Composers, Contemporary Classical, Lectures, New York

Two Feldman Lectures in NYC and via the Internet around the world.

[Noted composer/performer Bunita Marcus asked to share some information on her upcoming lectures on Morton Feldman.]

Hello Friends and Colleagues,

I am doing two lectures on Morton Feldman’s Notation and Compositional Process here in NYC this coming January 16th and 23rd at 1:00 to 3:00 pm. These lectures will also be available via Ustream.tv for people outside of NYC.

These lectures are unique audio/visual powerpoint presentations. The first lecture is on the influence of Rugs and the Visual Arts on his Composition and Orchestration. The second lecture is a closer look at his Rubato Notation and his Compositional Process, examining the vellums and manuscripts. I will also discuss the ramifications of this type of notation for the future of contemporary music. I have been lecturing on this subject for 24 years, but unfortunately very few people understand how Feldman went about putting a composition together. I have not published this information anywhere in this much detail. If you are at all interested in Feldman’s compositional process and how he notated his music, this will be an essential introduction. As most of you know, Morton and I composed together for over seven years–a crucial seven years–where he solidified his notation and compositional process in the late works.

I would like to invite anyone interested to attend. I have set it up so that anyone with access to a computer can watch it live. We are trying to make the internet participants able to ask questions via chat.   I will be addressing the issues surrounding the vellum scores that Morty created and the problems that have arisen when Universal engraves a score and loses this information. This will be of particular interest to anyone doing research into Feldman’s work.   Morty created some of the most interesting and ingenious notation in his late period and we will look at that in detail and it’s implications for the future of contemporary and common-practice music. The lectures are really sequential and I urge you to see both for the best comprehension.

The space in NYC is somewhat limited, so I do encourage you to get your tickets soon and reserve a seat. From the way things look now it will sell-out.  There is also great interest in the live internet feed and there is no limit to how many people can use this. But for my sake, please don’t wait until the last moment, try to order the tickets at least 4 days ahead of time. If for some reason you are interested but cannot make either form of the lectures, please do send me an email (b@bunitamarcus.com) and I will put you on a list to keep you updated on future lectures, and a DVD I have in the works.

Feel free to pass on this news.   It’s about time we started to clear the air concerning Feldman’s contributions to music.   The more people understand what he was doing, the more interesting it becomes.  Even though we worked together for many years, my music is nothing like his–except in one way:   I adopted and adapted his notational ideas.   And in all my years of teaching composition, I have learned that his notational ideas work with any type of music.  This I find amazing.   It gives me hope for a contemporary music that is accessible to traditionally-trained classical musicians.    It is no longer necessary to be a specialist in contemporary music in order to play it. Feldman’s notation shows us the way.  It is a composer’s solution, as it should be.

Remember, anyone, anywhere with a computer can log-on and participate, this is not just for the US, it is world-wide.  You just need to order tickets to get the correct URL for the lectures.

I will be demystifying Feldman to the degree that one can do so.
I hope to see you there!

Bunita Marcus
Ph.D. Music Composition
www.bunitamarcus.com

Faculty:

If you have composition students please let them know about these lectures.
There is plenty to learn here, especially about composition and notation.

You can buy the tickets (discounts for students, seniors and limited income) here:

http://www.bunitamarcus.com/shop.html

Location:

1-3 pm, Jan. 16th and 23rd, 2011 in Tribeca, NYC

Piano Magic, 78 Reade Street #5E (corner of Church), 10007
(This is a four flight walk-up on Sundays)
1, 2, 3, A, C at Chambers St.; 4, 5, 6, R at City Hall

Piano Magic: 212-732-8828
Bunita 347-715-6518

Also on Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=172144969472807

by Bunita Marcus
Click Picks, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Magazines, Online, Recordings, Websites

The Open Space reopens

…Though it never really closed… Started around 1998 in upstate New York by a small group of musicians including Benjamin Boretz, Mary Lee Roberts and Arthur Margolin, The Open Space was conceived as print and online magazine venture and CD publisher dealing with contemporary music as “…output from a community for people who need to explore or expand the limits of their expressive worlds, to extend or dissolve the boundaries among their expressive-language practices, to experiment with the forms or subjects of thinking or making or performing in the context of creative phenomena. We want to create a hospitable space for texts which, in one way or another, might feel somewhat marginal — or too ‘under construction’ — for other, kindred publications.”

