Recent postings here notwithstanding, I swear I’m not on a complete György Ligeti kick; but it just so happens that the German-news-in-English website Sign and Sight has printed the translation of a speech György Kurtág gave in remembrance of his great friend, fellow Hungarian and fellow composer. (The occasion was Kurtág’s receiving the Ordre Pour le Merite in Berlin.)
The German version was originally published in August this year, in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. As a bonus, this article includes all the extra stuff that Kurtág never got to say during the ceremony.
It’s a beautiful, intensely intimate memoriam.
Rather than go in-depth on one or two musicians, we’re going to play epicurean. The back-stories and other works of each of these musicians may (or sometimes, may not) be found easily enough with a few clicks around; I’ll leave that up to you. Right now, it doesn’t matter; I only want to lead you to a specific track on their individual Myspace pages, tracks that keep echoing around in my mind long after the first encounter.
[Update: Due to the flaky options Myspace offers for putting anything other than pop songs on the site, I passed over the tiny bit that tells me that “Ageha Tokyo” is actually a piece by the composer Samson Young (Hong Kong, but currently finishing his study at Princeton). A wonderful piece nonetheless, and Olivia’s is a fine performance. Samson’s own website, with much more information and listening is at 
In 1998, L.A. artist Cindy Bernard and friends started a series of concerts and installations that became the non-profit organisation 
The list of performers is long and varied, from Pauline Oliveros and James Tenney to Chas Smith and Rick Cox; Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman to Jessica Rylan and Tom Grimley; Harold Budd, Petra Haden, Tetuzi Akiyama, Phil Gelb, etc… even my much-admired internet buddies Johnny Chang and Jessica Catron. If you’ve been spending all your time sitting in the concert hall listening to Wuorinen, here’s you’re chance to loosen up — and catch up — on all kinds of other vital forms of new music in the here-and-now.
Liesl Ujvary (1939-, Pressburg/Slovakia) moved to Austria in 1945 and spent her childhood in Lower Austria and Tyrol. She studied Slavonic, old-Hebrew literature and art history in Vienna and Zurich. After some visits in Moscow she finished her dissertation on Ilja Ehrenburg’s ‘Julio Jurenito’ at the University in Zurich in 1968. She held a university teaching position for Russian language and literature at the Sophia University in Tokyo, and lives as a writer in Vienna since 1971.
With not only an M.F.A. and Ph.D. in composition from Princeton, but a B.A. and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Columbia (with a bit of Juilliard thrown in), you might expect some “high-concept” mixing with the music in Virgil Moorefield’s work, and so there is. But Virgil has a powerful weapon for keeping that ivory tower from becoming a tomb: he’s also a drummer. Not just any drummer, either; that’s him in the upper-center of the lower photo, the one-man motor driving Glenn Branca’s 100 guitars in Branca’s Symphony #13, “Hallucination City” (in a pic from the 2006 L.A. performance), a role he’ll be reprising when the symphony is done again this Oct. 12th at 
Official blurb: “A native of Shenyang, Fuhong learned to play the piano at the age of eight, and began to study composition at fourteen. She graduated from the music school affiliated with the Shenyang Conservatory of Music in 1995, where she received the highest entrance exam score on the National Examinations for admission to the Central Conservatory of Music (CCOM) in Beijing. At the CCOM she studied composition with Jianping TANG, and received a Bachelor’s degree in composition in 2000. She then earned a Master’s degree in composition under the direction of John Celona and Dániel Péter Biró at the University of Victoria in 2005. In the fall 2005, she began her doctoral studies with Gary Kulesha at the University of Toronto.”
Them thar hills are alive with composers!… Like Larry Gaab out in the “wilds” of Chico, California (O.K., more valley than hill, but what the hey): family and marital counselor by day, experimental electroacoustic musician by any-other-time. Spare with biographical and other details, about all he’ll tell you is that he “blends treated acoustic sources and electronic instruments into works which are in part composed and in part improvised. The electronic instruments are invented and played live by various extended techniques.”
Mayke studied piano and composition with Martijn Padding, Gilius van Bergeijk, Daan Manneke, Alexandre Hrisanide and Bart van de Roer at the conservatories of Amsterdam, Tilburg and The Hague. In 2004-2006 she was composer-in-residence with the Nieuw Ensemble. During the summer of 2005 she spent three months as artist-in-residence in Aldeburgh, England supported by a scholarship from Arts Council England, and in 2003 and 2006 she took part in the European interdisciplinairy workshop ‘Ziel 1 = Kunst’ in Oslip, Austria as representative of the Netherlands. Visit the link above and you’ll know exactly why Thea Derks wrote:
David’s recently been dropping by to comment, both at S21 and NewMusicBox (howdy, David! Y’all come back’n set a spell, hear?…). But since he’s new enough to not be one of our “regulars”, I thought I’d introduce you to his excellent work — by turns dark, contemplative, moody and even violently voluptuous. The link above will take you to his website/blog, which includes a number of complete MP3s (and a couple M4a’s for you iTunes folk). For a little info, I’ll let him tell it:
They’ll tell you: Nexsound has been dedicated to the unusual and experimental music, both acoustic and electronic, that could be of any style and trend released on CDs and MP3 files. The term that describes music released by Nexsound best is probably “environmental music”, and it is often like “indocile ambient”. Nexsound music envelops you, listening to it feels like immersing into the very special atmosphere that this music creates, and thus it is intended rather for private listening. We pay the very special attention to the package of CDs released, so they look and feel very nice.