Composers

Chamber Music, Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Music Events

Balliett House, San Antonio TX

doug Monday last week I headed over to San Antonio to hear a house concert hosted by composer and San Antonio Symphony bassist Doug Balliett. The program included two new pieces by P. Kellach Waddle, “Louange a l’Eternite de Jesus” from Messiaen‘s Quartet for the End of Time, and selections from Balliett’s arrangements and reinventions of Schumann‘s Dichterliebe for ensemble and tape. Balliett also contributed three new songs and arrangements of two by Mendelssohn, sung by Ken-David Masur.

It was hot. The audience, which ranged from symphony players to kids and families, made do with hand-fans but, now that I think about it, maybe the heat got to our brains in a good way. Balliett’s inquiry into Dichterliebe — sometimes faithful to Schumann, sometimes wild, gorgeous — stood out as an encouraging example of how the politics of old/new fall by the wayside in enthusiastic and creative hands.

I’m always encouraged by informal events like this. It’s refreshing to remember that institutions don’t have a monopoly on the music I love.

Performances (in attendance or on tape) by Stephanie Teply-Westney, Benjamin Westney-Teply, Lauren Magnus, PK Waddle, Alison Fletcher, Mollie Marcuson, Catherine Turner, Tal Perkes, Matt Zerweck, Ilya Sterenberg, Rachel Ferris, Doug Balliett and Ken-David Masur.

by Elliot Cole
Click Picks, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Uncategorized

Force of Nature – Frederic Rzewski Solo Piano UC Davis

Photo:Jerome de PerlinghiIt’s sometimes said that composers are either German or French, and American vanguard one Frederic Rzewski, with his much vaunted admiration for Beethoven, is clearly on the German side.  But how could he not be when some of his composition teachers like Dallapiccola and Babbitt forsook a flowing lyric line for a jagged dramatic one, whose aim is not to seduce the ear, but to wow with intellectual rigor?  But that doesn’t mean that Rzewski’s work is insincere, or lacks power — it has that in spades — but that it tends to be aimed at the mind and not the heart. It’s often confrontational, too. But that’s a good thing because any real musical interaction, like any real human one, has a built in   confrontational element, and confrontations help us grow.

Rzewski’s 1976 solo piano piece The People United Will Never Be Defeated (El Pueblo Unido Jamas Sera Vencido) is certainly a work in which he confronted the musical possibilities of all kinds of things that had been appearing in his output until then.  He was 38 at the time he wrote it and his discoveries here power lots of his subsequent work. I t’s as much as a watershed piece for him as Glass’ massive ensemble work Music In 12 Parts (1971-74) was for him.  It’s also a kind of compendium of rhythmic, harmonic and coloristic approaches to Chilean composer Sergio Ortega’s song for Salvador Allende on which it’s based. There are 6 variation sets of 6 each plus a coda, and Rzewski seems to use every possible pianistic device in it. (more…)

by Michael McDonagh
Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Festivals, File Under?, June in Buffalo

June in Buffalo starts Monday

Red Fish Blue Fish. Photo credit: Irene Haupt
Red Fish Blue Fish. Photo credit: Irene Haupt

Two of the happiest experiences I’ve had as a composer were back to back summers (’98 and ’99) at JUNE IN BUFFALO. Held at SUNY Buffalo in upstate New York, the weeklong festival is a chance for ‘emerging’ composers to hear their music performed by top notch musicians and to have it critiqued by master composers.

By the end of the festival, they’re likely to have gotten a good tape of their piece, met performers and new music ‘movers and shakers,’ listened to nigh a hundred hours of contemporary fare, gathered tons of ideas for new works of their own, and made some lifelong chums among the other emergent creators. To this day, I keep in touch with many folks I met at JiB.

This year’s festival runs from Monday, June 1 through Sunday, June 7. The senior composers are MARTIN BRESNICK, BERNARD RANDS, MATTHEW ROSENBLUM, HARVEY SOLLBERGER, and festival director DAVID FELDER. Ensembles include the Buffalo Philharmonic, Slee Sinfonietta (JiB’s in-house new music orchestra!), Meridian Arts Ensemble, Verge Ensemble, and the New York New Music Ensemble.

SUNY Buffalo has recently boosted its online presence in the new music community. The university’s Robert and Carol Morris Century for Twenty-first Century Music has launched a website offering programming from the past two years of JiB and other SUNY Buffalo new music activities. Alongside this is an addition to the blogosphere, entitled Edge of the Center.

