Contemporary Classical

Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Downtown, Festivals, Just Intonation, Music Events, New York

The search is over; the Grail is here

Like Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham‘s fame will always be for his use of multiple electric guitars, often in non-standard tunings and often at just-about-ear-splitting volume. The slight shame is that the guitar stuff is only one part of Chatham’s long and restless musical exploration: there’s also all his work as a trumpeter, as well as works for everything from two gongs to just-tuned piano to wind ensemble to full orchestra.  And while the massed guitar resources may be similar to Branca, I’ve always felt that Chatham’s clang/clash/drone carried something almost ‘lyrical’, compared to Branca’s body blows.

A major force in the 70s-80s ‘downtown’ NYC scene, Chatham has spent the last 20 years as an ex-pat in Paris, where he’s continued ramping up the ambition of his musical visions.  One of those visions became reality in 2005, when the City of Paris commissioned Chatham to compose a piece for their all-night La Nuit Blanche Festival. The result, A Crimson Grail, gathered 400 guitarists (w/ bass and percussion) in a marathon, three-movement sonic assault focused on Paris’ largest church, Sacré-Coeur. 10,000 people watched live, and 100,000 more on national TV. A fuzzy audio snapshot of the performance has been released on CD, but this Grail was so much a spectacle of a specific moment that any future performance would likely be nearly impossible, and in any case would be a very different beast indeed.

Well, that ‘beast’ has arrived, and this time on our side of the Atlantic. Chatham has reworked A Crimson Grail, this time for a slightly more ‘modest’ 200 guitars (and 16 bass guitars), and is in town to present it (along with section leaders David Daniell, Seth Olinsky, John King, and Ned Sublette) this Saturday, August 8th, as part of Lincoln Center Out of Doors. The performance is from 7:30 to 10 pm, at Damrosch Park (Southwest corner of the Lincoln Center Plaza, 62nd Street near Amsterdam Avenue).

by Steve Layton
Chamber Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Minimalism, Music Events

In C can you say, by the midnight light

in cFor all you Angelenos and outlying: word from Paul Bailey that this Thursday evening there’s a midnight performance of Terry Riley‘s In C, and you’re all invited to come on over and participate. Bailey’s eponymous ensemble will be joined by the Los Angeles New Music Ensemble and others — now, said others can include you! The place is Juanita’s (5930 York Blvd., Highland Park); there’s a 10:30pm load-in, 11:30pm rehearsal, and the midnight performance.

In C is shaping up to become this century’s new Messiah — except we don’t need no stinking Christmas to trot it out and have a go. So why not get into the spirit, and do your bit for communal music-making?  To give you a head start, Paul’s thoughtfully included a PDF of the score, so you can spend a little time beforehand brushing up on your chops.

by Steve Layton
Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical

A few for the week that will be

Some notable NY concerts worth taking up space for:

wedren & acme

Tuesday, Aug 4th, at Joe’s Pub ( 425 Lafayette Ave., NYC / Tickets: $15 at joespub.org or 212.967.7555) ACME (the American Contemporary Music Ensemble) is teaming up again with vocalist Craig Wedren, to present composer Jefferson Friedman’s genre-bending 3-song set titled On in Love, written for the ensemble and singer/songwriter Wedren (formerly of the band Shudder To Think). ACME and Wedren premiered On in Love in February at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre, and you can see video of that performance at Friedman’s own website.  The concert at Joe’s Pub will also include John Cage’s String Quartet in Four Parts (performed by ACME) and his Aria (performed by Wedren). Wedren will also perform a set with his band and ACME strings.

And on Sunday afternoon, Aug 9th ACME‘s back in action at the Isamu Noguchi Museum (9-01 33rd Rd., L.I.C., NY / Info: www.noguchi.org or 718.204.7088 / FREE w/ $10 Museum admission), this time with the premiere of a new string quartet by ACME’s ace composer/violinist Caleb Burhans. You also get selections from J. S. Bach’s Art of the Fugue (arr. for string quartet), Jefferson Friedman’s String Quartet No. 3, and Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in F, Op. 80, so all-in-all a mighty nice deal.