Given that they may have jumped into the pool just a tad early web-wise, and given the loose nature of of the project along with the busy and evolving schedules of the editors, The Open Space has tended to offer up things in spurts; the print magazine’s last issue was from late 2009, and the website languished for quite a while. Still, as befits an “open space” there has always been a very interesting accumulation of various article, scores, recordings and sound files available on their site, well worth a contemporary musician’s time to sift through. You can order CD recordings and back copies of the print magazine right from the site, as well.

Just last year, composer Dean Rosenthal signed on to get the purely digital webmagazine up and running again, and Dean’s happy to announce the first “issue” is online and available. The current form is a collection of contributions from various composers, of streaming recordings/video of selected works, some coupled with notes and scores of the piece. First offerings include such outside-the-mainstream luminaries as Michael Pisaro, Henry Gwiazda, Richard Coldman and Howard Skempton and others. And of course Dean is always happy to recieve submissions from you composers/performers out there, so why not give it a shot and help populate that open space with even more art and exploration!

by Steve Layton
Chamber Music, Classical Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Film Music, Houston, Music Events

Houston’s Musiqa presents: Real and Imagined

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/12767232]

(Visual Abstract, First Movement, Music by Pierre Jalbert, Film by Jean Detheux)

On January 8th, 2011, at 7:30 p.m. in Zilkha Hall of The Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, the Houston TX new music group Musiqa presents Real and Imagined – a concert collaboration with Aurora Picture Show featuring Theo Loevendie’s Six Turkish Folk Songs as well as music by Eve Beglarian, Paul Frehner, and Evan Chambers. Houston-based composer Pierre Jalbert’s Visual Abstract for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and percussion will be performed live to a film created by Jean Detheux. The concert will be conducted by Houston Symphony Assistant Conductor Brett Mitchell.

Led by five composers (including founding member Pierre Jalbert) Musiqa is receiving a great deal of notice for its innovative multi-disciplinary concert events (dance, visual art, and theater are always integrated into Musiqa performances) as well as its educational programming that annually reaches thousands of Houston area students. Next season, Musiqa will celebrate its ten-year anniversary.

Pierre Jalbert graciously responded to a few questions about Visual Abstract:

Chris Becker: Did Jean Detheux create his film before, after, or during the composition of Visual Abstract?

Pierre Jalbert: He created the film after the piece was written. The music was commissioned and premiered by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble a few years back. Jean and I worked on a project last year in which he created a film first and I wrote the music to the film. That work was entitled L’œil écoute (The Eye Listens), and was also premiered by PNME. This time around, we decided that we would reverse the process, and he would do his film to the already existing music.

Chris Becker: In performance with the film, is the conductor watching the film for the timing of some of your musical events? I’m thinking of the third movement where rhythmic hits coincide with abrupt changes in the film.

Pierre Jalbert: Yes, the conductor is looking at the film for cues from time to time, and we rehearse many times through to get the timing down. As you can imagine, it’s very difficult as each performance is slightly different. But Jean made the film to not have too many abrupt changes. But still, there are a a few that make it challenging.

Chris Becker: The layers of images in Detheux’s film are very rich and tactile. They remind me of natural phenomena, weather, or even what we “see” when we close our eyes and listen to the sounds around us. Speaking as a composer, what do you think makes an “abstract” work of visual art successful?

Pierre Jalbert: I think when one looks at the film and hears the music as a single entity, and one does not dominate over the other, but each enhances the other, then we have something interesting.

