The Original New Music Community
Standing, left-to-right: Garth Sunderland, Emily Brausa, Thomas Piercy, Samuel Andreyev, Jeremy Podgursky, Alex Kotch, Rodney Lister, Rusty Banks, Samuel Vriezen. Kneeling, left-to-right: Christina Perea, Galen Brown, Miranda Cuckson, Laura Barger, David Salvage. The hall was cold; the music was hot. We hope to share the sounds with you soon.
Composer, artist, Fluxus member, Scratch Orchestra member, John Cage associate, and chemist George Brecht died in a nursing home in Cologne, Germany, on Friday, December 5th. Brecht, who was born George MacDiarmid but took Bertolt Brecht’s name in homage, was one of the most significant and influential avant garde artists of the 1960s. The title of this post refers to a document (page 17 of the linked PDF file) Brecht wrote for Fluxus in 1969 in which he proposes “moving landmasses over the surface of the earth” using conveyances such as icebergs or massive amounts of styrofoam, since his made-up company feels that it will be “technologically realizable within ten years.”
In searching the web for information on Brecht I also discovered that project.arnolfini, an online division of the British Arnolfini museum, is organizing a worldwide performance of Brecht’s “Motor Vehicle Sundown (Event)” at sundown (in your own location) on January 10, 2009. The event was planned prior to Brecht’s death, and I assume it will take on something of a memorial quality now.
Those of you who were at the first Sequenza21 concert two years ago may remember that pianist Hugh Sung played my piece Systems of Preference or Restraint. What you may not have noticed was the technology he used to do it. That technology is now considerably more accessible to the average performer, and I encourage you to keep reading after the cut. (more…)
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.
The Manhattan edition of the Sequenza21/Lost Dog Ensemble concert–as seen in the New York Times–is happening tonight at 8 pm at the Good Shepherd Church, 152 West 66tth Street (between Broadway and Amsterdam). Admission is free, as in you don’t have to pay to get in. This is your last chance to see a Sequenza21 concert until we save up enough money to have another one so don’t miss it.
Our friends at Other Minds in San Francisco invented the New Music Séance in 2005, and after two sold-out editions, they’re back with a third. The event will feature three concerts of hypnotic, spiritual and rarely-heard musical gems spanning the past 100 years, offered in the intimate candlelit surroundings of Bernard Maybeck’s 1895 Arts and Crafts-style Swedenborgian Church in San Francisco. Performers Sarah Cahill (piano) (you go girl) , Kate Stenberg (violin), and Eva-Maria Zimmermann (piano) will channel new music’s progenitors alongside composers of today, in works for solo piano and violin piano duet.
The marathon features three distinct concerts tomorrow, December 6, 2008: Concert I, “Birds in Warped Time” at 1pm; Concert II, “Deep River Dreams” at 4pm; and Concert III, “Ruth Crawford and Her Milieu” at 8pm. The final concert will be preceded by a special discussion of Ruth Crawford by Professor Judith Tick of Northeastern University, Crawford’s biographer. All events take place at Swedenborgian Church, 2107 Lyon Street, San Francisco. Tickets are on a sliding scale (individual concerts / 3-concert series): SEER ($25 / $65), MEDIUM ($40 / $110), PSYCHIC ($60 / $170). (Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.) Complimentary refreshments are provided for all ticket-holders, and series tickets at the PSYCHIC level include 6pm buffet dinner with the artists. The first two editions of the New Music Séance were sold out, and seating is limited to 100 persons per show, so early ticket purchase is recommended. Tickets are on sale now, at www.BrownPaperTickets.com or by calling (800) 838-3006. For information, visit otherminds.org or call (415) 934-8134.
And Lower East Side Performing Arts, Inc. will present Zendora Dance Company and the music of the lovely and gifted Elodie Lauten in a special Holiday Benefit on Tuesday, December 9 – 7:30 PM at Lafayette Bar & Grill, 54 Franklin Street (between Broadway and Lafayette) in Manhattan.
