The Composers Concordance is having a concert tomorrow night at 8PM at the Greenwich House Music School Renee Weiler Concert Hall, 46 Barrow Street which will star our very own Jeff Harrington. Okay, there are some other composers on the program, too, but none as adventuresome or all-round lovable as our favorite geek-composer. Paul Hoffmann will perform the New York premiere of Jeff’s brilliant Big Easy mashup, Blue Strider. You’ll find the full schedule for the program here.
Marco Antonio Mazzini is a Peruvian clarinetist with an Italian name who lives in Belgium and plays with a Czech orchestra called the Ostravska Banda which–as fate would have it–is joining the Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble for a good-looking program (Brown, Wolpe, Stockhausen, Xenakis) of modern music at Zankel Hall Monday night. There will be a preview performance Sunday night at the Willow Place Auditorium in Brooklyn Heights. Marco would be up for organizing a Sequenza21 concert in Ghent sometime if we have some Euro-interest.
Here’s something to put in your calendar. Our friends at the Metropolis Ensemble, led by Artistic Director Andrew Cyr, have a fabulous program called “There and Back Again” lined up for May 24 at the Angel Orensanz Foundation Center for the Arts, highlighted by the U.S. Premiere of Avner Dorman’s Mandolin Concerto. Mandolin virtuoso Avi Avital (for whom the work was written) and the Metropolis Ensemble Strings will do the honors.
“The concerto’s main conflicts are between sound and silence and between motion and stasis,’ Dorman says. “One of the things that inspired me to deal with these opposites is the Mandolin’s most basic technique – the tremolo, which is the rapid repetition of notes. The tremolo embodies both motion and stasis. The rapid movement provides momentum, while the pitches stay the same.”
Dorman says the piece draws from the mandolin’s vast repertoire, including Baroque, Russian folk music, Bluegrass, Indian music, Brazilian jazz and Avant-Garde.
“When Avi approached me to write a concerto for him, my acquaintance with the mandolin was fairly limited,” he says. “I had used it in chamber pieces only twice before, and did not know most of the repertoire for the instrument. As I got to know the instrument better, I discovered its diverse sonic and expressive possibilities.”
Also featured will be Osvaldo Golijov’s The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind for string quartet and clarinets, with clarinet soloist Tibi Cziger in collaboration with the Metropolis Ensemble Chamber Players, Arnaud Sussmann and Lily Francis, violins, Eric Nowlin, viola, Michal Korman, cello. The program will round out with Shostakovich’s masterpiece Chamber Symphony op. 110a and Bartók’s Rumanian Folk Dances.
That’s Thursday, May 24, 2007 (7:30pm) at the Angel Orensanz Foundation Center for the Arts, (172 Norfolk St, between Houston and Delancey).
Lots of neat stuff happening this week and beyond.
Pulse, the composers federation that includes our amigo Darcy James Argue will close out its 2006-2007 “season” with a new music project called Sihr Halal, Music of Praise and Celebration. The concert is Saturday, May 5th 2007 at 8:30 PM at Roulette located at 20 Greene Street in SoHo (tickets are $15 at the door, $10 students/seniors). The project is funded in part through Meet the Composer’s Creative Connections program.
Sihr Halal features the premiere of six compositions by the composers of Pulse—Darcy James Argue, Jamie Begian, Joseph C. Phillips Jr., JC Sanford, Joshua Shneider, and Yumiko Sunami. You can get a taste of what’s in store by going over to the Pulse blog where you’ll find audio excerpts from all of the pieces available online (recorded during rehearsal) along with commentary from the composers.
Another friend of the family, Jenny Lin, is doing an all Valentin Silvestrov program, including Der Bote, Epitaph, Post Scriptum & Drama Sunday, May 6, 2007, 5:00 PM 31 Little West 12th Street New York, New York 10014 Info here or call 212.463.8630.
Young-Ah Tak, the amazing pianist who blew the joint away with her performance of Judith Lang Zaimont’s Wizards (2003) at last year’s Sequenza21 concert is playing the piece again (along with works by people named Haydn, Debussy, and Schumann) at the Yamaha Piano Salon, 639 Fifth Ave., 34th Street (entrance on 54th Street between Madison and Fifth). The concert starts at 7:30 and admission is free. If you want to catch a real comer while she’s still making her bones, this is a great chance.
It’s minimalist week in the Center of the Universe, highlighted on Friday night by the John Adams 60th birthday concert at Carnegie Hall. Adams will be conducting the American Composers Orchestra in performances of My Father Knew Charles Ives, The Wound-Dresser (with bass-baritone Eric Owens) and the Violin Concerto, with Leila Josefowicz doing the honors.
Meanwhile, also on Friday, in a nearby universe, Michael Riesman, Music Director of the Philip Glass Ensemble and concert pianist, will be performing the world premiere of his marvelous new transcription for solo piano of Glass’ score to the 1931 classic horror film, Dracula. The gothic walls of the Orensanz Foundation for the Arts provide a perfect backdrop to Reisman performance, which will done live to film. Tickets are $20 ($25 at the door).
On a more somber note, there will be a public memorial service for composer and pianist Andrew Hill, who died last Friday, at Trinity Church (89 Broadway at Wall Street) this Friday, April 27, at 2:00 pm.
A million wet puppy kisses to Alex Ross for the Sequenza21 shout out in this week’s New Yorker. We love you, too.
