Sequenza21

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 at the Tenri institute  more out of professional obligation than anything else, but what I found there was a dynamite group of young musicians who are muscling their way into the New York music scene with surprising speed.  The March 1st concert was the first of a three concert mini-series, and I also went to the third concert, on March 6th at the Nabi Gallery.  Here’s what I found.

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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 questions for me.

Basically, I was interested to find out a little bit about the history of Sequenza21 – how it came together and its stages of development.

Also, I would love to hear any thoughts about the place of a site like Sequenza21 in the world of contemporary classical music:  What is the significance of the kind of community it fosters?
Does it help to reach new audiences – is it an effective means of promotion – or does its main value lie elsewhere?

Does it have some role in altering the perception of contemporary classical music in contemporary society?

…or any other thoughts.

I am sure everyone involved with the site is extremely busy.  Please do not feel pressured to reply if you simply do not have the time.  I would, however, truly appreciate any information and thoughts you could offer.

Many Thanks,
Will Boone

JB Note:  So, what do we think?

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 meanings, and that, whether we’re aware of it or not, art is always a fundamental emotional experience, even with words. And — it should get us where we live.                                                                                                                                                                  Flamenco provides one of the rawest, purest, and most sophisticated musico-dramatic experiences on the planet. And the 6-member Son De La Frontera,  presented by The Bay Area Flamenco Partnership at The Yerba Buena Center for The Arts Theater Saturday 1 March, are masters of this ancient form, which began in India with the gypsies who crossed North Africa, and settled in Spain’s Andalucia, where flamenco flourished in the intermingled soil of its Islamic, Jewish (Sephardic), and Christian cultures. Son De La Frontera delivered it clearly, honestly,and without regret. Virgil Thomson once declared that composers did everything but speak the language of the heart. But these Spaniards, who paid tribute to composer-guitarist Diego Del Gastor (1908-1973) here, certainly did. And their music, which comes from Del Gastor’s, made the divided chambers of the heart visceral, and incredibly real.

The two-hour, no break concert began with a guitar solo, a martinete, by Gastor’s nephew, Juan Del Gastor. The martinete is a kind of not-in-any-set meter improv, and Del Gastor’s was ripe with subtle yet powerful touches and myriad colors, like a dream of Spain’s fairest flower. Things got obviously more intense when guitarists Raul Rodriguez and Paco De Amparo took the stage with singer Moi De Moron, and the compas, or rhythm section provided by him — handclapping on the palmas, or the sordas — and Manuel Flores, and Pepe Torres, who also danced. Rodriquez and De Amparo’s unisons and solos were a harmonic and coloristic anchor to the intricate polyrhythms of the other three musicians, especially the phenomenally fancy footwork, or taconero, by Torres, who had  tons of that essential flamenco ingredient, duende, and whose turning, lurching, and jumping was powerfully controlled, the scarlet back of his black vest the only note of color in the show. 

Flamenco has a rich vocabulary of differently accented 12 count (beat) rhythms which form the basis of the buleria, the solea, which were stunningly played, sung and danced here. The group also gave knockout performances of the fiesta, cantina, sevillana, as well as the 4 count (beat) tanguillo, and tango. Flamenco is about all the basic passions of love, hate, abandonment, fear, despair, and revenge. It gets them down as no other art form can, and doesn’t make them pretty. But this brutal, in the best sense of the word, form lets them sing. And I was reminded of the late great Spanish mezzo Rocio Jurado, who sang on the soundtrack of Carlos Saura’s 1985 film of De Falla’s El Amor Brujo, when listening to Moi de Moron. You don’t have to know or even “hear”  the words to feel whats he’s saying. It doesn’t get any better, or more real than this. 

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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 of Mendelssohn’s Elijah last year.) Lost Dog has been around since 1995, but was rolled into AMS when the society was founded. Astoria, for those who don’t know, is a neighborhood in Queens, New York, just over the Triborough Bridge from Manhattan, and on the N R and W subway lines. As artists got priced out of places like Downtown Manhattan, and DUMBO and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, many moved to Astoria, and in recent years has become one of the several rapidly gentrifying artsy communities in the Five Boroughs.

