Our friends at RCRDLBL are sharing an MP3 of “Lots” by indie classical composer Dan Deacon (embed below).
Dan Deacon’s new full length recording, America, is out August 28th via Domino Records.
Best wishes to Pauline Oliveros, who turned eighty today!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-X4raYLHPE&feature=related[/youtube]
This month, Gyan Riley is curating for New York venue the Stone. One of the San Francisco residents that he’s invited to visit the Big Apple for a gig is avant-cabaret artist Amy X. Neuburg, who performs there tonight (details below).
Neuburg eschews the usual instrumentation of a cabaret performer, instead using an electronic drumset. But the music isn’t isolated to percussive utterances; rather the synth drums serve as a control surface with which she can trigger live recording and overdubs. Thus, a drum hit might ‘sound’ like drums, or it might just as easily trigger backing vocals or synth patches.
Using this setup, Neuburg often creates multiple loops, each with its own place in the sound field. Her set at the Stone (her first appearance there) will introduce some new works, but also revisits her back catalog, updating several pieces to accommodate this “spatialized” aesthetic.
Amy X. Neuburg at the Stone
May 30 at 8 PM
The Stone,
Corner of Avenue C and Second Avenue
NY, NY
Tickets: $10 at the door
To many, Memorial Day weekend means the kickoff of the summer season: getaways, barbecues, traffic, and more traffic …
But the New York new music scene doesn’t seem to be on holiday from its Spring season yet. indeed, we’ll be talking a number of events in coming weeks, extending well into June.
Performers and, one hopes, audiences, aren’t even taking the weekend off. Tonight is an all Milton Babbitt concert at CUNY Grad Center. It features several pieces done by the performers who’ve made them part of their core repertoires. But any chance to hear Judith Bettina sing Philomel again or William Anderson and Oren Fader play Soli e Duettini is most welcome. Less often heard but featured here is the early “Composition for Four Instruments” and the piano duo Envoi from 1990. Though it’s bittersweet to go to hear Babbitt’s music without his convivial presence and sepulchral commentary, it is good to see that the Composers Alliance and CUNY are making every effort to keep his music alive.
Milton Babbitt Retrospective
Friday, May 25, 2012, 7:30pm at CUNY Graduate Center
Elebash Recital Hall (365 Fifth Ave, New York) Free Admission
Program
None but the Lonely Flute (1991) Patricia Spencer, flute
Envoi (1990) Steven Beck and Zachary Bernstein, piano
Soli e Duettini (1989) Oren Fader, guitar, William Anderson, guitar
Melismata (1982) Karen Rostron, violin
Philomel (1964) Judith Bettina, soprano
Composition for Four Instruments (1948) Patricia Spencer, flute; Charles Neidich, clarinet; Joshua Modney, violin; Christopher Gross, cello
My Ends are My Beginnings (1978)Charles Neidich, clarinet
More Melismata (2006) Christopher Gross, Cello
Swan Song no. 1 (2003) Barry Cooper, flute; Robert Ingliss, oboe; William Anderson, mandolin
Oren Fader, guitar; Calvin Wiersma, violin; Susannah Chapman, cello; James Baker, conductor
Music Programs • The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue • New York, New York 10016-4309
(212) 817-8590 • music@gc.cuny.edu
___
On Saturday, Collide-O-Scope Music is presenting a varied program, including a Babbitt work as well, but mostly featuring music by emerging and mid-career composers. As is often the case, CoSM programs both works for conventional instrumentation and for sound objects that are decidedly unconventional. Here, the latter is represented by Lou Bunk’s “scratch-o-lin,” a cardboard contraption that he fervently attacks with a violin bow!
Collide-O-Scope Music presents “The Medium is the Music”
Alexandra Gardner: New Skin (2002)
James Romig: Walls Like These (2012)
Lou Bunk: Shreds of New Walls (2012) *
Christopher Bailey: Fantasy-Passacaglia After Hall and Oates II (2012) *
Lou Bunk: Study for Bowed Cardboard (2010)
Christopher Bailey: Outlying Afterward (2012) *
Michael Klingbeil: Vers La Courbe (2012) *
Milton Babbitt: Preludes, Interludes, and Postlude (1991)
* World Premieres
Saturday, May 26 at 8:00 PM
The Cell Theater
338 West 23rd St., New York City
338 West 23rd St., New York City
Tickets: $15/$10 (students)
For tickets and more info:
http://www.thecelltheatre.org/
http://www.thecelltheatre.org/
CDs, Cello, Chamber Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Downtown, Experimental Music, File Under?, New York, viola
Saltarello
Garth Knox, viola & fiddle
with Agnès Vesterman, cello & Sylvain Lemêtre, percussion
ECM Records CD 2157
Dance music in multiple forms, from the saltarello, a Venetian dance dating back to the Fourteenth century, to Breton and Celtic folk music, as well as transcriptions of medieval era compositions, Renaissance era consort music, and contemporary fare, are featured on Saltarello, violist Garth Knox’s latest ECM CD. Among the early music slections, Particularly impressive is a Vivaldi concerto, performed in a duo arrangement for viola d’amore and cello. Its interpreters, Knox and Agnès Vesterman, take this continuo less opportunity to accentuate a supple contrapuntal interplay between soloist and bass line. Equally lovely is a piece that combines music by Hildegard and Machaut in a kind of medieval style mash-up. Also stirring is this duo’s version of John Dowland’s most famous piece, Lachrimae, perhaps known best in its incarnation as the song “Flow My Tears.”