For those of you who may not be familiar with it, there is a seminal document called The Cluetrain Manifesto that defines a new style of communication in an age in which everyone and everything is electronically connected. Its premise, to which I subscribe, is that the internet is fundamentally different from mass media like television because it allows lots of people to have “human to human” conversations (with all the complexity and difficulty that implies) rather than being force fed a one-sided party line or mass marketing message.
There can be negative aspects to this ubiquetous connectedness. Some people hide behind the mask of anonymity on the internet to say and do cruel and destructive things. But, in the best case scenario, the web allows us to talk to each other and–under the right conditions of respect, transparency, and honesty–to learn and even grow into a community where people can disagree without being disagreeable. I believe Sequenza21 is one of those rare communities and that makes me proud.
The first of the Manifesto’s 95 theses is this: “Markets are conversations.” In other words, if people are talking seriously about your product, or your Whitney concert, that is a positive thing from both a human and commercial point of view.
Just an old hippie (and professional marketer’s) point of view.
p.s. We need a new conversation started over on the Composer Forum page. If you don’t have a user name or password to post something let me know and I’ll fix you up.
Lots of terrific new reviews over on the CD Review page.
I listen to the fantastic Counterstream radio (see toilet seat icon) while I work and yesterday heard a terrific piece by Ezra Sims and it occurred to me that somebody ought to voluteer to write a regular column here every week or every other week called something like “Underrated,” which would focus on composers we don’t hear much about.
Kevin Gallagher, guitarist and founder of Electric Kompany, writes:
I noticed in your Jacob TV piece that there was hardly any mention of the fact that Electric Kompany is doing a world premiere of White Flag (for rock quartet and tape) based on sounds from the Iraq war starring the voices of Bill O’Reilly and George W Bush at the Whitney Museum at Altria on Friday, May 4 at 8pm.
Needless to say, I was pretty upset that they aren’t stressing this piece to the press. It’s rare enough to have a world premiere for rock quartet at the Whitney, never mind to have it tied to the biggest news story for the past 5 years.
I don’t know if the Whitney is scared of it (possible), but I want people to know what we’re about to do. It’s a good piece and we’re going to play the hell out of it. If you could please make sure people know about the premier, I would be very appreciative. Thank you for your help.
Contrary to speculation that the mystery man in Friday’s photo is a Guantanamo detainee or a middle school crossing guard, the fashion-forward gentleman in question is, in fact, the Dutch composer Jacob ter Veldhuis, aka JacobTV, whose work (it says here in the press release) “…has had a huge impact on the European music scene in the past decade, but he is far less known in the U.S.” It could happen.
The Whitney Museum of American Art, that well-known new music venue, is concluding its Spring 2007 Whitney Live series with Grab It!, a three-day festival dedicated to JacobTV, Wednesday to Friday, May 2-4, 2007 at the Whitney at Altria in mid-town Manhattan. The festival is the first large-scale examination of his work on this side of the pond, featuring some of his signature pieces as well as recent compositions and premieres, video, instrumental work, and a new evening-length dance piece set to his boombox music. He will also unveil a major CD/DVD anthology of his work on the Dutch label Basta, which includes orchestral music, boombox works, chamber music and video.
That would explain the “three pounds” of CDs I got from the Whitney which, by the way, are still up for grabs although, frankly, judging from the catty comments, you folks are not taking this opportunity nearly seriously enough.
Among the participants and performers in the festival are PRISM Quartet, Miro Dance Theatre, New Century Quartet, Frank J. Oteri, Kevin Gallagher, Electric Kompany, Margaret Lancaster, Dorothy Lawson, Meehan/Perkins Duo, and Kathleen Supové
The back story is that Limor Tomer, who curates the “Whitney Live” events, heard JacobTV’s music when the Prism sax quartet did a whole evening of his work at Symphony Space last year (Prism performs on the May 2 concert, then again twice in Philadelphia a few days later). She went wild over the music and decided to take the risk of programming three nights of his work, although no one here is really familiar with it. She hired the terrific new music publicist and all-round hottie Aleba Gartner to promote the show and, of course, we all know about my character flaws in the area of pretty gals.
Speaking of which, Aleba is also promoting the June in Buffalo Festival June 4-10 this year. This is one of the top festivals in America and it gets surprisingly little coverage although we always try to do our part. Anybody live in the Buffalo area who would like to “audit” the festival, do a little deep immersion, and keep a daily Sequenza 21 diary of the event? Something can be arranged.
Other stuff: I was having a Rome withdrawal attack last night and tuned into Showtime’s new Tudors mini-series. Pretty good, actually, but my favorite part is when a scruffy young man turns up at the cathedral with a letter from the Bishop of Canterbury introducing him as Thomas Tallis, a bright prospect who plays the organ, flute, sings and “composes a bit.”
And, finally, if I haven’t said so already, I think Steve Layton does a fantastic job week after week with his Click Picks. Thanks much, Steve. You’re a big part of our little success.
Next to the Mountaineers winning the NIT (okay, so it’s the tournament of losers…we won), the most exciting news in the world today is that our lil’ buddy Ian Moss is having his second annual Capital M world premiere extravaganza at Tonic next Wednesday. The concert will feature new works by Ian Dicke, Mike Gamble, Caroline Mallonée, Ian Moss, Edward RosenBerg III, Jonathan Russell, and Kyle Sanna. Noted provocateurs and ne’er-do-wells Anti-Social Music will follow with their particular brand of “punk classical” madness.