Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, Critics

Promoting Modern Music by Stealth

Tom Jackson over at Modernclassical writes:

Donald Rosenberg, the classical music critic and correspondent for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, gets the cover of the arts section Sunday with a primer on classical music, an article about the “beloved staples” which form the foundation of classical music. The headline graphic lists the usual suspects — Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach.

The big shock is when you turn the page and see a huge graphic accompanying the article listing Rosenberg’s picks for a representative sampling of the repertoire. Rosenberg lists just three works from the Baroque period and only four from the Classical period. The Romantic period lists 19 works, but for the 20th Century, Rosenberg lists 35 separate composers and works, including Ligeti, Lutoslawski, and Messiaen. It is a really impressive effort on Rosenberg’s part to educate readers about modern music. Subversive, almost.

by Steve Layton
Uncategorized

Mr. Gaddis Speaks

Stanley moved suddenly, sitting up as though to break a spell.  He sat rigid on the edge of the bed, clenching his teeth as though to discipline the activity of his mind, which he could hardly stir during the day when he tried to work.  How could Bach have accomplished all that he did?  and Palestrina?  the Gabrielis? and what of the organ concerti of Corelli?  Those were the men whose work he admired beyond all else in this life, for they had touched the origins of design with recognition.  And how?  with music written for the Church.  Not written with obsessions of copyright foremost; not written to be played by men in worn dinner jackets, sung by girls in sequins, involved in wage disputes and radio rights, recording rights, union rights; not written to be issued through a skull-sized plastic box plugged into the wall as background for seductions and the funnypapers, for arguments over automobiles, personalities, shirt sizes, cocktails, the flub-a-dub of a lonely girl washing her girdle; not written to be punctuated by recommendations for headache remedies, stomach appeasers, detergents, hair oil . . .

William Gaddis, The Recognitions, p.322

by David Salvage
Uncategorized

Alex’s iPod

Steve Layton writes:  “Our hip weekly in Seattle, The Stranger, has a yearly “Strangercrombie” Xmas-auction of unusual gifts. One of the music-related gifts up for grabs is this”:

Alex Ross’s iPod

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross set music nerds’ hearts aflutter last year on his national iPod Tour, lecturing on 20th-century composers from Ligeti to Bjork to Messiaen and playing samples from his iPod. Now here’s your chance to possess an Alex Ross-programmed iPod of your very own. The venerable Ross has programmed two playlists into this very iPod Nano (silver) in his own New York apartment with his own delicate fingers.  Eeeeee! Priceless! Opening bid: $1.99!

Don’t you have to be old to be venerable?

Elsewhere, the WaPo had a wonderful young-musical-genius-finds-a-way-despite-all-adversity story today.  

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Music Events

Oh, It Doesn’t Look at All Like Christmas

You wouldn’t know it from the freakish weather (60 degrees today) here in the Center of the Universe but it’s Christmas time and that means it’s time for Phil Kline to lead a massive chorus of boomboxes through the streets of Greenwich Village in the 15th annual holiday presentation of his legendary UNSILENT NIGHT.   

The fun starts this Saturday, December 16 at 7:00 pm, at the arch in Washington Square Park.  You know the drill:  Kline puts the different parts of his composition on cassettes, and distributes them to those who show up at Washington Square.  At the given signal, everyone simultaneously pressses  PLAY.  When the cassettes start rolling, “they blossom into a marvelously crafted symphony” (Time Out New York) and the crowd begins to snake eastward, following a pre-determined route until the piece ends in Tompkins Square Park less than an hour and a mile later. 

Since its debut in 1992, UNSILENT NIGHT has become a cult holiday tradition in NY and around the world, drawing crowds of up to 1,500 participants.  This year will see (actually some of them have already happened) repeat presentations in San Francisco, Philadelphia, San Diego, Vancouver BC, Middlesbrough (England), and Sydney, Australia, as well as the first ever performances in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Baltimore, Charleston, Rochester, Asheville, Milledgeville (Georgia), Banff (Alberta, Canada), and the Yukon Territory.  This past February, a new version of UNSILENT NIGHT was presented at the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, as part of a sound art festival in the Alps.

