New York

Commissions, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Events, File Under?, Interviews, New York

Introducing Meet the Composer Studio

Meet the Composer’s latest venture, MTC Studio, will be unveiled on Monday at an event at the 92nd Street Y (Tribeca). It features members of the International Contemporary Ensemble and the first class of MTC Studio composers – Kati Agócs, Marcos Balter, Yu-Hui Chang, Glenn Kotche (of the band Wilco), Dohee Lee and Ken Ueno – in an evening of conversations and music making.

Yesterday, I caught up with Ken Ueno (University of California-Berkeley) and asked him about MTC Studio and some of his other recent exploits. In addition to his activities with Meet the Composer, Ueno is getting a portrait concert on the Baltimore Contemporary Museum’s Mobtown Modern series. What’s more, he’s spending the year as a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.

Ken Ueno. Photo Annette Hornischer

Sequenza 21: For those not in ‘loop’, what’s ‘Meet the Composer?’

Ueno: Meet the Composer is one of America’s most important and vital institutions supporting the creation of new musical work.  A core tenet of theirs is to foster exciting new ways for composers to interact with audiences and performers.

Sequenza 21: Tell us about their new project, MTC Studio.

Ueno: Meet the Composer sums it up this way: “MTC Studio is a website that documents the creative process of composers through video, blogs, and other web content offering a rare perspective into the raw inner-workings of a composer’s world. Viewers get the unique opportunity to follow a musical work from first note to stage and can take part in individually supporting commissioning projects.”

Sequenza 21: What was the process for creating your page on the website?

Ueno: Kevin Clark of Meet the Composer’s home office and Jeremy Robins (a videographer) came out to Berkeley to interview me over the summer.  During that time, we shot some initial footage.  They gave me a flip camera and I’ve been since shooting my own footage that Jeremy has been editing.  It’s kind of like keeping a video diary balanced with a more general introduction to who I am and what I do as an artist.  It’s been a lot of fun.
Sequenza 21: Have you had, will you have, interactions with the other MTC composers?

Ueno: Most of them I’ve already known for years!  I’m quite honored and humbled to be included amongst some of my favorite composers of my generation!  Glenn, I did not know from before.  But being a Wilco fan for years, I look forward to meeting him.
Sequenza 21: You’re busy on this trip to the US. Tell us your itinerary!

Ueno: I gave a lecture on my music at Columbia this week.  Next week, I have the MTC Studio event, a lecture at Stony Brook, and two performances of my new piece for the Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players (at Stony Brook and at Merkin Hall).

Sequenza 21: How’s your residency in Berlin been? What’s the academy like and what are you writing there?

Ueno: Being at the American Academy in Berlin’s been great!  I have the time and space to concentrate on composing.  It’s a gracious gift of time.  What’s been especially enthralling and stimulating has been learning from the other fellows.  People like the literary critic James Wood, the journalist Anne Hull, the writers John Wray and Han Ong.

Two senior colleagues from UC Berkeley are there too: Martin Jay, a historian (one of the world’s foremost experts on the Frankfurt School), and his wife, Catherine Gallagher, a professor in English (an expert in the field of counterfactual fiction).  It’s been great hanging out with these folks and picking their brains about all sorts of things. I’m quite impressed with our youngest fellow fellow, Kirk Johnson, who started the List Project.  His organization has helped hundreds of Iraqi allies transition to the US.  This man has saved people’s lives!  Very inspiring.  We are also lucky to have Pamela Rosenberg be our dean of fellows, with all the experience she’s had in the arts.  Oh, and as a foodie, I’ve especially enjoyed the creations of the academy’s chef, Reinold Kegel.  He’s fantastic!

During my year at the academy, I’ll be working on a number of projects.  The first piece I finished was a 20-minute work for 11 instruments for the Stony Brook Contemporary Chamber Players, which will be premiered next week.  Next, I’ll work on an installation for SCI-Arc, a collaboration with the architect, Patrick Tighe.  After that, I’ll work on pieces for Alarm Will Sound and a solo for Evelyn Glennie.  If all goes well, I’m hoping to have time to work on my chamber opera, in which I’ll perform, but that’s due much later.

