The Keys to the Future festival, at Greenwich House’s Renee Weiler Concert Hall, presents 3 consecutive nights of recent solo piano music – each concert has 4 pianists. The fundamental premise of this festival is that the contemporary scene is characterized by unprecedented diversity, and that that is a good thing. Each of the 3 evenings presents some strange juxtapositions of styles – sometimes the only thing that two pieces on one of our programs have in common is that they are notated and contemporary. I prefer this to a concert of works all in the same style – when a post-minimalist work follows an atonal modernist work on the same program, they tend to highlight characteristics in each other in interesting and unexpected ways. Audiences have really responded to this aspect of the shows.

A few words about a couple of the pieces. On Evening 1, Marina Lomazov, Blair McMillen, Tatjana Rankovich and I will play works of Louis Andriessen, Poul Ruders, Joan Tower, John Fitz Rogers, Joseph Rubenstein and Henry Martin. Andriessen’s “The Memory of Roses” presents a particularly intimate and personal side of the composer’s work. Over the last 4 decades, Andriessen has written short pieces for family and friends, often performed at birthdays. He decided to collect 20 of these pieces, and I will be playing the 7 of these works that are for solo piano. These are very small-scale charming works with all kinds of stylistic influences, from Chopin and Chabrier to Stravinsky and Cage. Speaking of the latter, one of these short works (“Chorale”) was written and completed the day John Cage died and is a moving tribute. There is another piece that can be played on music box or piano (I’ll play it on piano), that uses exclusively the highest register of the piano, to beautiful effect.

Closing Evening 1, the phenomenal virtuoso and new music champion Tatjana Rankovich will play 4 Preludes and Fugues by Henry Martin. Henry has composed Preludes and Fugues in each key – obviously, they look back to Bach but they are also firmly rooted in the present – particularly the Preludes, but even the Fugues manage to sound contemporary. (This is not easy to do.) There isn’t any way to pigeonhole these pieces – neo-Baroque and neo-Romantic both apply to some extent, but none capture the totality of the music. The final Prelude and Fugue, in one movement and subtitled “A Slow Drag,” is a technical tour de force and a lot of fun – it closes Opening Night of our little festival down at Greeenwich House.

The Rogers “Variations” is a monumental neo-Romantic work of ‘face-melting’ virtuosity – Marina plays the hell out of it. Tower’s “Throbbing Still” is aggressive and viscerally powerful, and Blair plays the hell out of it. The Ruders has minimalist and jazz influences. My “Romance No. 2 (aurora)” is a flowing, hybrid work in which I express my love for the instrument. For more info, please check our website www.keystothefuture.org. Hope to see you at the shows! I’ll write some more notes tomorrow about Evening 2.

Joseph Rubenstein
Artistic Director, Keys to the Future

Nadia Boulanger

Mademoiselle

A film by Bruno Monsaingeon

Ideale Audience (www.ideale-audience.com)

Mademoiselle, the DVD release of Bruno Monsaingeon’s 1977 film about renowned pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, is a fascinating document. It includes footage of Boulanger from the 1970s, still teaching as she neared ninety years of age. Her exacting standards, detailed criticism, and keen analytical mind are all on display.

Igor Markevitch and Leonard Bernstein are interviewed, discussing Boulanger’s impact on 20th century music. Markevitch shares his formative experiences as a student of Boulanger. Bernstein recounts Boulanger’s criticisms of one of his songs, including a suggestion that he had included “the wrong note.” Although he had never previously studied with Boulanger, the then 58 year-old felt as if he was “back in school” and receiving a composition lesson!

Most fascinating are Monsaingeon’s conversations with Boulanger. Her steadfast devotion to teaching is an inspiration. Any composer or educator who needs an antidote to their creative malaise or writer’s block should listen to what she has to say about the restorative and ineffable power of music.

The Columbus Symphony Orchestra (OH) is in dire straits. It is possible the orchestra could fold in the very near future. The problems are financial and organizational, and management and labor are not seeing eye-to-eye at all. According to principal clarinetist, and Sequenza21 friend, David Thomas, the press coverage has been terribly one-sided, and the musicians’ point of view is not getting out. Here’s a website where you can show your support, and here’s another where news is always coming in. David has kindly forwarded me his version of events, and I am posting it in the comments section.

Growing up in central Ohio, I have some important musical memories because of the CSO: hearing Respighi for the first time, taking lessons from their second-chair clarinetist, and, more recently, having had a terrific performance led by Peter Stafford Wilson, their assistant conductor. Central Ohio without the CSO is hard for me to imagine, but all too easy, one supposes, for most people who live there.

I am all about my music, and my music is all about me… It flows from what I’ve been through, what I’ve seen and how I feel. I live in New York and am on top of the world. Been here since 2004 and I love this city, I love my life here. But, my path has not been easy.   – Ashley Alexandra Dupre

For the prurient minded.

Anybody up for seeing, and reviewing the New York debut of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project on April 1st at the 10th Annual MATA Festival? They’re doing Lisa Bielawa’s Double Violin Concerto, On a Sufficient Condition for the Existence of Most Specific Hypothesis by Ken Ueno (throat singer), The Conscious Sleepwalker Loops by Alejandro Rutty, MATA’s first orchestral commission, and Clades by Derek Hurst

I can get you a pair.