You’re strongly encouraged to bring your own boomboxes, for which Kline will provide tapes.  Which raises an interesting question:  where do you find boomboxes these days.  Haven’t they gone the way of the 8-track?

Yeah, so get with it Phil.  Let’s have the silent UNSILENT NIGHT with a bunch of people wandering around the Village with their ears stuffed with iPod ear thingies.  Positively Fourth Street Cageian.

Our friend Brian Sacawa led the first-ever Baltimore version of UNSILENT NIGHT on Friday night and has video to prove it. 

 

by Jerry Bowles
Uncategorized

Last Night in L.A.: Monday Evening Concerts Reborn

A sold-out REDCAT held a brilliant concert to celebrate the re-birth of our Monday Evening Concerts and to honor the late Dorrance Stalvey, the man who directed the concerts for almost 35 years.  The series had hit a rough patch when Stalvey became director (and curator of music at LACMA).  He brought creativity in programming and in performance to the series.  To recognize Stalvey’s contributions to our community and our music, Alan Rich provided a lovely tribute to the man in the concert’s written program, and the centerpiece of the concert was the performance of Stalvey’s last completed composition, “Stream” (2002) for violin and piano.  As appropriate for a modernist who also started an important jazz program at LACMA, “Stream” was resolutely modernist, except for a touch or two of bebop with some stride piano in the pianist’s left hand.

The program began with Luciano Berio’s “Circles” (1960), first performed in this series in 1962 and twice more under Stalvey’s leadership.  Written for Cathy Berberian, our performance had Christina Zavalloni dazzling us.  We heard her first back in March when she sang Andriessen’s “Inferno” as part of the Minimalist Jukebox series.  Last night she was an elemental force, prowling the stage, sometimes playing with the words and sounds, sometimes cajoling, sometimes commanding, at all times handling the fearsome leaps and techniques as mere trifles.  The piece supports the soprano with harp and two percussionists who each handled 15-20 different instruments, plus occasional vocalisations.  Our harp was the Phil’s Lou Anne Neill (playing this for the third time in this series); our percussionists were Ross Karre and Steven Schick (formerly the Banger percussionist), now with “red fish blue fish” at UCSD.  The soprano is given the words to three poems by e.e.cummings with which to use Berio’s notes.  Berio’s program notes from the 1962 Monday Evening concert contained the following summary:  “The theatrical aspects of teh performance are inherent in the structure of teh work itself which, most of all, a structure of actions:  to be listened to as theater and to be viewed as music.”  Oh, he would have been happy with last night’s performance.

Christina Zavalloni gave one encore, a performance of Berberian’s “Stripsody” (1966) for soprano solo.  The score, of which a page is copied below, courtesy of Sheet Music Plus, is a collection of sounds or phrases which might have been written into assorted comic strips.  Once again Zavalloni triumphed.

The concert ended with Gerard Gisey’s “Vortex Temporum” (1994-1996) for piano (Vicki Ray in a major part), violin (Mark Menzies), viola (Kazi Pitelka), cello (Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick), flute (Dorothy Stone), clarinet (Philip O’Connor).  Musicians from California E.A.R. Unit and Xtet (the two regular groups of Monday Evenings at LACMA) formed the group and Donald Crockett of USC and Xtet served as conductor.  Mark Menzies has a good commentary on the work, with sound clips, at this site.

The work has elements of real power.  The most impact on me was the conclusion of the first part of the work when the piano launches into a demanding, difficult, aggressive solo, culminating with a crash of sound that slowly decays.  Into this quiet a faint sound begins intruding; it isn’t a sound from outside, or from the mechanical equipment, it’s the noise of the bows slowly scratching along the strings and finally a note resolves itself in the sound.  I found myself holding my breath.

