Contemporary Classical

Composers, Conferences, Contemporary Classical, Kansas City, Minimalism

Minimalism Conference, Day 4

Charlemagne Palestine at the ConsoleTonight’s performance by Charlemagne Palestine was, in short, one of the most extraordinary musical experiences of my life.  Palestine has developed a technique for playing the organ which involves the use of wooden shims to hold down keys so he can build up drones with many notes and still have his hands free to improvise melodies over top of it.  He starts with an open fifth and builds over the course of a couple hours to a dense roar that uses most of the available power of the instrument.  It was mesmerizing.  In truth, I wasn’t expecting to like it much — I expected it to be long and loud and somewhat interesting but ultimately boring.  I couldn’t have been more wrong, and I urge you that if you ever have an opportunity to hear Palestine play you not miss it for anything.

The rest of the day went well too, but I’m just too exhausted to talk about it at the moment, so I’ll save it for my wrap-up in a day or two.

by Galen H. Brown
Contemporary Classical

Forget Gonzo Journalism…Philly’s got a Gonzo Cantata!

It’s not often that Sequenza 21 gets scooped by the likes of Rachel Maddow – but that’s a good thing for composer Melissa Dunphy and the group of 30 musicians that are all performing Dunphy’s The Gonzales Contata with text directly taken from former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ testimony before Congress. Written in a neo-Baroque style, Dunphy has inverted the genders of the primary characters in the story, with Gonzales and Sen. Specter, Leahy and Hatch sung by females and Sen. Diane Feinstein sung by a tenor. The work is being performed this weekend in Philiadelpha at the Rotunda (4014 Walnut Street) at 7pm tonight and tomorrow at 2pm with tickets being sold at the door for $20.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqUWIbP0c6Y[/youtube]

A composer, cellist, actress and model, Dunphy is currently a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania. She first performed the Gonzales Cantata at West Chester University and instead of shopping it around to other choirs, she decided to apply for performance at the Philly Fringe Festival, which she did – late – but it was still accepted. Funded completely out of her own pocket and sharing profits with al the performers, Dunphy seems to have single-handedly created a demonstration of how to create a “big splash” with her work…the weekend before she starts her graduate studies at UPenn.

By creating a website dedicated to the work, complete with html tags from The Drudge Report (seen below), and utilizing Twitter to garner notice within the political  journalistic ranks (completely outside of the circle of music critics, I might add), Melissa is creating a PR model for any composer to learn from. From the recording of the entire work (!) on the Gonazales Cantata website, it’s obvious that she’s got the neo-Baroque thing down, and she does a nice job of threading the needle between creating something so dissonant that it would turn off the general public and something so über-tonal that it wouldn’t interest new-music types. (more…)

by Rob Deemer
Conferences, Contemporary Classical, Kansas City, Minimalism, Piano

Minimalism Conference, Day 3

This summary has to be a short one, since I need to finish preparing for my paper presentation tomorrow morning, but today was another excellent conference day.  During the day, in addition to papers there was a concert of Tom Johnson‘s extremely minimal Organ and Silence performed by Neely Bruce.  At dinner time Robert Carl gave a plenary address about In C, a subject on which he has just published a book.  Then we all had some of the justly famous Kansas City barbecue.  In the evening Sarah Cahill, a great champion of contemporary music, gave a concert which included two recently completed transcriptions of Harold Budd‘s The Children on the Hill.  The piece was originally improvised, and there exist two vastly different recordings, which Kyle Gann has painstakingly transcribed.  The pieces are quite beautiful.  The rest of the concert was good too, but the other highlights for me were an excerpt of Hans Otte‘s Das Buch der Klange, which is virtuosic, beautiful, and spectacular, and John Adams‘s China Gates, which he actually wrote for Sarah Cahill many years ago.

by Galen H. Brown
Conferences, Contemporary Classical, Kansas City, Minimalism

Minimalism Conference, Day 2

New Ear and Tom Johnson perform "Narayana's Cows"A day that starts at 9AM and ends after 11 at night, in which 15 different people give presentations, and which culminates in a two hour concert, is not a day that is easy to distill down to a single theme (except perhaps happy exhaustion).  We began with no fewer than six papers on Steve Reich, some of which were thematically linked but none of which was redundant.  Perhaps my favorite moment of those morning sessions was when Sumanth Gopinath compared a feature of Different Trains to the music from a classic 1980s IBM commercial.  In the afternoon we had papers on Part, Eastman, Glass, and Young.  Kyle Gann described his painstaking reconstruction of Dennis Johnson‘s pivotal-yet-nearly-lost November, which Kyle and Sarah Cahill will be performing in all its 5-hour glory on Sunday.  And at the end of the day the great Tom Johnson, who was the Downtown critic for the Village Voice from 1971 to 1982 and who now lives in Paris, gave an hour-long presentation on European minimalist music that we in the United States aren’t familiar with, and on some of his own music.  Johnson’s book The Voice of New Music is essential reading for anybody who wants to understand minimalism, and it was a real thrill to hear his current thoughts on the European scene.