Chris Becker: Next season, Musiqa will celebrate its ten-year anniversary. As one of the people who founded the organization, how does it feel to look back on all Musiqa has accomplished?

Pierre Jalbert: It’s amazing to look back and see how the organization has grown. I remember a few of us meeting at Tony Brandt’s house 10 years ago and brain-storming about what the organization could be. We wanted to get new music out into the community and into downtown and offer up repertoire that wasn’t being heard in Houston. All of the composers on the Artistic Board work really well together (Anthony Brandt, Karim Al-Zand, Rob Smith, Marcus Maroney, and myself), and that has been crucial in keeping things going through the years.

Tickets for Real and Imagined – including discounted tickets for seniors and students – are available for purchase on the Musiqa website.

by Chris Becker
Broadcast, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Events, Radio

Mountains and Rivers Without End

Getting ready to enjoy all those new, happy/shiny Xmas presents, I’m sure… Well, here’s another that won’t cost you a dime:

S21’s WPRB-favorite-son, announcer Marvin Rosen, is getting a jump on the upcoming Alan Hovhaness centennial with a 24-hour marathon broadcast of Hovhaness’s music (that’s Marvin above, in 1992, with Hovhaness at the composer’s home). “Mountains and Rivers Without End” begins Sunday, Dec. 26th at 7pm, and will feature more Hovhaness than you can shake a stick at (I know more than a few composers who might well be furiously shaking that stick, but I myself am pretty partial to this American original). Two guests during the marathon will be clarinetist and conductor Lawrence Sobol (December 26, evening), and pianist Sahan Arzruni (December 27, early afternoon) both of whom have recorded the composer’s music. In the New York/New Jersey area you can tune to WPRB at 103.3 FM, while the rest of can stream it all live online.

Marvin is about as well-positioned as anyone to lead you through Hovhaness’s vast output; his doctoral dissertation was on Hovhaness’s music; he was a friend of the composer for many years and spent two weeks in Seattle working with him on his piano music in preparation for the first of two recordings on the Koch International Classics label. Marvin also wrote the liner notes for other Hovhaness recordings on the Koch International Classics label as well. And Marvin has one of the most extensive rare collections of Hovhaness’s music both on CD and LP, so there are bound to be many treats heard. So turn out to tune in, and give Marvin some virtual caffeine support through the long night and day!

by Steve Layton
Contemporary Classical

2010 and the end of musical history

It’s not uncommon to see articles both decrying the sad state of affairs in classical music as a whole as well as celebrating the new opportunities that are available for both composers and performers with the right amount of musical and entrepreneurial skill, luck and perseverance. A prime example of one that covers both issues was recently published as a transcript of a speech given by the Guardian’s Tom Service with the intentionally controversial title “So long, and thanks for all the noise: 2010 and the end of musical history”. Well-spoken and thoughtful (and without the acidity of many critics from across the pond), Service writes:

My sense is that many young composers now realise that the game is up, that the conventional paths to fame and, er, fortune in contemporary classical culture just aren’t worth the candle. Instead, they’re better off on their own, not least because their music doesn’t fit the line-ups of an orchestra, or even the 1 to a part ensembles of the Sinfonietta, or the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, or Liverpool’s Ensemble 10:10, or Manchester’s Psappha – a line-up and repertoire whose time has probably also come, has also become a living history more than something genuinely contemporary. Composers still need to make choices, of course; being open to the rest of the world does not guarantee the creation of great, or even good art in an of itself, and they will have to find their own limitations, draw their own lines in the shifting sands of musical culture. But composing without the fear of traducing the absurd unwritten laws of modernist composition will only be a good thing. Like Reich and Glass before them, today’s composers have the chance to build their own communities of listeners and audiences – whether in the flesh or on-line – and make the music that matters to them for people who care about it – and actually enjoy it.