Knox, who is a past member of both Ensemble Intercontemporain and the Arditti String Quartet, also performs the disc’s newer material with consummate musicality: he also has the bedeviling habit of making virtuosic writing sound far too easy to play (his poor violist colleagues!). Knox’s own composition, “Fuga Libre,” combines jazz rhythms and neo-baroque counterpoint with ever more complicated harmonic tension points and several instances in which Knox demonstrates various extended playing techniques. Meanwhile, Kaaija Saariaho’s Vent Nocturne, an eerily evocative and tremendously challenging piece for viola and electronics, is given a haunting, sonically sumptuous rendering.
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Tomorrow night, Knox celebrates the release of the CD at LPR (details below). Early music, new pieces by and for Knox, and lovely comestibles on menu and on tap? Sounds like my evening’s planned!
Event Details
Tuesday May 22nd – Doors open at 6:30, show starts at 7:30
158 Bleecker Street, NYC| 212.505.FISH
music of Hildegard von Bingen, Guillaume de Machaut
John Dowland, Henry Purcell, Antonio Vivaldi, Kaija Saariaho, and Garth Knox
May 23-24, 2012: Spektral Quartet and High Concept Laboratories Present Theatre of War
On Wednesday, May 23 in Chicago, the Spektral Quartet and High Concept Laboratories will present Theatre of War, an artistic investigation into the disconnects between the experiences of those most directly affected by our wars and the experience of the public at large. The event comes at a salient moment, immediately following the NATO summit meeting in Chicago. Theatre of War will be held at the Chopin Theatre and will be repeated on Thursday, May 24. All ticket proceeds are being donated to the Vet Art Project (www.vetartproject.com)
In every era there are artists who are able to use their work as a prism through which the public can examine troubling facts that might otherwise be hiding in plain sight. Examples abound, as diverse as Picasso’s antiwar masterpiece Guernica and Nina Simone’s civil rights broadside Mississippi Goddam. With our personal history in the struggles for civil rights and against the War in Vietnam, we consider this an important role of art. We have been troubled by the lack of public discourse and artistic light shone on a decade of US war-making.
We applaud the Spektral Quartet and their collaborators for embracing this artistic tradition with Theatre of War. The multimedia production will employ music, film, literature, and theater to examine the consequences of our nation being at war. With our modern all-volunteer military, few Americans are directly involved in our war efforts. We as a society hold those who serve in high regard. But we tend to do so with an empty reverence. We worship them as heroes without really understanding what we ask them to do in our names, nor comprehending the physical and psychic toll they pay in doing it. These are the disconcerting realities Theatre of War will confront.
The musical components of Theatre of War will be “Stress Position” by Chicago composer Drew Baker and George Crumb’s “Black Angels.” Guest pianist Lisa Kaplan of eighth blackbird will perform “Stress Position,” a staged piece for solo amplified piano. The pianist is subjected to a kind of torture, stretched to the limits to play constantly at the two extremes of the keyboard. As the volume increases and the lights go out, the audience is engulfed in the experience. The Spektral Quartet will play “Black Angels,” written by Crumb at the height of the Vietnam War turmoil. It is scored for electrified string quartet and the players are also required to vocalize, play percussion, and bow water-filled crystal glasses, creating eerie, otherworldly effects.
Richard Mosse, a filmmaker and photographer who has been embedded with US military units in Iraq and Afghanistan, will provide the video portion of the program. His short films “Theatre of War,” “Gaza Pastoral,” and “Killcam” expose elements of our military efforts of which the everyday public are typically unaware.
