’s the technical aspect where I can say, academically, we’re not modernist music. We believe in stuff that has the same chords as Weezer, the Beatles or Radiohead. I’m choosing to deal with music I grew up with and that interests me. But I don’t want to make people go through all these things to decide whether they like it or not. In this big piece I wrote, there might be a message, but the actual music takes very little to understand. You don’t need to listen to Michael Nyman or Steve Reich or Phillip Glass to listen to my music—although it’s based on them. You don’t need to have 20 years of musical history in your mind to listen to stuff I write.

The PBE website has more info, and lots of music to hear, watch, and purchase, so go/do/hear/buy. Their next performance is as part of the line-up for RealMusic 2008, kicking off at 7pm June 21st at Whittier College (on the way from LA to the big OC, yo…). Also on the bill are plenty of other like- and unlike-minds, like Steve Moshier’s Liquid Skin Ensemble, John Marr/Brother Mallard, Susan Asbjornson, Brian Kehlenbach and Melody Versoza. All this for not more than a ten and a little gas money, what could be better?

by Steve Layton