There’s plenty to be excited about this year, but next year’s festival celebrates twin anniversaries: the thirty-fifth anniversary of JiB’s inception and its twenty-fifth since David Felder resurrected it from hiatus. Should be a loaded week!

David Felder. Photo credit: Irene Haupt
David Felder. Photo credit: Irene Haupt

While it’s been a while since I’ve gone to JiB, I have a few suggestions for attendees.

1) Bring extra copies of scores, parts, and recordings

2) Make enough business cards to share with performers, composers, etc.

3) That said, don’t force any of the above on anyone. Unlike some venues, the spirit at JiB is more about ‘building a new music community’ and less about ‘sharp elbowed angling for commissions.’

4) Bring non-perishable food: power bars, H2O, etc. Between lectures, seminars, rehearsals, concerts, and socializing, opportunities to eat are few and far between.

5) Leave yourself far more time to get out of the dorm than you think will be necessary. That place is a labyrinth!

6) Be polite to your performers and to the JiB staff. The week is a gauntlet: they are unbelievably busy!

7) Be a good colleague to your fellow composers. If you have something to say about their music, be constructive. Don’t use the masterclasses as an opportunity for one-upmanship.

8 ) Keep open ears. You may not like a certain style now, but getting a chance to hear all sorts of music at JiB may provide stimulus for projects or avenues of inquiry that you can’t yet foresee.

9) Don’t expect to get any new music written. The festival’s days start early and end late. Soak in the sounds. Get out and meet people.

10) Enjoy – you’ll never forget June in Buffalo.

by Christian Carey
Books, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Exhibitions, Scores

New, Newer, Newest Notations

from Notations 21Last year I mentioned seeing an exhibition here in Houston, “Every Sound You Can Imagine“; a compilation of all kinds of newer musical manuscripts and scores.  Then just yesterday I was reading of a show at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, “Notation, calculation and form in the arts“.  All, of course, continuing the tradition of John Cage’s and Alison Knowles’ seminal 1969 book Notations (available complete online right now as a PDF download).

Which seems all the more reason to mention the long-awaited Notations sequel just released: Notations 21, brought together by Theresa Sauer.  Besides the book, the Notations 21 project has its own website with even more information.  Between all these links you can feast, gawk and marvel at snippets of the highest, subtlest, strangest and most elegant musical and extra-musical explorations of the last 50 years.

by Steve Layton
Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, Mexico

New Music in Morelia

Morelia (in the State of Michoacan, Mexico) will be hosting its Fifth Contemporary Music Festival from June 1-6. Although relatively young, the festival has gathered prestige and generated enthusiasm in the course of a few years, thanks in part to a list of distinguished composers and performers. Just a few names: Helmut Lachenmann, International Contemporary Ensemble, Robert Platz, Nicholas Isherwood, Carlos Sánchez Gutierrez, Cuarteto Latinoamericano, Manuel Rocha, Dynamis Ensemble.

This year Morelia will be listening to some world-renowned composers and performers such as Philippe Manoury (France), Jack Body (New Zealand), S21-well-known Wilfrido Terrazas (Mexico), Orlando Jacinto García (Cuba), Eddie Mora (Costa Rica), Ekaterina Shatskaya (Russia), Iracema de Andrade (Brazil), and Christophe Desjardins (France). Concerts, lectures, and workshops will be given in the course of the week.

If the musical guests intrigue you, it should be mentioned that Morelia is known to be one of the most beautiful cities in Mexico. Its colonial architecture and rich cultural life make it an attractive destination. But now I’m beginning to sound like a promoter of tourism for the State of Michoacán.

The festival is organized by the Government of the State of Michoacán, the Mexican Center for Music and Sound Art (CMMAS, after its spanish abbreviation and whom I thank for the information) and the Conservatorio de las Rosas. It promises to be another interesting edition.

by Iván Sparrow
Awards, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Oliveros Wins Big Uptown

Congratulations to PAULINE OLIVEROS. Columbia University announced today that she is the recipient of the 2009 William Schuman Award: a $50,000 prize which recognizes “the lifetime achievement of an American composer whose works have been widely performed and generally acknowledged to be of lasting significance.” The previous award-winner was John Zorn in 2006.

