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

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

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

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

This Saturday night at Greenwich House, composer Ted Hearne pays loving tribute to the glorious achievements of state and federal officials in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. An hour long song cycle, Katrina Ballads enshrines the immortal words of Barbara Bush, Dennis Hastert, Anderson Cooper and others in all the dignity they deserve. Or (ahem) roasts the above named folks to a crisp. Either way, tickets are $15 and $8 depending on your social status – so it’s cheap. Workers around the world unite.

I’m a bit late in reviewing this, but two Saturdays ago, February 23, the Lost Dog New Music ensemble performed at Judson Memorial Church at Washington Square in Manhattan. Lost Dog isn’t yet a very well-known group, but if this concert was any indication they may be on their way to indispensable. The group is the contemporary chamber music wing of the Astoria Music Society, which was founded in 2003 and which also includes a composers collective called Random Access Music, a jazz series called Astoria Jazz Nights, and the Astoria Symphony. (I saw the Symphony in an excellent performance

A long, long time ago, boys and girls, there was a very funny TV series called Get Smart, starring a Borscht Belt comic named Don Adams as a brain-addled superspy named Maxwell Smart and a cute-as-a-button gamine named Barbara Feldon as his trusty sidekick, Agent 99. This was before most of you were born. Adams left the building for the big Grossinger’s in the Sky a long time ago but Barbara Feldon, Agent 99, is alive and well and appearing this Wednesday night at 8 pm with the early music ensemble Parthenia, a Consort of Viols, in Hot Off the