After dinner, the Kansas City based New Ear Ensemble gave a concert of minimalist works.  New Ear is, to begin with, a superb group–they played some very difficult music very well.  The concert had three high points for me: Vladimir Tosic‘s Arios for piano and cello was quite beautiful and highly formalized in a way that made every moment feel like a natural, organic outgrowth of the preceding.  Jacob Ter Veldhuis‘s The Body of Your Dreams for piano and tape is always great fun, with its Reich-inspired interplay between piano melodies and a tape part assembled from an infomercial about a piece of exercise equipment that promises great results with minimal effort.  The final piece on the program was Tom Johnson‘s Narayana’s Cows, which is an ingenious representation (including Johnson providing explanatory narration) of a math problem supposedly posed by the 14th century mathematician Narayana Pandit:  “A cow produces one calf each year. Beginning in its fourth year, each calf produces a calf. How many cows are there after, for example17 years?”  That may sound dry, but it’s actually a very fun piece.

by Galen H. Brown
Contemporary Classical

Hilary and Missy

Our third “Hilary Hahn Interviews…” segment was actually the first recorded for S21; kind of like the first Star Wars was actually the third… or something…

I brought Missy Mazzoli to your attention as far back as 2006, when she’d just finished getting her Masters degree. More recently, just a couple months ago we were telling you about the popularity of the alt/classical/something group she’s now part of, Victoire. Those very few years out of school have been kind, with all kinds of projects and praise coming her way. As well they should; Missy’s work overflows with offbeat and surprising ideas, executed in creatively beautiful ways. Here’s part one of Hilary’s sit-down with Missy (as always, the other three parts can be seen by heading to Hilary’s YouTube page and searching the right sidebar there):

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5PSH8oDvNU[/youtube]

by Steve Layton
Conferences, Contemporary Classical, Kansas City, Minimalism

Minimalism Conference Day 1

Kansas City at Night

If good luck in travel is a harbinger of things to come, then the fact that my flight into Kansas City for the Second International Conference on Minimalist Music actually touched down twenty minutes early is surely a very good sign.  And so far today things have worked out that way.

The conference got underway with two papers on Intertextuality in the music of Dutch composer Louis Andriessen and British composer (and the first journalist to use the word “minimalist” to describe music) Michael Nyman.  Apparently Nyman steals liberally from everybody, including himself.  I mean that in only the best possible way–Nyman seems to deeply interested in the artistic possibilities that such borrowing and referencing, and he even once had a microfilm reader in his house next to his piano to enhance his ability to quickly look for material to work with.  After a short break we then had three papers on the music of Phill Niblock, whose microtonal drone music is strange, fascinating, and beautiful.

After dinner, and after an on-stage conversation with Kyle Gann, Mikel Rouse presented his 2000 film Funding at the Kansas City Public Library.  The film is a fascinating non-narrative (or perhaps extremely-limited-narrative) exploration of New York City, money, and identity, underscored by Rouse’s post-minimalist, rhythmically complex music.  Rouse has clips of some of his films, including Funding, on his website, so I’ll just direct you there, since I need to get some sleep so I’ll be fresh for day two, which starts at 9AM tomorrow with a paper on Steve Reich.

Also, remember that some of the conference participants are Twittering about the conference with the hashtag #minconf.

by Galen H. Brown
Blogs, Classical Music, Click Picks, Contemporary Classical, Websites

Snap, Crackle, Pop (with a few Fizzles)

Up and running for a few weeks now, The Cereal List blog/website attempts to goose the arse of the always-just-a-little-too-sacrosanct classical music world. Run by the shadowy “Milton Blabber”, “Randall Scandall” and “Miss Information”, the blog’s posts have their share of flats mixed with a few good sharps. Though some jabs have veered just this side of awful or even libel, when they get it right, with such gems as “Generate a New York Times Review of your Work“, they’re pretty spot on. My current fave though, has to be “How to Design a Classical Music CD Cover”:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoqcHAdyiN4[/youtube]

Whoever they may be, and as low as they may occasionally go, it’s obvious that these are people who are definitely active  in “the scene” and know their target intimately. It may not be the first place I’m going to check each morning, but I don’t see much wrong with trying to knock a few bricks off the Temple of Art.

by Steve Layton
Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, Experimental Music, Miller Theater, New York