Columbia will celebrate Oliveros with a concert and reception at 8 PM on March 27, 2010 at Miller Theatre.

by Christian Carey
Composers, Interviews, New Amsterdam, Performers, Podcasts, viola

My Ears Are Open. This week on the podcast: Nadia Sirota

For those of you keeping track, this week’s episode is the second of three highlighting violists. Last week, Elizabeth Weisser; this week, Nadia Sirota. Nadia has some good advice for musicians: it may sound obvious, but that thing that makes you unique is the thing that makes you special. Not only is this good advice for performers but it’s good for composers to remember as well. The more we can embrace our “craziness”, the more comfortable we can be with ourselves. Musicians on the podcast talk a lot about working and collaborating with composers, but Nadia actually has some suggestions for making these relationships work in mutually respectful ways. Nadia also has a new CD, first things first, which will be released on New Amsterdam Records on Tuesday, May 19 (Steve had a nice pre-release-party-post last week).

Looking ahead, the week of May 31 will feature violist John Pickford Richards, and during the month of June I’ll be talking with pianist Seda Röder and conductor/composer Brad Lubman.

May 31 also happens to be the annual Bang on a Can Marathon in New York City– are there any musicians you would like me to try and track down for an interview? I will also be in Chicago in early June – is there anyone in the second-city I should be in touch with? If you have suggestions please email them to:

podcast@jamesholt.net

And for those of you new to the show, you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes by clicking here, point your blog-readers here, or find it on InstantEncore by clicking here.

by James Holt
Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, Orchestral, Orchestras, San Francisco

SF Symphony serves up Mason Bates world premiere

[Ed. note: Polly Moller is not just busy telling you about concerts like the one below — while she’s out there pushing for the other guy, I want to mention the she herself has what looks like a great gig, with Pamela Z and Jane Rigler, May 17th at the Royce Gallery, 2901 Mariposa Street (between Harrison & Alabama), SF. tickets are $10, and you can see more here. Go, Polly! …OK, on with the show…]

Mason BatesSequenza21 readers are a quirky and unpredictable bunch.  But I’m willing to bet that any of them who show up on Wednesday, May 20, Friday, May 22, or Saturday, May 23 at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco will not spend the first half fidgeting around, waiting for the marvelous Yuja Wang to take the stage, so they can text their friends about what kind of gown she’s wearing.  No, our readers will be on the edges of their seats ready for the world premiere of The B-Sides by Mason Bates!

The internet got a taste of Bates’ new work on April 15th, when the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, led by San Francisco’s own Michael Tilson Thomas, played the final movement, “Warehouse Medicine”, in Carnegie Hall.  Bates explains in the program notes that his five-movement piece is “informed by the grooves of electronica as well as the modern masters of orchestral sonority, and might also be said to inhabit the ‘flipside’ of the symphonic world – a place where drum-n-bass rhythms meet fluorescent orchestral textures.”

The B-Sides is dedicated to MTT, who commissioned it.  The maestro invited the composer backstage during a concert intermission in November 2007, “between Tchaikovsky and Brahms,” Bates recalls.  “He suggested a collection of five pieces focusing on texture and sonority—perhaps like Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra. Since my music had largely gone in the other direction—large works that bathed the listener in immersive experiences—the idea intrigued me. I had often imagined a suite of concise, off-kilter symphonic pieces that would incorporate the grooves and theatrics of electronica in a highly focused manner.”

Something else Sequenza21 readers are likely to do, if they attend the Friday, May 22 show, is stick around for Davies After Hours. It’ll be hard to resist, with Bates morphing into his alter-ego, DJ Masonic, and joining SF Symphony Resident Conductor Benjamin Schwartz to host a hybrid concert/reception they call Mercury Lounge: Mercury Soul Comes to Davies. DJs and chamber ensembles will offer their reflections on the night’s concert…which oh, by the way, includes Sibelius’ Symphony No. 4 in A minor, Opus 63.

Tickets are available online, and also by phone from the San Francisco Symphony Box Office at (415) 864-6000.

by Polly Moller
CDs, Chamber Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Other Minds, Recordings

Between the Rocking Cradles

Given the rarity of records and performances of the music of Marc Blitzstein (1905-1964) through the 1970s, my first encounters with him were like everyone else: references in the “populist music of the 30s and 40s” section of 20th-century history books, and as arranger of the American version of Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera that we all knew from the old (& wonderful) original-cast recording. Works such as his iconic The Cradle will Rock and Airborne Symphony were still talked about, but quite hard to track down and hear. It wasn’t until the mid-80s that revivals and reassesments began, with good biographies coming even later.