The literary and theatrical segments of Theatre of War will come from Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska and Chicago writer Virginia Konchan. Szymborska’s poems “Hatred” and “The End and the Beginning” assay the fundamental nature of human conflict and reconciliation. Konchan’s short story “Blackbird,” adapted for the stage by Molly Feingold of High Concept Laboratories, probes the scars of war borne by a returning soldier and his frustrated search for healing.
In presenting Theatre of War in the wake of the NATO Summit, we hope the Spektral Quartet and their artistic partners will spark a personal-level examination of our ongoing global military operations. Following the program, the audience will be encouraged to share their reactions in discussion with the artists and with each other.
Chicago-based Spektral Quartet was formed in 2010 with a commitment to play a wide-ranging repertory in traditional and genre-breaking venues. The members are Aurelien Fort Pederzoli (violin), J. Austin Wulliman (violin), Doyle Armbrust (viola), and Russell Rolen (cello). High Concept Laboratories, led by Co-artistic Directors Molly Feingold and Kevin Simmons, collaborates with Chicago-area artists and performers to foster the creation and development of new works.
Theatre of War
Chopin Theatre
1543 W Division
Chicago, IL 60642
Wednesday, May 23, 2012 at 7:30 PM
Thursday, May 24, 2012 at 7:30 PM
General Admission: $30.00
Student Admission: $20.00
Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/242801
Arlene and Larry Dunn are avid fans of a wide range of contemporary arts and music endeavors as well as life-long social activists. They are frequent contributors of “audience perspective” blog postings for digitICE, the blog of the new music juggernaut International Contemporary Ensemble. They live in rural LaPorte County, Indiana.
Princeton Symphony Orchestra
Richardson Auditorium, Princeton, NJ
May 13, 2012
ChamberMusicianToday.com
PRINCETON – The Princeton Symphony’s final concert of its classical season included two repertory staples – Brahms’s Fourth Symphony and Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major – as well as a revised version of Sarah Kirkland Snider’s sole work to date for orchestra, Disquiet. Although Snider is a rising star in the world of contemporary music, she has thus far made her name as a formidable composer of vocal works, notably the song cycle Penelope, as well as theatre music and chamber compositions for groups such as yMusic and NOW Ensemble.
She first conceived some of the material for Disquiet back in 2000, and the original version of the piece was premiered at Yale while she was a graduate student there in 2004. The revised version given by the Princeton Symphony, conducted by Rossen Milanov, is a single movement tone poem around a quarter of an hour long. Rather than depicting “disquiet” primarily via its pitch or rhythmic language, creating abundant dissonances or angularity, Snider takes another approach: uneasiness is primarily delineated by the work’s formal design. Thus, one may at first be surprised to hear the its often lush harmonies and strong melodic thrust. But as Disquiet unfolds, a labyrinth of disparate gestures and contrasting sections, often supplied in quick succession, imparts the title’s requisite restive sensibility.
Milanov brought out the piece’s wide dynamic shifts, exhorting brash tutti and hushed sustained chords from the orchestra. The piece’s quick sectional shifts allowed several performers brief turns in the spotlight: concertmaster Basia Danilow, clarinetist William Ansel, and flutist Jayn Rosenfeld noteworthy among them.
One hopes that, with this performance under her belt, Snider will get the opportunity to create more works for orchestra. Given Disquiet’s colorfully cinematic use of motives, one also wonders whether she might try her hand at film-scoring.
Tonight, the Alabama Symphony, conducted by Justin Brown, appears at Carnegie Hall as part of Spring for Music, a week long celebration of out-of-town orchestras with adventurous programming aesthetics. Many of them are making their Carnegie Hall debuts; all of them are bringing programs of interest and demonstrating that, despite the oft-reported economic vicissitudes in the world of classical music, there remains a tremendous vitality of orchestral music making throughout North America.
In addition to a repertory standby, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the ASO presents two New York premieres of pieces they commissioned: Avner Dorman’s Astrolatry and Paul Lansky’s Shapeshifters. The latter work is a double piano concerto for the duo Quattro Mani.
The same forces recently recorded it, as well as two other pieces by Lansky, for Bridge . The disc, titled Imaginary Islands, shows off Lansky’s music at its most colorful, filled with virtuosic passages for the soloists and formidably propulsive post-minimal writing for the orchestra. The composer’s take on minimal figuration is a fascinating marriage of an “enhanced” harmonic palette, one evocative of Messiaen as often as it is of Adams, with crackling ostinati and pileups of syncopation.
The recording demonstrates how far the ASO has come in a relatively short period of time: less than twenty years ago (in 1993), the orchestra had declared bankruptcy and its future was very much in doubt. The musicians and Brown, who soon departs from his position as their music director, should be proud of the successes the ASO has enjoyed in recent years. The standard of playing has risen, the orchestra’s programming has included a number of new works including several commissions, and they have been featured on several recording projects. This week’s visit to Carnegie Hall: a well-deserved victory lap!