Wordless Music meets Miller again

Miller TheaterRonen Givony’s Wordless Music is back at Miller Theater this Sept. 9-12, doing it’s indie-rock/electronic/classical/new-music thing. The 9th brings back the 802 Tour (Nico Muhly, Sam Amidon and Doveman, w/ special guest Nadia Sirota); the 10th welcomes Do Make Say Think and DMST founder Charles Spearin’s “The Happiness Project”; the 11th features Tim Hecker, Grouper, and Julianna Barwick; and the 12th caps it off with Destroyer and Loscil performing a rare collaborative set of original music from each artist’s catalog, then the JACK Quartet. All shows start at 8pm, with tickets setting you back $15-$20. Columbia University’s Miller Theatre is located north of the main campus gate at 116th St & Broadway, on the ground floor of Dodge Hall.

by Steve Layton
Contemporary Classical, Festivals, London, Proms

Schnittke, Shostakovich and Nyman at the Proms

The Prom concert on August 24, by the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Valery Gergiev, opened with Nagasaki by Alfred Schnittke, his graduation piece from the Moscow Conservatory. In this piece for chorus, solo mezzo-soprano, and large orchestra (including a theremin), Schnittke set texts reflecting on the devastation of the Japanese city by the atomic bomb at the end of the Second World War by Anatoly Sofronov, described in Calum MacDonald’s program notes as “the official Soviet propaganda poet”, along with poems by two Japanese poets, Eisaku Yoneda and Shimazaki Tōson.

Although the piece was accepted by the Moscow Conservatory, its finale was considered by the Soviet Composers Union as not optimistic enough (probably only a Soviet bureaucrat could demand from a piece about the aftermath of a nuclear attack); Schnittke was accused of having succumbed to”Expressionism” and “forgetting the principles of Realism in music.” Schnittke rewrote the finale, using additional text by his friend Gerogy Fere, and it was approved for performance, which is received in 1959. It was not performed again in Schnittke’s lifetime.

Since it is basically a student piece and from the 50’s, it is probably not surprising that Nagasaki has none of the extreme modernist and post-modernist“funny business” which one thinks about as being characteristic of Schnittke’s music. It’s a rather straight-forward, very strong, very accomplished, very effective piece, showing the influence of Shostakovich. The first movement, which seems a little as though it might be the beginning of the St. Matthew Passion as arranged by Shostakovich, lingers strongly in this listener’s memory.

The second half of the concert was the Eighth Symphony of Dimitri Shostakovich. It is so easy to think about Shostakovich only in terms of his being some kind of political football, that it is often a surprise to come in contact with a piece that, due to an absence of a sexy back story and simply by its sheer quality, makes you realize just what a good composer he was–especially what a brilliant orchestrator. It’s full of striking material and endlessly inventive orchestration, but also very sure in its construction, with a very tight dramatic trajectory. The quieter philosophical last movement and particularly the long gentle coda, with its very light texture featuring a series of instrumental solos accompanied with strikingly unexpected combinations of instruments, is especially memorable. Its hard to imagine either of these pieces receiving better performances than Gergiev and the LSO gave them. (more…)

by Rodney Lister
Contemporary Classical

Draw a Straight Line and Follow it to Kansas City

Reichs Piano Phase Pattern. Source: Wikimedia
Reich's "Piano Phase" Pattern. Source: Wikimedia

In just over a week minimalist musicians, scholars, and fans will descend on Kansas City, Missouri for the Second International Conference on Minimalist Music, which runs from September 2 to 6.  I’ll be there–I’m giving a paper on Saturday–and I’ll be blogging regularly to give you a participant’s view of the proceedings–papers, concerts, lunchtime conversations, drunken rants, or whatever else is happening that seems noteworthy.  I’ll also be Twittering (@galenbrown), and the conference has its own Twitter account (@2ndminimalism). We’ll be encouraging other Twitter users to post their own thoughts with the hashtag #minconf.

Our pal Kyle Gann is one of the co-organizers of the conference, and in order to whet your appetite I asked him a few questions about the event:

GB: You went to the first version of this conference two years ago in Wales.  How did that conference come about, and what made you and the organizers decide to turn it into a regular thing?

KG: I don’t know what led Pwyll ap Sion (author of a book on Michael Nyman) and Tristian Evans to attempt the first festival. They clearly didn’t think it would succeed much, and when they got three dozen paper abstracts, they expanded it from one to three days. They lined up three keynote speakers in case two decided not to come. The last day of the conference, a group of us formed the Society for Minimalist Music, and decided to hold the conference every other year, alternating between Europe and America. When someone asked who should direct the next one, everyone sort of looked at me.

I have to say that Bangor, Wales, was an over-the-top picturesque spot for a conference, even if you did have to fly to London and take a four-hour train to get there. Kansas City is a wonderful place too, but I think only the barbecue can compete in the charm area. (more…)

by Galen H. Brown