Though his trajectory parallels Weill’s or Copland’s in some way, moving from serious, cutting-edge classical to more readily accessible forms derived from popular music and musical theater, Blitzstein stuck with the agitator’s role to the end: works with a strong social message, whether against dictators of fascism or capitalism, and solidarity with the dispossesed and outsider. His reward as a political outsider was to be blacklisted in the red-scare 50s; and as a sexual outsider (though married, Blitzstein was rather openly gay) to be beaten to death in Martinique.

But before all that, there was the 20-something student from a well-to-do Jewish family, studying in Europe with both Arnold Schoenberg and Nadia Boulanger. This younger self, as John Jannson’s Blitzstein website writes, was “a self-proclaimed and unrepentant artistic snob who firmly believed that true art was only for the intellectual elite. He was vociferous in denouncing composers – in particular Kurt Weill – whom he felt debased their standards to reach a wider public.”

That young, arty-elitist composer is the one that our good friends at Other Minds have set out to document, with a new CD hitting the shelves May 12th. Titled First Life, it contains a number of unpublished and barely-heard works from the late 20s and early 30s, given passionate performances by pianist Sarah Cahill and the Del Sol String Quartet. This is smart and energetic music, filled with then-experimental flourishes, and well worth putting on your shelf or in your playlist.

WNYC’s Sara Fishko recently profiled the CD, as well as the rest of the great Other Minds CD catalog, on her The Fishko Files program; it’s still up for listening here.

by Steve Layton
Chamber Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Orchestral, Orchestras, Performers

Review — S.E.M. Excitment at Tully

Music by Wolff, Sciarrino, Kotik, Carter, and Ligeti / Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble, Ostravská Banda, FLUX Quartet; Petr Kotik, Conductor /Alice Tully Hall, May 6, 2009

Conductor/composer Petr Kotik has been an impressive advocate for contemporary music in New York for forty years. Residing in the US since 1969, he has been running the S.E.M. ensemble since 1970: performing a wide range of repertoire, commissioning works and cultivating successive generations of young players into seasoned new music performers. S.E.M.’s orchestral unit has been active since ’92; Kotik’s also been running Ostravská Banda, an international chamber orchestra comprised of S.E.M. players and young European counterparts, since ’05. Both of these groups, as well as the FLUX string quartet, another youngish ensemble devoted to new music, were featured on Wednesday night’s Tully Hall performance: a program of brand new chamber music and three contemporary works that seem destined for the core repertory.

Christian Wolff’s Trio for Robert Ashley (commissioned for the concert) employed three of the FLUX members – violinist Tom Chiu, violist Max Mandel, and cellist Felix Fan – in a fragmentary multi-movement piece. Indeed, its juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated musical materials set the tone for an evening devoted to unorthodox formal presentation. Sustained notes were set against skittering, Webernian motifs. Single lines evaporated into pensive rests while vigorous tutti were all too ephemeral; evaporating into the silence from when they came.

In its US premiere, Salvatore Sciarrino’s Vento D’Ombra made quite an impression. Another work which employed silences as well as fragmentary gestures as signatures, it focused on tiny musical cells – mostly dyads and trichords – as well as a cornucopia of special effects. Wind and brass players breathed through mouthpieces without fingering notes, strings played scordatura and microtones. The whole was a meticulously shaded pointillist canvas of brief gestures, undulating slides, and pianissimo staccato dabs.

Kotik’s own String Quartet was cast in a lengthy single movement. Impeccably performed by FLUX, it was centered on an ambling, long-breathed melody played by the quartet in unison (later in octaves). Only gradually did this evolve into two-voice counterpoint, with a violin countermelody that took on greater urgency. Tutti passages ratcheted up the tension quotient still further, evocative of some of the brilliant polyphonic passages from Ligeti’s second quartet. The idée fixe unison passage returned at pivotal junctures, requiring precise coordination and tuning on the part of FLUX: both were readily supplied.

Elliott Carter’s recent ‘second piano concerto,’ Dialogues, is a fascinating companion piece to the monolithic concerto from the 1960s. Written for a much smaller orchestra, it allows the soloist to take on an enlarged role. In a clever inverse of its larger precursor, the pianist often overwhelms the ensemble, cowing it with brilliant virtuosity. Daan Wandewalle was an excellent protagonist, supplying brilliant cadenzas, thunderous verticals, and an overarching sense of shaping and musicality. (more…)

by Christian Carey