In the Kaleidoscope: the Music of Sean Shepherd
April 23, 2012
Music Mondays at Advent Lutheran Church
NEW YORK – Sean Shepherd’s music was featured in last week’s Music Monday concert at Advent Lutheran Church on New York’s Upper West Side. One of the fast rising stars of contemporary classical music’s thirty-something set, Shepherd has already been performed by the New York Philharmonic, on their Contact contemporary music series, and is currently in residence with both the orchestras Cleveland and Reno. Upcoming performances of his works are this summer at the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music and in the Fall with the National Symphony (both under Oliver Knussen). His publisher – a little house you may have heard of – Boosey and Hawkes.
Although the aforementioned accomplishments indicate that Shepherd is making a name for himself as a composer of orchestral music, the concert at Advent Lutheran demonstrated that he’s also creating compelling works for chamber forces. The centerpieces of the program were two oboe quartets – Mozart ‘s K. 370 paired with a new piece by Shepherd. In discussing the work in an onstage interview, the composer mentioned his undergraduate degree in bassoon performance as an entry point into composing for winds and as a reason for his selection of the Mozart work as a companion piece to his own music on the concert. Another inspiration surely was oboist Liang Wang (of the New York Philharmonic), whose superlative control in the Mozart buoyed a supple performance with many lovely dynamic shadings.
Shepherd’s Oboe Quartet (2011), which received its New York premiere, takes inspiration from the Mozart; but not in any direct or referential sort of way. Rather, the graceful balance of elements found in the earlier piece serves as a totemic point of reference, allowing Shepherd’s postmodern language to be imbued with large-scale formal clarity. Wang adopted a more mysterious tone quality here, befitting the arcing filigrees that characterized his more virtuosic passages. His collaborators, violinist Miranda Cuckson, violist Jessica Meyer, and cellist Julia Bruskin were also impressive in the work’s darting counterpoint and frequent tightly coordinated entrances.
Cuckson, joined by pianist Aaron Wunsch, gave a performance of Shepherd’s Dust (2008) that underscored its variegated moods, ranging from diaphanous Impressionist verticals to fierily angular melodic ricochets. Dust encompasses both Shepherd’s flair for the dramatic and his capacity for fetching lyricism.
The Claremont Trio was on hand to give the New York premiere of a brand new piano trio, written for them by Shepherd. Some of the signature elements found in the evening’s earlier pieces were here too: quickly rendered angular passages in rhythmic sync, wide contrasts of mood between more ruminative sections and those busily attired with nervous energy, and a varied harmonic palette that encompasses passages that, while not exactly tonal in orientation, provide a sense of lyricism and centricity, as well as places where the pitch language is replete with dissonance. But more heightened here than elsewhere on the concert was the sense of multiple time streams and a catalog of metric shifts that I presume may be architectural in design (I hope to get my hands on a score to verify this presumption). Regardless, it’s one of Shepherd’s most thoughtfully constructed works to date. The Claremont Trio plays it throughout with assuredness and enthusiasm. Collectively and as soloists, Shepherd has given them many places to shine: and shine they do. Dare we hope that a studio recording is forthcoming?
Incidentally, Music Mondays hosted a packed crowd for this event. While it doesn’t hurt that admission is free, whatever they are doing to get out the word is working!
Over at Sequenza 21 Editor Steve Layton’s Bandcamp page, is a free download of a comp he’s curated, titled ppp. Description and embed below.
“Between April 26th-28th 2012, twenty-five musicians from around the U.S. and the world gathered at the music-sharing website known as ImprovFriday.com. The suggested theme for our sharing was simply “ppp;” i.e., the music term for “extremely soft and quiet.” How each person interpreted this in their own performance was left to them. This CD documents mash-ups I made during the course of the weekend event, of all the different tracks coming in to the site from these musicians. Some tracks were heavily edited, but most were left close to their original state, and simply allowed to interact with the other tracks in an unforced way.”
Musicians: Günter Gläser, Kawol Samarkand, Roger Sundström, Peter Thörn, Glenn Smith, J.C. Combs, Lee Noyes, Kavin Allenson, Steve Moyes, Richard Sanderson, Paul Muller, Lydia Busler-Blais, Benjamin Smith, Jérôme Poirier, Fabio Keiner, Norbert Oldani, Chris Vaisvil, Steve Layton, Paulo Chagas, Steve Moshier, Bruce Hamilton, Shane Cadman, Jim Goodin.
released 29 April 2012