Speaking of nice deals, nothing’s nicer than FREE! Which is just what it’ll cost you to experience the Asphalt Orchestra (Jessica Schmitz, piccolo; Alex Hamlin, Peter Hess and Ken Thomson, saxophones; Shane Endsley and Stephanie Richards, trumpets; Jen Baker and Alan Ferber, trombones; Ken Bentley, sousaphone; Sunny Jain, Nick Jenkins, and Yuri Yamashita, percussion) as they open Lincoln Center Out of Doors Wednesday, August 5. The band will perform the next four nights, Thursday-Sunday, August 6-9. Performances will take place nightly at 7:00 P.M. in different locations across the Lincoln Center campus.

The scrappy group’s debut program spans an amazing range of material, including new commissions by Tyondai Braxton of Battles, Stew and Heidi Rodewald of The Negro Problem and Passing Strange, and celebrated Balkan musician-composer Goran Bregovic, plus music by Björk, jazz legend Charles Mingus, Swedish metal pioneers Meshuggah, and those classic instigator/composers Conlon Nancarrow and Frank Zappa.

For those of you who’d love to slouch off to play at the Hamptons (though has it ever stopped raining enough to think about sea and sand?), yet want to stay moderately ‘culturefied’ while you’re at it, the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival is off and running. In addition to the warhorses, there are two actually quite wonderful contemporary concerts taking place:

Real Quiet will be heard on Aug 6th in a program featuring the US premiere of Pimpin’ by Jacob Ter Veldhuis as well as works by Evan Ziporyn, Chinary Ung and Brett Dean.

Then on Aug 11th , Brooklyn Rider performs “Crosstown” and “Plume” by composer Ljova (Lev Zhurbin) along with works by Philip Glass, Toiva Karki and Komitas Vardapet.

by Steve Layton
Contemporary Classical

Parting is Such…A Song for David Salvage

david4One fateful morning in the fall of 2004, I opened the door to pick up my New York Times and found instead a wooden basket containing a pale homo sapien wearing large black glasses who appeared, at first glance, to be a nerdish cousin of Edgar Winter but, as it turned out,  was a young  graduate student named David Salvage, fresh out of Sweet Apple, Ohio.   David was pursuing a Ph.D. at CCNY while earning a few bucks on the side as a loneliness counselor at the late, lamented Tower Records classical shop.

This is about the time that I had decided to transform Sequenza21 into something more substantial than a pretext to get some free CDs and began switching the site to a blogging community. I recognize free labor when I see it and David was eager to help. He began doing reviews and writing posts and bringing other bright young composers and musicians into the family.

By 2006, the site was doing pretty well and David (along with another odd young man named Galen Brown) took the lead in organizing the first ever Sequenza21 live concert, persuading CCNY to lend us a space, and organizing musicians and all that.  It was roaring success despite the fact that it ran so long we didn’t get to eat David’s mother’s cookies and I got stuck with a $300 post-concert bar/restaurant tab because nobody would go home.

David and Galen were also the prime organizers of two terrific Sequenza21 concerts last year, in partnership with the Lost City Ramblers…what?  Oh, the wonderful Lost Dog Ensemble–one in Queens and one Manhattan.  I am happy to report that none of the Sequenza21 concerts involved any effort from me other than mailing the occasional check.

I talked to David dad at this year’s Manhattan concert and got some sense of what it is like for a perfectly normal, non-musical, Frank and Dino-loving, middle-class family from Sweet Apple, Ohio to be invested with a spooky kid who climbs up on the piano bench and starts noodling Bach at five-years-old and whose piano teacher tells you after a few months of training that “he’s got to have a better piano.”  Dad is still reeling from the sticker shock.

Dad has reason to be pleased now because David finally has a real job.  After a couple of busy years of indentured servitude for CCNY in Brooklyn, David finished and successfully defended his dissertation (on the other Hungarian, not Ligeti), got his doctorate, and is leaving New York this week to begin his new tenure-track position as an instructor in theory and composition at Hampden-Sydney College, located, oddly enough, in Sweet Apple, Virginia.

He assures us that he is not abandoning Sequenza21 and will be contributing from time to time and possibly even organizing a Sequenza21 concert in Washington,  which is the closest civilization to Sweet Apple.  Any co-conspirators in the DC area are invited to co-conspire.

All kidding aside, I have come to love David.  He’s done terrific things for Sequenza21, the concerts would not have happened without him. We wish him all the best.