Saturday’s concert was, as I mentioned, not in Astoria but in Manhattan, and it was quite well attended for a contemporary music concert. The opening work was a piece by Lost Dog’s Artistic Director Garth Edwin Sunderland called Dark Heaven Angel. Composed for scordatura cello, tuned according to the harmonic series, the piece constructed a wide variety of sonorities out of different parts of the harmonic series. As in something like The Well Tuned Piano, much of the music seemed to exist in a contradictory world where the harmonies were simultaneously dissonant and harmonious, jarring and resonant. Part way through, car horns could be heard a few blocks away, and in almost any other circumstance they would have been an unwelcome intrusion, but somehow the timbre of the horns fit with the cello sounds, and actually enhanced my experience of the piece. Cellist Eric Jacobsen, it should be noted, is not a regular Lost Dog member, but he was spectacular in both this piece and as a featured performer in the next as well.

The featured work was Peter Maxwell Davies’s Vesalii Icones, a 14 movement work for chamber ensemble (flute, clarinet, piano, percussion, viola, and cello) and dancer. Davies drew his inspiration from a series of 16^th century anatomical drawings by Andreas Wessels, or Vesalius in Latin. Vesalius used to perform human dissection during his lectures, and he was so celebrated that the government would time executions to coincide with them. The drawings themselves are, to modern sensibilities, quite bizarre—-rather than being clinical and impersonal, the dissected figures strike balletic poses, and are depicted with country landscapes in the background. Davies chose images and paired them with the Stations of the Cross, which the dancer interprets. It was an ambitious piece to write, and ambitious to perform. Unfortunately, I’m not much of a Peter Maxwell Davies fan, and I was not particularly impressed with the choreography, but, my own tastes notwithstanding, the piece is actually very good, and had some moments that even I found quite wonderful—-some of them funny and some beautiful. And I should say that other people seemed to like the choreography, so maybe I just don’t know what I’m talking about. What I do know, however, is that the performances—-both the dancing and the music-—were outstanding. Silas Huff, who also conducts the Astoria Symphony, lead the ensemble ably, and at one point cavorted with the cellist and with dancer Dora Arreola, reenacting the famous Abu Ghraib photos during the “The Mocking of Christ.”

In short, most people probably haven’t ever heard of Lost Dog before, but this talented group of musicians clearly has a lot to offer, and I’m looking forward to seeing what they do next.

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 Press, a concert of new music and poetry at Picture Ray Studio, 245 West 18th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues) in Manhattan. Other guests will be Paul Hecht, and soprano Kristin Norderval.

Scheduled works include Max Lifchitz’ Night Voices No. 15 (2008), for 4 viols, David Thompson’s 2:4 (2008), a fantasy for 4 viols, David Glaser’s Fantazy (2008), a duet for tenor and bass viols, Frances White’s Like the Lily (1999) for two bass viols and electronic sound
(arr. for Parthenia 2008), Paul Richards’ A Twelvemonth and a Day (2007) and Kristin Norderval’s selections from Nothing Proved for four viols, soprano and interactive audio processing (2008). Check out the program notes. $10 “rush” tickets at the door subject to availability. For tickets and more information, contact Parthenia at 212-358-5942 or visit them online.

I’m guessing that Agent 99 will be reading poetry rather than fiddling. She has a marvelous speaking voice and is nobody’s dummy. I’m sure I’m one of the last people alive to remember that she won $64,000 on The 64,000 Question in the category of Shakespeare.

It’s now just a smidge over seven years since Iannis Xenakis died. And almost exactly 13 years ago, Xenakis sat down for this amicable interview in English:

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This is the first ten minutes; its poster, Edward Lawes, promises a second part in the near future. (And if anyone recognises who Xenakis is talking with in the video, fill me in.)

I get a lot of review CDs.  Most of them I listen to once, or not at all, and pass them along to the four or five people who have proven to be reliable reviewers.  It is rare that a recording makes me stop everything and listen.  Jenny Lin’s new recording of two major piano works by Ernest Bloch with the SWR Rundfunkorcheter Kaiserslautern, under Jiri Starek, is one of those rare moments.  I must confess that I didn’t know the Concerto Symphonique but I’m inclined to take the word of David Hurwitz at Classics Today who has pronounced it “one of the 20th century’s great masterpieces for piano and orchestra,” and this CD “easily…its finest recording to date.”

Jenny’s performance is extraordinary. Intense, sensitive, nuanced, and perfectly executed.  You wonder how a 97-pound human being could possibly create a sound this big and enveloping.  Her account of Bloch’s much more familiar Concerto Grosso No. 1 is just as spectacular, in a quieter way.  You come away from the CD with the realization that Bloch was even better than you thought he was and that Jenny Lin, who has until now been best known for her willingness to take on new and gnarly works, is an A list pianist in the late romantic repertory as well.