Service brings up many good points and pulls no punches, laying responsibility on the future of new/concert/art/whatever music (rightly so) at the feet of the composers both young & old as well as the performing and academic institutions that help to foster contemporary musical art. In my own opinion, the idea that it’s perfectly legitimate to use whatever medium/style/technique that allows a composer to bring his/her voice into being has been growing and gaining momentum for years now, and more articles like this are surely in store. What has not yet been discussed nearly enough – and this may take quite some time – is the ramifications of our ever-increasingly “big-tent” art form on both those who create and those who analyze and interpret those creations. I can see where Service is coming from with his suggestion of the “end of musical history” as it has been characterized up till now, though I’d prefer the “beginning of a new musical history” myself.

Read the rest here.

by Rob Deemer
Contemporary Classical

Totally Off-Topic Alert: My 9 Favorite American Movies of 2010

1.  The Social Network – The story of a socially-retarded Harvard teen-aged geek who screws over his best friend and a pair of very large, wealthy, well-connected  blue-blooded twin brothers to create Facebook and become the world’s youngest billionaire is an epic tale that derives much of its power from the fact that it is basically true.  Brilliant acting and pacing, with a script that is remarkably fair and leaves you with the impression that Mark Zuckerberg may be a poster boy for Asperger’s Syndrome but he is also the only guy in the room who could have pulled it off.  The Citizen Kane of the “friend me” generation.
2.  Never Let Me Go – I must confess that until a couple of weeks ago I had not heard of this brilliantly understated adaptation of Kanzuo Ishiguro’s (Remains of the Day) dystopian novel about three friends—two girls and boy–who grow up together and become romantically involved in what seems to be an idyllic English boarding school.  What we, and they, gradually learn is that they are DNA-created clones whose destiny is to become vital organ donors for the citizens of a country that has convinced itself that they are not human but mere spare parts.  I found it both chilling and emotionally wrenching.
3.  Greenberg – Ben Stiller as a 40-something slacker who begins to realize that he is no longer young and that most of his troubles just might stem from his own immaturity and self-absorption.  Like many Gen Xers wedged between the all-consuming narcissism of their boomer parents and the scary self-confidence of Gen Yers (think Mark Zuckerberg), his character is still avoiding responsibility and waiting for the big break that will never come.  With the aid of a dose of healthy confrontation from his only remaining friend, an inexplicable—even to him—attraction to a ditzy but good-hearted 25-year-old blonde (played wonderfully by an actress named Greta Gerwig), and a sick dog, he begins making baby steps toward maturity.  The dialogue and performances are precisely on target.  Written and directed by Noah Baumbach, who did The Squid and the Whale.
4. Life During Wartime – Todd Solendz’ follow-up to Happiness (1998), his dark and unforgettable masterpiece of family dysfunction on an epic scale.  Many of the same characters are back although some are played by different actors but if they have spent any time in therapy it hasn’t helped.  Solendz’s movies make you uncomfortable not simply because they deal with such happy subjects as pedophilia and sexual humiliation but also because you never sure whether what you’re seeing is meant to be very black humor or some sort of warped Greek tragedy.  Paul Reubens, Pee Wee Herman to his fans, makes a very un-Pee Wee-like appearance as an unhappy ghost and Ally Sheedy scorches the screen with a brief turn as the prickly sister who is miserable because she “gave up her poetry” to write screenplays and now lives in a beach house in Malibu with her boy friend “Keanu.”
5.  Please Give – A very New York-film about liberal guilt and waiting for the old lady next door to die so you can buy her place and knock down the wall and expand your condo.  The incredible actress Elizabeth Keener plays an unhappy for no particular reason antiques dealer who with her husband buys stuff from the heirs of people who have just died (who seldom know how much its worth and just want to get rid of it quickly anyway) and resells it for a profit.  Subtle and beautifully done.