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

Miss the Mississippi

 

evebFrom:  Eve Beglarian

hi my friends,

some of you already know that I’ve developed an obsession with the Mississippi River and its place in American culture, politics, and geography. I’ve spent the last several months getting ready to journey down the river at a human-powered pace, investigating what the river means at this particular moment in our shared lives. I’ll be starting at the headwaters at Lake Itasca, Minnesota on August 1 and expect to arrive in New Orleans in late November or early December. I’ll make work in response to the journey, and then next season I imagine traveling back up the river retracing my path, performing the work I’ve made in response to the first trip.

I have designed the trip not as a solo journey but as a shifting set of collaborations with various friends and colleagues who will be traveling with me for shorter or longer periods, shaping my perspective in varying ways depending on their passions and interests. My first two collaborators are the linguist and historian Richard Steadman-Jones, with whom I will be working on a project called Archive of Exile, and Mac Walton, a musician and adventurer with whom I share many interests that will undoubtedly take shape in some fun way I can’t yet predict.

we will be making the trip by a combination of kayak and bicycle, with a backup car carrying our gear. the three of us just spent a couple of days in Minneapolis getting outfitted with a kayak, (see below for evidence) and we’re leaving tomorrow for Lake Itasca, and I am so excited about all this I can barely speak!

I won’t be sending email announcements like this very often if at all over the next few months, so before heading out, I’m inviting you to follow along with me on the blog I’ve set up at http://evbvd.com/riverblog/

I think it’d be really great if we can create a community of virtual wayfarers or something like that! you can also follow me on twitter (evbvd) and/or facebook (eve.beglarian) if that’s your thing. and if you want to meet up in person along the way, let me know! while part of this trip feels like some kind of quest or pilgrimage, I don’t imagine it as a retreat in any sense, but an engagement, a seeking, and I invite you to join me in whatever ways might be meaningful to you, whether vicarious or actual.

in the meantime, I hope you have a great rest of your summer!

xoxox

evb

Only if it’s not likely to

Can the believed-in happen.

                       James McMichael

by Jerry Bowles
Composers, Contemporary Classical

Scelsi’s ghost

Over at La Folia (for all its simplicity still the most interesting online source for contemporary CD reviews), Grant Chu Covell gives an illustrated account of his visit to the great composer Giacinto Scelsi‘s (1905-1988) house in Rome — now the Fondazione Isabella Scelsi.  No, don’t expect to get any images of the famously photo-shy composer; but there are a number of other great pics and observations.

by Steve Layton
Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music

SoCal meets SoCar meets Wandelweiser

This Monday night (July 27), 7PM the 701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia, South Carolina hosts a concert devoted to a potent movement active on the fringes of (or maybe quietly threading its way all through?) the current classical scene: the Wandelweiser Group.  Described as “the evaluation and integration of silence(s) rather than an ongoing carpet of never-ending sounds,” Wandelweiser was formed in 1992 by Dutch flautist Antoine Beuger and German violinist Burkhard Schlothauer. Their ranks have slowly grown over the years, and include Swiss clarinetist Jürg Frey and pianist Manfred Werder, American guitarist Michael Pisaro and trombonist Craig Shepard, Austrian trombonist Radu Malfatti, and many more. With such a stellar group, and aided by its own publishing operation (Edition Wandelweiser) and its own record label (Wandelweiser Records), quite a following has grown up worldwide.

But it’s rarely heard anywhere near the confines of the traditional concert hall; Wandelweiser music works with extremely delicate, sometimes obsessive, nearly conceptual sound — gestures and patterns seemingly unmoored in expanses of quiet intensity. Even when rigorously calculated, there’s a sense of improvisation; nowadays, since the movement has also attracted many players from the experimental/improv side of the serious music line, that sense is often a reality.

Wandelweiser ideas found their biggest foothold in the U.S. in Southern California, with CalArts as the focus. But now Columbia SC has folds experimental music and performance workshop: Jason Brogan director and guitar; Kieran Daly, performance; Michael Hanf, percussion; Richard Kamerman, electronics; Nathan Koci, horn/accordion; David Linaburg, guitar; Dave Ruder, clarinet; Sam Sfirri, piano; Ron Wiltrout, percussion.

Monday’s concert is titled “Several Silences”, and brings together pieces not only from the South Carolina contingent, but both Europe and Southern California as well: Antoine Beuger – cantor quartets; Jason Brogan – metronomic irregularity; Michael Pisaro – harmony series nos. 11a-d; Sam Sfirri – I gave thanks for evening that brings out the lights; Mark So – this singular tale of the past; Manfred Werder – 2008 (1).