Event details:

Introducing Meet the Composer Studio

Monday November 15, 2010, 7:30 PM

Mainstage at 92YTribeca, 200 Hudson Street, NYC

Tickets: $15

by Christian Carey
CDs, Concerts, Downtown, File Under?, New Amsterdam, New York, Recordings, Video

Newspeak’s sweet light crude

The new indie classical kids on the block, Newspeak, have just released their first video. David T. Little’s composition sweet light crude, featuring soprano Mellissa Hughes in fine voice and the ensemble grooving up a storm, is ready for your delectation on YouTube.

The piece has been given the “jump cuts and jitter” treatment by videographers Satan’s Pearl Horses.

sweet light crude, Newspeak’s debut CD, is slated for release by New Amsterdam Records on November 16. Jitter not included: perhaps that’s for the best.

Newspeak on Tour

Fri., Nov. 12 (today):  Progressive Rock Showcases at Orion Sound Studios (2903 Whittington Ave # C, Baltimore; 410-206-1801). WithKayo Dot.

Sat., Nov. 13:  Secret Art Space, Bethlehem, PA (24 Rink St. at South New St.).  With Kayo Dot.

Sun., Nov. 14:  Littlefield, 622 Degraw St. (between 3rd and 4t Aves), Gowanus, Brooklyn.  With Kayo Dot and Loadbang.

by Christian Carey
Composers, Concert review, Conductors, Contemporary Classical, New York

New York Philharmonic performs Kraft by Magnus Lindberg

Magnus Lindberg before the show

[As part of my residency at the NEA Journalism Institute for Classical Music and Opera, I had to write an overnight review with a word limitation–something I hadn’t done in 15 years. What follows was my original story; an edited version appeared on our private web site where our reviews were posted.

I was very impressed with how the NY Phil turned a performance of a relatively obscure 25-year-old work into a must-attend event. The last time I saw that much excitement about a contemporary orchestral instrumental work was back in the late 1980s in San Diego, when a Soviet arts festival brought composers, musicians, and actors to town for a year-long festival. How did the NY Phil get the city so excited about an old work by its composer in residence?  When I get a chance between my current assignments, I hope to post an essay about that.]

Strident steel tintinabulations and dull metallic clanking invaded Avery Fisher Hall Tuesday evening (Oct. 12), where, minutes earlier, the music of Debussy and Sibelius, and the virtuosity of violinist Joshua Bell had delighted audience members.

That clangor wasn’t the 1 Train filtering up through the floor; it was the New York premiere of Magnus Lindberg’s Kraft. Fortunately the New York Philharmonic’s front office had prepared listeners for these sounds through videos and feature stories documenting Lindberg’s shopping trip at a local junkyard, turning this chapter of his two-year residency into a cause célèbre.

Alan Gilbert’s humorous but earnest explanations before Kraft also broke the ice for nervous patrons sitting near a 50-gallon storage drum or a large tam-tam suspended from the ceiling, providing them with aural signposts in Lindberg’s wild soundscape.

Lindberg’s style these days, although clearly modern, is also accessible to audiences, a polished language marked by rhythmic propulsion and dissonant but perceptible harmonies. Lindberg was an enfant terrible when he completed Kraft in 1985; its brute primitive force, imaginative orchestration, and exuberant theatricality immediately distinguished him from the droves of European modernists trying to emerge from the shadows of Boulez, Xenakis, or Ferneyhough.

Kraft is a contemporary concerto grosso, where the soloists not only play piano (magnus Lindberg), clarinet (Chen Halevi), cello (Carter Brey), timpani (Markus Rhoten), and percussion (Christopher Lamb and Daniel Druckman), but also hammer and scrape found objects from the New York area, most of them appearing to be old auto parts and iron gas cylinders. These solos are then spatialized on speakers (done skillfully by Juhani Liimatainen).

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by Christian Hertzog
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Mexico, Miller Theater, New York

BroadBand Connection

A lot of important ensembles have been coming out of places like Oberlin (Eighth Blackbird), Yale (So Percussion, Now Ensemble), and Eastman (Alarm Will Sound, JACK Quartet, Signal) over the past 10+ years.  Well, it looks like there is another one trying to break through from Eastman called Eastman BroadBand.

BroadBand is preparing for a tour of Mexico that will culminate in a performance at the Festival Internacional Cervantino in Mexico City, but before they leave they will stop in New York City on Monday to pick up their visas at the Mexican consulate and perform at Columbia’s Miller Theatre (8pm).