6.  City Island – A second-string NY Times reviewer who had apparently never heard of Moliere doomed this one with a snippy review (inspiring about 400 nasty comments on the Times web site) but I thought Andy Garcia was hysterical as a corrections officer who lives with his wife and two kids in the curiously dislocated New England fishing village at the top of the Bronx called City Island.  One week he brings home a studly young prisoner on furlough ostensibly to help him build a shed in the backyard.  The awfully well-behaved con is his son by a premarital relationship and although he tells the kid he doesn’t quite get around to telling his perfect wife, played by Julianna Marguiles.  She is already suspicious of him sneaking out to “poker games” a couple of nights a week when, in fact, he’s taking acting lessons.  Things really go farcical when she spots Andy with a pretty girl who is scene partner from acting class and decides to get even by putting some moves on the sweaty young dude in the backyard who knows what she doesn’t.  Everything works out in the end, of course, and you don’t even need to know about the daughter who has dropped out of college and earning money as a pole dancer or the teenage son who likes to watch fat women eat doughnuts on the Internet.   I never liked Andy Garcia in anything before this but his “audition” for Martin Scorsese is fall-down funny and  I would pay money to watch Julianna Marguiles lick stamps for an hour.
7.  Rabbit Hole – Familiar premise of couple torn apart by the death of a child but superb writing by David Lindsay-Abaire (who wrote the play on which it is based) and excellent performances by Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckart, Miles Teller and especially Dianne Wiest, as the Nicole character’s mother make this a memorable effort.   Especially touching and well-handled is Nicole’s need to seek out and befriend the suffering teenager who couldn’t stop fast enough when her son chased his dog into the street.
8.  The Kids Are All Right – Annette Benning will probably get an Oscar for her portrayal of the butch half of a lesbian couple (the other half played by Julianne Moore) who each have a child from the same sperm donor.  The fun begins when the kids, now grown, and each an exact copy of their different mothers decide to track down the sperm donor, played by Mark Ruffalo, and he begins to form “fatherly” attachments to the kids.  Not to mention a sexual attraction to one of the lesbian mothers.  Not really a comedy although it’s listed in that category but it is educational:  I don’t think I knew before that lesbians like male porn movies.  I love the little Australian girl with the Polish name who plays the daughter.  Somebody might want to tell Julianne Moore that maybe it’s time to start not taking her clothes off in movies.
9. Winter’s Bone – This year’s Indie darling is set among the new generation of mountain folk of the Ozarks who apparently have all traded in their elders’ moonshine stills for meth labs and are happily cooking up cheap drugs for middle Americans who enjoy being stupid and having their teeth fall out.    Ree Dolly (yep, that’s the character’s name—played with enormous conviction by a young actress named Jennifer Lawrence), is a teenager with a heap of troubles.  See, Pa’s gone missing and mommy ain’t regular and so the responsibility for taking care of her siblings—a girl about nine and a boy about 12—has fallen upon poor Ree.  If she can’t find Pa and get him to make the back payments, or prove he’s dead and collect the insurance money, the county’s going to seize the family farm and they’ll be homeless.   Her only ally is her drug-addled and not very reliable uncle, played by John Hawke, (the guy who played the shopkeeper who was sweet on Trixie the Whore in Deadwood).   Turns out, Pa had been seen talking to the law and the other dealers know exactly where his remains are but are understandably not anxious for them to be found.  Finally, though, the hardy women folk take pity on poor Ree and solve her problem.   My problem with the film is that this is a culture I know a lot about (everybody in it looks like one of my uncles or first cousins) so the little wrong details annoyed me.  For example, when she’s showing her brother how to skin a squirrel she does it all wrong and, anyway, a 12-year-boy in that culture would have skinned dozens of squirrels by that age.  And the mountain mommas I know wouldn’t have taken Ree out on a nighttime boat ride so she could fish daddy up from under the big log and saw off his hands with a chainsaw to prove that he was dead.  They would have sawed them off themselves and left them in a nice plastic bag on her porch.  Mountain people are very neighborly that way.
by Jerry Bowles
Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, File Under?, New York

SEM Holiday Concert on Tuesday

Petr Kotik

Since 1984, the SEM Ensemble, directed by Petr Kotik, has given annual Christmas concerts. But these are not your usual holiday fare! The programs mix works from the New York School, other pieces in the avant-garde/experimental tradition, and early music.