If you’re in the area do try and make it; for $10 you’ll get a window into a whole new world.

by Steve Layton
Bang on a Can, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, New York

Having a MoCA at Banglewood

If you thought there couldn’t possibly be any more we could tell you about Bang on a Can events the past couple months, you’re so so wrong!  Starting today and running to the end of the month, The “Banglewood” summer festival at Mass MoCA is underway in North Adams, Massachusetts. (Mass MoCA is the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art there, and the fest’s co-sponser.)  Head on up to find public performances, workshops for participants in everything from Balinese music to improvisation, master classes, music business seminars, and more.

Festival events open to the public this year include daily gallery recitals at 1:30pm and 4:30pm, free with museum admission; the perennially popular Kids Can Too event (July 18, 11:30am); an afternoon conversation with the big guy — Steve Reich — about Sol LeWitt (July 25, 3pm); a performance by Bang on a Can artists of Reich’s seminal work, Music for 18 Musicians (July 25, 8pm); and what BoaC event would be complete without a Marathon – six hours of non-stop new music featuring more than thirty composers and performers (August 1, 4-10pm). There are also two recitals daily in the galleries at 1:30 and 4:30 from July 16-July 31.  The Marathon will include a performance of George Anthiel’s 1924 classic Ballet Mećanique, John Adams’ Shaker Loops – heard here in its version for seven solo strings, David Lang’s Pierced, Julia Wolfe’s Dark Full Ride, Michael Gordon’s Potassium, music by Meredith Monk, Frederick Rzewski, and more. In between these events, come and hear music by Todd Reynolds, Eric Chasalow, Daniel Wohl, Walter Zimmerman, Olivier Messiaen, Art Jarvinen, Aaron Jay Kernis, Steve Mackey, Jeff Stanek, Louis Andriessen, Gregg August, Derek Johnson, Brad Lubman, Sarah Kirkland Snider and Morton Feldman.

This year’s Festival faculty members include Gregg August (bass), David Cossin (percussion), Katie Geissinger (voice), Michael Gordon (composition), David Lang (composition), Brad Lubman (conducting), Nicholas Photinos (cello), Vicki Ray (piano), Todd Reynolds (violin), Derek Johnson (guitar), Ken Thomson (clarinet, saxophone), and Julia Wolfe (composition). The Festival will be attended by 10 composers and 24 performers  from across the US, as well as from Russia, South Korea, New Zealand, Scotland, Spain, The Netherlands, Canada, Australia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Yeah, it’s not totally free (but not bank-breaking, either) and you’d better bring bug spray, but other than that what’s not to love?

by Steve Layton
Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, Experimental Music, Improv, Music Events, San Francisco

Outsound New Music Summit kicks off on Sunday

San Francisco’s Mission District, home of so much that is cool, is a natural neighborhood for the arts.  The San Francisco Community Music Center located at 544 Capp Street is the the Bay Area’s oldest community arts organization and San Francisco’s largest provider of low-cost, high quality music education.  In 2008, 2,300 students of all ages, ethnicities and income levels enrolled in Music Center programs and over 16,000 people enjoyed musical performances at no or low cost.

Starting this Sunday, the SFCMC will host the eighth annual Outsound New Music Summit, a festival which for all its success and longevity has somehow stayed the Bay Area’s best-kept secret.  Sunday night’s “Touch the Gear” expo is free and open to the public, featuring 20 individual artists and ensembles and their homemade, customized, and startling instruments and electronic rigs.  All of them will be set up and ready to show you, the audient, how to make music and noise like they do.

Four concert nights follow on the subsequent Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday night. Artist Q & A sessions at 7:15 p.m. each evening set you up for performances starting at 8:00 p.m., starring:

  • Alicia Mangan & Spirit,  ROVA Saxophone Quartet, and Vinny Golia (solo and with locals in a mixed ensemble) in “Free Improvision/Free Composition”
  • Forms of Things Unknown, Peter Kolovos, Conure, Hans Fjellestad, and Thomas Dimuzio in “Industrial Soundscapes”
  • Jess Rowland & The Dreamland Puppet Theater, Kathleen Quillian & Gilbert Guererro, and Bonfire Madigan in “InterMedia”
  • Natto, Ghost In the House featuring Waterphone inventor Richard Waters, and Left Coast Improv Group in “Deep Listening and Introspection”

Full scheduling details and performer bios can be found in the online schedule. Tickets are available in advance from Brown Paper Tickets, or for $10.00 at the door.

by Polly Moller