The program will be a special avant-premiere with improvisations from the Zendora Dance Company based on the second act of The Two-Cents Opera, Elodie Lauten’s semi-autobiographical fantasy about writing an opera where real, surreal and supernatural co-exist. Hmmm…. looks like a pattern developing here. Suggested donation for this benefit event is $10. For reservations or more information, please call 212-388-0202 or visit http://www.geocities.com/lesperformingarts for program information.
And NYTIMES WIN, as the kids like to say.
That’s right, Monday night’s S21 concert at Waltz Astoria was a big success. Lost Dog played wonderfully, and I can vouch for the fact that the program is every bit as good as we’ve been claiming. And of course a good review in the Times by our pal and internet neighbor Steve Smith is a nice bonus.
This Friday at the Good Shepherd Church (152 West 66th Street in Manhattan) should be even better, and I’m told that most of the composers will be in attendance, many having traveled hundreds or thousands of miles to be here. Admission is free, and the show starts at 8PM.
Also, it’s not to late to help out with a modest financial contribution–your support helps us make these things free. You can give online here, (please be sure to write “For the Sequenza21 concert” in the “Special Instructions” box–otherwise it won’t be applied to our event), or if you’d prefer you can send a check to:
The Astoria Music Society
38-11 Ditmars Blvd.
Box 102A
Astoria, NY 11105
(If you send a check, please include a note indicating that you want your gift applied to the S21 concert.) All contributions made through Astoria Music Society (Lost Dog’s parent organization) are tax deductible. If for whatever reason you hate those options but still love us, e-mail me at galen[at]galenbrown.com and we’ll work something out.
Hot off the…ur presses. Australian Brett Dean has won the 2009 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for his violin concerto The Lost Art of Letter Writing (2006; if you have RealPlayer installed you can hear a couple minutes of it here, as well as a podcast interview with Dean himself). The Grawemeyer Award, granted annually by the University of Louisville, is the world’s most prestigious composition prize—worth $200,000—and Dean is the first composer from Oz to win the award. Dean’s The Lost Art of Letter Writing was selected from a field of 145 entries worldwide, and the Grawemeyer’s prize announcement describes the concerto as “a wonderful solo vehicle that also contains terrific writing for orchestra.”
“The writing of music is a solitary process, and one spends a lot of time immersed in one’s own internal sound world,” says Dean. “A prize is an acknowledgement that one’s work is not only being heard, but appreciated in the big, wide world outside of one’s own studio. But I can think of no prize which represents a more significant acknowledgement of this kind than the Grawemeyer Award. To read the names of the award’s previous winners, and to know that my own work will stand alongside the work of these legendary musicians that I admire so greatly, is a humbling and moving experience.”
We’re not the kind of folks to say “we told you so” but our founding publisher Duane Harper Grant spotted Dean as a comer way back in 2000 and did an interview with him for Sequenza21. Here’s what we wrote at the time in the introduction: “Unless you follow the Berlin Philharmonic or the Australian classical music scene or have stumbled into the late night underground experimental music scene in Berlin or onto one of his very hard to find recordings, you may never heard of Brett Dean (b. 1961). But, you will. You will.” The interview is here. (more…)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1ThSi1wbqU[/youtube]
Did you learn anything in music school? Or does the phrase “circle of fifths” mean nothing to you?
How does one learn “anything”? Doesn’t one learn “something”? “Something” and “anything” really aren’t the same thing, are they? Could you help me out here?
What’s your favorite “bad” piece of music? And briefly justify your crappy taste.
Would my favorite “bad” piece of music be “better” or “worse” than my next-favorite “bad” piece on my list? Just trying to get oriented. . . .
Your five-composition-long playlist for Schoenberg would contain:
Huh. I was not aware “composition” was a unit of measurement. One more American who knows nothing about the metric system, I guess.
Congress calls on you to draw up a bailout plan for contemporary music! What do you do?
Well, that would depend on whether On-You-To-Draw-Up-A-Bailout-Plan-For-Contemporary-Music answered the call. Maybe he or she wasn’t home or on the other line. And am I the only one who thinks first names are getting ridiculous these days?