On Tuesday evening December 21 at the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea, SEM will present J. S. Bach’s Fugue in 6 Voices from A Musical Offering (1747), Kotik’s 1st String Quartet (2007-’10), Why Patterns? (1978) by Morton Feldman, and two works by Christian Wolff: Small Preludes (2009-’10) and, incredibly, the American premiere of a work dating from 1958: For Six or Seven Players (for Merce Cunningham).

Petr Kotik and Christian Wolff were kind enough to share some remarks on For 6 or 7 Players and Small Preludes.

Christian Wolff – For 6 or 7 Players

Christian Wolff’s For 6 or 7 Players (for trumpet, trombone, piano, violin, viola, double bass, and optional flute, hence 6 or 7) was originally written for Merce Cunningham’s dance “Rune” in 1958, while Wolff served in the U.S. Army. Wolff sent the piece to Cage, not retaining a copy for himself and the original was lost. Finding the manuscript somewhat ambiguous, Cage painstakingly re-notated the piece into a precise score.

In 1964, during rehearsals with John Cage in Warsaw for the performance with the Merce Cunningham Dance Co. at the Warsaw Autumn festival, Cage brought a piece by Christian Wolff: For 6 or 7 Players (Music for Merce Cunningham). The piece was hand-copied by Cage, bearing his typical manuscript signature. The musicians were the Czech ensemble from Prague, Musica viva pragensis, which I founded few years back. Cage intended to perform the piece few days later, but it proved to be far too complicated to be ready in one or two rehearsals, so he gave up on the idea and left the material – the score and parts – with me. Going through my music archive last summer, I discovered the material and decided to perform the piece. Christian Wolff and I met to go through the score to resolve a few questions, and the performances are result of this effort. —Petr Kotik

The written music of “For 6 or 7 players” (1959) indicates, on a score, time spaces (brackets) anywhere within which a specified number of pitches, to be selected by the players from a given collection, are to be played. Dynamics and modes of playing are also variously specified or left free. That the music was made to go with a dance (Merce Cunningham’s “Rune”) encouraged me to allow for plenty of silence.–Christian Wolff

Christian Wolff — Small Preludes

The arrangements of “Small Preludes” (2010) were made to offer something more recent. There were 20 small preludes for solo piano (2009), of which 8 are arranged for the instrumentation of “For 6 or 7 Players” (the optional seventh player is a flutist) and a ninth is left as is, a piano solo. The original piano music was written on two staves but without specification of clef, so in playing and making instrumental versions, a considerable variety of different pitch readings are possible (in this instrumentation these choices are made by the composer). — Christian Wolff

Concert Details

December 21, 2010 at 8 PM @ Paula Cooper Gallery, NYC

Paula Cooper Gallery is located at 534 West 21st Street, New York. Tickets are $15, Students and Seniors $10.  For information and reservations, call (718) 488-7659 or email pksem@semensemble.org




by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical

Big Up to Adventurous Programmers from CMA/ASCAP

The CMA/ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming will be presented at the 33rd Chamber Music America National Conference on Saturday, January 15, 2011 at the Westin New York at Times Square (207 W. 43rd Street) in New York City.  Frances Richard, vice president and director of concert music, American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), will present the awards during a ceremony that begins at 5 p.m.

Established jointly by Chamber Music America and ASCAP, the annual awards recognize U.S.-based professional ensembles and presenters for distinctive programming of new music composed in the past 25 years. The recipients were chosen by an independent panel of judges, who evaluated the applicants on the basis their programming of recent works and innovations in attracting audiences to new music performances.