Remember how you bought a bunch of Yahoo! stock at $13 per share when they went public in April of 1996, and how by January of 2000 those shares peaked at $475 per share, making you fabulously wealthy, which is why you now have so much time to spend reading our humble little website?  Wait, you didn’t do that?  Yeah, me neither.  It’s hard to get in on the ground floor of a good thing, which is part of why I’m excited to have lucked into discovering the Matrix Music Collaborators.  In truth, I went to their March 1st concert at the Tenri institute  more out of professional obligation than anything else, but what I found there was a dynamite group of young musicians who are muscling their way into the New York music scene with surprising speed.  The March 1st concert was the first of a three concert mini-series, and I also went to the third concert, on March 6th at the Nabi Gallery.  Here’s what I found.

(more…)

Dear Sequenza21 folks,

I enjoy your site immensely.  It is really a wealth of information and opinions – a kind of lively gathering of the diverse personalities that inhabit contemporary music.

I am a musicology grad student and I am working on a project this semester about classical music on the internet – the way new technologies affect how the music is disseminated, received, perceived, etc. – and the ways new and changing audiences are interacting with the music.

I am not sure who responds to emails at this address, but I was wondering if anyone could answer a few questions for me.

Basically, I was interested to find out a little bit about the history of Sequenza21 – how it came together and its stages of development.

Also, I would love to hear any thoughts about the place of a site like Sequenza21 in the world of contemporary classical music:  What is the significance of the kind of community it fosters?
Does it help to reach new audiences – is it an effective means of promotion – or does its main value lie elsewhere?

Does it have some role in altering the perception of contemporary classical music in contemporary society?

…or any other thoughts.

I am sure everyone involved with the site is extremely busy.  Please do not feel pressured to reply if you simply do not have the time.  I would, however, truly appreciate any information and thoughts you could offer.

Many Thanks,
Will Boone

JB Note:  So, what do we think?

Things happen when you pay attention. Resemblances line up, and disjunctions jar. These things certainly happened when I caught Word for Word’s theatricalization of James Baldwin’s Harlem-set story Sonny’s Blues, and Spain’s flamenco group Son De La Frontera on successive nights in San Francisco last weekend.  Word for Word used every possible dramatic device, including fine actors, to make each syllable of the story come alive while the Spanish musicians produced a thoroughly non-verbal experience though there was lots of singing.

The paradox was that both performances — even the wall to wall words of Sonny’s Blues — delivered language-free meanings, and that, whether we’re aware of it or not, art is always a fundamental emotional experience, even with words. And — it should get us where we live.                                                                                                                                                                  Flamenco provides one of the rawest, purest, and most sophisticated musico-dramatic experiences on the planet. And the 6-member Son De La Frontera,  presented by The Bay Area Flamenco Partnership at The Yerba Buena Center for The Arts Theater Saturday 1 March, are masters of this ancient form, which began in India with the gypsies who crossed North Africa, and settled in Spain’s Andalucia, where flamenco flourished in the intermingled soil of its Islamic, Jewish (Sephardic), and Christian cultures. Son De La Frontera delivered it clearly, honestly,and without regret. Virgil Thomson once declared that composers did everything but speak the language of the heart. But these Spaniards, who paid tribute to composer-guitarist Diego Del Gastor (1908-1973) here, certainly did. And their music, which comes from Del Gastor’s, made the divided chambers of the heart visceral, and incredibly real.

The two-hour, no break concert began with a guitar solo, a martinete, by Gastor’s nephew, Juan Del Gastor. The martinete is a kind of not-in-any-set meter improv, and Del Gastor’s was ripe with subtle yet powerful touches and myriad colors, like a dream of Spain’s fairest flower. Things got obviously more intense when guitarists Raul Rodriguez and Paco De Amparo took the stage with singer Moi De Moron, and the compas, or rhythm section provided by him — handclapping on the palmas, or the sordas — and Manuel Flores, and Pepe Torres, who also danced. Rodriquez and De Amparo’s unisons and solos were a harmonic and coloristic anchor to the intricate polyrhythms of the other three musicians, especially the phenomenally fancy footwork, or taconero, by Torres, who had  tons of that essential flamenco ingredient, duende, and whose turning, lurching, and jumping was powerfully controlled, the scarlet back of his black vest the only note of color in the show. 

Flamenco has a rich vocabulary of differently accented 12 count (beat) rhythms which form the basis of the buleria, the solea, which were stunningly played, sung and danced here. The group also gave knockout performances of the fiesta, cantina, sevillana, as well as the 4 count (beat) tanguillo, and tango. Flamenco is about all the basic passions of love, hate, abandonment, fear, despair, and revenge. It gets them down as no other art form can, and doesn’t make them pretty. But this brutal, in the best sense of the word, form lets them sing. And I was reminded of the late great Spanish mezzo Rocio Jurado, who sang on the soundtrack of Carlos Saura’s 1985 film of De Falla’s El Amor Brujo, when listening to Moi de Moron. You don’t have to know or even “hear”  the words to feel whats he’s saying. It doesn’t get any better, or more real than this. 

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