The program features music by Silvestre Revueltas, Juan Trigos, and Alejandro Viñao, as well as Eastman faculty and BroadBand artistic directors Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez and Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon.  Eastman BroadBand has this to say about the program:

“The music on the program explores the composers’ interaction with contemporary culture through a number of seemingly diverse perspectives: the musical folklore of Mexico, Spain, and Pakistan; the literature of Juan Rulfo and Juan Trigos Sr; the kinetic sculptures of Arthur Ganson, and the ‘music of architecture’ are all examined through the abstract lenses of these imaginative artists.”

The program also features two soloists who I’ve had on the podcast this year.  You can listen to what pianist Cristina Valdes and soprano Tony Arnold have to say about performing contemporary music and working with composers here and here.

Tickets: $25 general admission, $12 students and Eastman alumni. www.millertheatre.com.

by James Holt
Downtown, Electro-Acoustic, Experimental Music, Festivals, New York, Sound Art

Getting a little water in your ears

The Electronic Music Foundation’s really big shoo, “Ear to the Earth 2010 — The 5th New York Festival of Sound, Music, and Ecology“, will be running from October 27th through November 1st. This year the theme is “Water and the World”, and features a veritable pantheon of composers, performers and sound artists. A bit from their press release:

Water is essential to the support of all living organisms.  Yet, we are headed to a crisis in managing it.  For its fifth installment, Ear to the Earth 2010 will turn its attention to the current states of water and our social and cultural attitudes towards it. For five days eco-composers and sound artists will explore the topic of “Water and the World” through compositions, installations and presentations featuring the sound of water and bringing forth critical environmental issues — melting ice and rising sea levels, access and privatization, pollution, storm intensity, salinity, to name a few. The festival will take place at Frederick Loewe Theater, Greenwich House Music School, White Box, and Kleio Projects in New York City.

It all kicks off with a rare New York appearance by probably the dean of Canadian composers, acoustic ecology pioneer R. Murray Schafer (Oct. 27).  Highlights include a presentation on how animals (including fish) taught us how to dance by bioacoustician Bernie Krause (Oct. 29); Kristin Norderval’s new vocal electronic work on a virtual polar icecap meltdown (Oct. 30); Michael Fahres’ video concert of dolphin sounds and Senegalese master drummers (Oct. 31); Phill Niblock and Katherine Liberovskaya’s live audio/video work on the sounds of the Rhine and Danube rivers (Oct. 31); Charles Lindsay and David Rothenberg’s new live performance work on water in western United States (Nov. 1); Andrea Polli and TJ Martinez’s documentary on surfing as a way to reflect on climate change (Nov. 1); as well as performances and presentations by Matthew Burtner and Scott Deal, Yolande Harris, David Monacchi, Maggi Payne, and Matt Rogalsky.

On Oct. 30, New York Soundscapes – an evening of premieres offering panoramic portrayals of the metropolis’s audio personality and urban ecology  – will feature a team of up-and-coming sound artists focusing on NYC water-related issues such as consumption (Miguel Frasconi), the Gowanus Canal (Aleksei Stevens), and the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel (Paula Matthusen).  In addition, this year’s festival will present Daniella Topol and Sheila Callaghan’s highly entertaining, yet disturbing, theatrical work on struggles around water, and sound installations by Annea Lockwood, Liz Phillips and Jennifer Stock.

Everything you need to know about schedules, venues and tickets is here at the EMF website.  Read on for some personal words from a few of the particpants:

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by Steve Layton
Classical Music, Concerts, New York, Piano

Colorful Music

 

Russian composer/theosophist/sensualist Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) spent a lot of his life dreaming of a kind of sensory extravaganza, pieces that would submerge the audience in swirling sound, dance, colored light, heady aromas… Yeah, kind of like the 60s, but a little more Old-World refined. One result of Scriabin’s musical synasthesia was that he held very specific views on which colors were inextricably tied to each key and note. As Wiki tells it:

In his autobiographical Recollections, Sergei Rachmaninoff recorded a conversation he had had with Scriabin and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov about Scriabin’s association of colour and music. Rachmaninoff was surprised to find that Rimsky-Korsakov agreed with Scriabin on associations of musical keys with colors; himself skeptical, Rachmaninoff made the obvious objection that the two composers did not always agree on the colours involved. Both maintained that the key of D major was golden-brown; but Scriabin linked E-flat major with red-purple, while Rimsky-Korsakov favored blue. However, Rimsky-Korsakov protested that a passage in Rachmaninoff’s opera The Miserly Knight supported their view: the scene in which the Old Baron opens treasure chests to reveal gold and jewels glittering in torchlight is written in D major. Scriabin told Rachmaninoff that “your intuition has unconsciously followed the laws whose very existence you have tried to deny.”