The three ensembles and five presenters to be honored are:

Ensembles

The California E.A.R. Unit—based in Castaic, CA—receives the award in the category of ensembles specializing in contemporary music. Founded in 1981, the E.A.R. Unit is a composer/performer collective, presenting new works and commissions in the Los Angeles area and elsewhere in the region. Its 2009-2010 season featured works by Linda Catlin Smith, Linda Bouchard, and John Luther Adams, as well as compositions by ensemble members.

The Voxare String Quartet, based in New York City, receives the award for ensembles that perform mixed repertory. The group has explored the lineage of American quartet repertoire by performing works by Ned Rorem, David Del Tredici, Daron Hagen, and others, alongside works by European masters. The group performs in both traditional and alternative venues.

The John Escreet Project will receive the award for jazz ensembles. The past season prominently featured Brooklyn, NY pianist John Escreet’s CMA New Jazz Works commission, Explorations in Speech, which takes the rhythms and pitches of informal speech as a compositional starting point. Various samples of recorded speech are juxtaposed and sometimes superimposed—and used as the basis for musical improvisation.

Presenters

Baltimore’s Contemporary Museum Mobtown Modern Music Series receives the large contemporary presenter award. The museum introduced the series in 2007 to promote new music in its home city. Recent events included a performance, in conjunction with a FAX exhibition, of Die FaxMachine, by artistic director Brian Sacawa; a composer-portrait concert of works by Baltimore-based Alexandra Gardner; and Phil Kline’s Unsilent Night.

Southern California’s Ojai Music Festival receives the award in the mixed-repertory small presenters category. Founded in 1947 as a laboratory for such giants as Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, and Elliott Carter, the festival continues its tradition of innovation under composer/music director George Benjamin and artistic director Thomas Morris. Last season’s programming included pairings of Purcell Fantasias with classical Indian ragas, and Frank Zappa with Edgard Varèse.

The Jazz Gallery, in New York City, receives the award for large presenters specializing in jazz. The organization was cited for its commissioning series and composer workshops with Steve Coleman, as well as for its Thursday night Debut Series featuring premieres of such emerging composers as Ambrose Akinmusire, Ben Wendel, Jen Shyu, Sachal Vasandani, and Amir ElSaffar.

Milwaukee’s Present Music receives the award for small presenters specializing in contemporary music. Artistic director Kevin Stalheim reaches into the community with new music, co-teaching a course with a local music critic; local film students produce composer/artist interviews for the series’ website; visiting artists conduct master classes with a youth symphony; and the annual Thanksgiving concert features the Bucks Native American Singing and Drumming Group.

The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center of College Park, MD, receives the award in the category of large-scale presenters of mixed repertoire.  The center’s last season featured works it co-commissioned from Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, Paul Dresher, Daniel Kelly, and others, as well as performances by Kronos Quartet and Joshua Redman. The center’s Creative Dialogues series with artists and scholars, its pre- and post-performance activities, and artist residencies, as well as its “You’re the Critic” e-surveys, engage audiences on a regular basis.

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

Free Party! Help Metropolis Ensemble Celebrate Its Grammy Nomination

Just got a note from Andrew Cyr inviting Sequenza21 readers (and maybe some other less distinguished people) to a free party at Le Possion Rouge tomorrow night to celebrate the Metropolis Ensemble’s Grammy nomination for its Naxos recording of Avner Dorman’s Mandolin Concerto (Avi Avital (soloist) and Andrew Cyr (conductor) with Metropolis Ensemble). Avi, Andrew and the Metropolis crew will perform a few sets during the evening, including the Mandolin Concerto and, maybe, Andrew says, even “a Balkan music jam.” Not only is admission free but the first two drinks are on the house. The party start @7 and lasts until everyone goes home. What’s not to like?

The Red Possum (as I like to call it) is located at 158 Bleecker Street (a sacred place for those of us old to have caught Thelonious Monk on stage there in a different lifetime.)

And,  speaking of parties, the funniest classical CD review I have ever read is on page one of our sister ship today.

by Jerry Bowles