Scriabin’s grand schemes barely came to fruition during his life, but that’s never stopped later generations from debating, analyzing or even attempting realizations of his ambitious vision. One such attempt is in store for New Yorkers this coming Monday and Tuesday, Oct. 25th and 26th., at the Jerome Robbins Theater (located within the Baryshnikov Arts Center, 450 West 37th Street). Georgian pianist Eteri Andjaparidze and lighting designer/Macarthur Grant “genius” Jennifer Tipton will be mowing through a wide swath of Scriabin’s piano music, all accompanied by lighting inspired by his ideas on musical colors. More information on time and tix here; And to warm up your ears here’s a recording of Vladimir Sofronitsky playing Scriabin’s Sonata No.4, which will be on the concert:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAeLmHxrYxM[/youtube]

by Steve Layton
Composers, Contemporary Classical, New York, Opera, Performers, Premieres, Women composers

Mephisto’s Songs at the Apollo Theater Soundstage

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N36TWwH98gE[/youtube]

This Friday and Saturday October 22 and 23, Andrea Liberovici’s multimedia work Mephisto’s Songs premieres a part of the Apollo Theater’s Salon Series. I’m not familiar with Liberovici, but I am familiar with Mephisto’s featured performer singer Helga Davis. In addition to Ms. Davis’ amazing vocals, the piece includes recorded narration by Robert Wilson and cello improvisations by The Kronos Quartet’s awesome Jeffrey Zeigler. Live musicians for this performance include Clarice Jenson (cello), Fred Cash Jr. (bass), and Abe Fogle (drums).

Some of you may be familiar with Helga Davis as a host of WQXR’s Overnight Music. She works frequently with composers Paola Prestini and Bernice Johnson Reagon who, in collaboration with Robert Wilson, created the critically acclaimed opera The Temptation of Saint Anthony with Davis singing the role of Hilarion. And some of you truly hip folks may know that she sings on two scores I composed for dance, Like Dirt for Racoco Productions and La Spectra for Movement Pants Dance. Davis is also a distinctive and powerful composer. Her solo shows combining song, spoken word, theater, and video at venues that include New York City’s Whitney Museum or Galapagos are not to be missed.

Check out the Apollo Theater website for ticket information for their Salon Series. An article about another one of Liberovici’s recent projects can be found here.

by Chris Becker
Brooklyn, Contemporary Classical, Houston, New York

Houston Calling: She Told Me This

Mezzo Soprano Zheng Chao

The music season has definitely kicked into gear all across the country. Sure, I will always love and find inspiration via New York City; I just received a great CD from a new friend in Brooklyn and the other night skyped for the first time with another NYC friend and collaborator who helped lead Burnt Sugar in a recent musical tribute to James Brown at the Apollo Theater (Salon Series at the Apollo is looking really, really cool. Miller Theatre, you have been warned…).

But I’m excited by the music new I’m reading from all the coasts (and Midwest). Here’s yet another great concert event taking place in my new home – Houston, Texas.

This Saturday, October 16th, Houston’s contemporary music group Musiqa launches its 9th season with the world premiere of composer Stewart Wallace’s chamber piece for She Told Me This composed for and performed by Mezzo Soprano Zheng Chao with a libretto by Amy Tan. Sara Jobin, Assistant Conductor of the San Francisco Opera, conducts. A native Houstonian, Wallace is best known for his opera Harvey Milk , which premiered in Houston in 1995. Zheng Chao’s recently diagnosed and current battle with lung cancer in part inspired Wallace to compose this piece especially for her. You can read more about Chao and her story here.

Saturday’s program also includes a world premiere dance performance by Dance of Asia America to works by Lei Liang and Lou Harrison as well as two pieces by composers Anthony Brandt and Todd Frazier commissioned for the recent anniversary of Rice University’s Richard E. Smalley Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology.

It all takes place Saturday, October 16th, 2010, at 7:30 p.m. in Zilkha Hall of The Hobby Center for the Performing Arts. A pre-concert screening of a film about Stewart Wallace and Amy Tan’s collaboration takes place at 7:00 p.m. You can purchase tickets at www.musiqahouston.org

by Chris Becker
ACO, BAM, Bang on a Can, Concerts, Lincoln Center, New York

Kraft, Transit, Talea, ACO, BAM

There are a few more concerts happening in New York this week that you should know about, and then I’ll give the concert updates a rest for a while.  Promise.

Tonight (Tuesday, October 12), is your last chance to see the New York premiere of Kraft by Magnus Lindberg.  7:30pm, New York Philharmonic, Avery Fisher Hall.  If you somehow haven’t heard about this, you can read the s21 posts about it here, here, and here; the New York Times articles and videos here, and here.  You can even find some info over at Huffington Post.  Check on ticket availability here, and see you tonight!

Thursday (October 14), like most nights here, is full of fantastic concerts to check out.  Here are two that I strongly recommend: Option #1, Transit presents So Percussion, Tristan Perich, and Corps Exquis (a collaboration between Daniel Wohl and six video artists) at Galapagos (8pm).  Option #2, Talea Ensemble is presenting a concert called KINETICS (also at 8pm at the Rose Studio at Lincoln Center); they will perform music by Philippe Leroux, Luciano Berio, Frank Denyer, Manfred Stahnke, and a world premiere by Alexandre Lunsqui appropriately titled Kineticstudies.  Good luck choosing!

Friday (October 15) is the season opener for the American Composers Orchestra (7:30pm. Zankel Hall).  Their program is called “Mystics & Magic” and they will present John Luther Adams, Jacob Druckman, Wang Jie (winner of ACO’s 2009 Underwood New Music Readings Commission), Alvin Singleton, and Claude Vivier.  And they will also be welcome two truly amazing soloists: soprano Susan Narucki (for Claude’s piece), and pianist Ursula Oppens (for Alvin’s piece).

Saturday (October 16) I’ll be checking out A House in Bali over at BAM.  Of course, this is actually being presented the 14-16th, so take your pick.  There’s no need to go into details about it here, you can read my earlier post for more information.

by James Holt
Composers, Concert review, Conductors, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, File Under?, New York, Orchestras

Magnus Lindberg on Kraft + Einstürzende Neubauten

My tweet right after the concert on Thursday: “Magnus Lindberg’s Kraft: some very beautiful passages + intriguing spatial effects amidst a joyously chaotic maelstrom of sound.”

It’s a fascinating piece and a gutsy one for the New York Philharmonic to present. I do question the wisdom of programming it alongside Joshua Bell playing the Sibelius Violin Concerto. It threw some of the more conservative ticket-holders a curveball, as they had no idea (unless they’re checked out the promo videos on YouTube) what the Lindberg had in store for them.

There were far more than the “handful” of walkouts Anthony Tommasini noted in his otherwise superlative review in the New York Times. From where we were sitting in the Third Tier of Fisher Hall, we had a birds-eye view of a steady exodus of disgruntled patrons: perhaps 10-15%.

On Friday, I talked about the walkout phenomena with my analytical studies class. One issue we discussed was the notion that many orchestras seem to have of “one audience” vs. the possible lifesaving way forward of cultivating “many audiences.” The former notion seems pretty entrenched at the Phil. I’m glad to see that Alan Gilbert and some of the folks in the press office are exploring ways to curate and cultivate multiple kinds of music-making at the NYPO and leverage social media to find new audience sources. Last year, Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre was a terrific example of that.

But Thursday’s concert seemed to me to be a holdover of the former way of thinking. Get people to come to hear Joshua Bell, and then have the conductor give a lecture explaining why they should like a loud piece with oxygen tanks and multiple gongs in the midst of the audience. I don’t entirely blame the folks who stormed out for being upset, although I do wish they’d taken the hint and left after the concerto if they weren’t up for an adventure.

Still, for those who stayed, it was quite an adventure. Here’s Lindberg discussing the piece.


How often does a promo video (and indeed, program booklet) from the NY Philharmonic namecheck experimental industrial postpunk collective Einstürzende Neubauten? This is perhaps the first time! But one can really see the connections between the group’s aesthetic and Magnus Lindberg’s Kraft in the videos below: check out their percussion setup!




There’s one more performance of Kraft on Tuesday. If you’re in New York, I heartily recommend checking it out!

by Christian Carey