Bruce Hodges comments on a 2004 New York performance of the work, and he was just as swept away, but he remained much more coherent about it than I.

What a great re-start to a series that means so much to our musical lives.  The remaining three concerts of the year will be in Zipper Hall of Colburn School, a slightly larger venue with outstanding acoustics.  This is so much nicer than LACMA’s multi-purpose auditorium!

by JerryZ
Uncategorized

Skeptical Spectralist

Sometime, not too long ago, I seem to remember a discussion of the definition of spectral music running in the comment section. The latest issue of Skeptical Inquirer magazine includes an interview with composer Joshua Fineberg, who gives it a go:

We are creatures that are tremendously sensitive to timbre because the vowels of language depend on timbral perception, as does our auditory scene analysis. The fact that we are relatively less good at identifying things like pitches and intervals is part of why for a long time they were interesting.

Joshua Fineberg

by Jodru
Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, S21 Concert

Making a List, Checking it Twice

It’s the time of year again when everybody makes “best of” lists.  So what’s yours?  CDs?  Concerts?  Meals?  Books?

The concert of the year for me, of course, was the Sequenza21 event which, I believe, exceeded everyone’s expectations in terms of attendance and quality of performances.   I’ll be making my list of best CDs soon.

Who’s got something? 

by Jerry Bowles
Click Picks, Contemporary Classical, Uncategorized

Steve’s click picks #10

Our weekly listen and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online (This will be the last click-picks for December; Xmas, New Years, etc., you know how it goes… back with more in January):

Aaron Gervais (b.1980 — CA / US)

Born in Edmonton, Canada, Gervais is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in composition at UC San Diego. Aaron is also a graduate (with honours) from the University of Toronto, where he studied under Professor Chan Ka Nin. He’s also studied jazz and composition at Grant MacEwan College, composition at the University of Alberta, and Cuban percussion in Havana. He’ll tell you:

Over time, my music has gradually taken on more and more aspects of my particular musical background. I grew up playing jazz and rock drums in addition to classical percussion, and this influence has become increasingly clear in my pieces, although not always in terms of direct appropriation. What is more common is an interest in the cultural elements of hearing: why we hear things in certain ways, what it is we listen for in particular genres, and so forth. In addition, my recent pieces have taken a particularly critical slant on these questions. I tend not to trust statements or ideas that people take as axiomatic, so I have focused on writing music that deconstructs these “givens” in order to find out exactly how axiomatic they really are—challenge for the sake of challenge, in other words. […] Over the past few pieces, I have been interested in writing music that is fast-paced, rhythmic, and light in texture. I’ve definitely written a lot of slow dark music, but it seems to me that there is a preponderance of that kind of thing in the new music community and I want to see how far I can push the other direction. Composers like Jacob ter Veldhuis and Richard Ayres have been particular inspirations in that regard, though I am just as likely if not more to look at popular music for this.

Aaron’s clean and clear site will tell you more, and under “Works” you’ll find plenty of quality listening, along with program notes and score excerpts.

Pamelia Kurstin (b. 1976 — US / AT)

For all its low-tech, archaic and arcane qualities, the theremin (that curious electric box that you play by moving your hands/fingers through the space around two antennae) has had a fairly healty resurgence in the last ten years. In fact, I’d venture to guess that the number of people playing (or at least playing with) the theremin is higher right now than at any time since its invention in the 1920s. Of all these, one of the most musical and ambitious has to be Pamelia Kurstin. Hailing from Michigan, time spent in NYC, but now in Vienna, Austria, Pamelia has a real affinity for coaxing beautiful music out of what can be an real beast of an instrument. Besides appearing on many other artist’s recordings, she’s long been rumored to eventually have a solo CD appearing on John Zorn’s Tzadik label. In the meantime, this will take you to her Myspace page, where you can hear four intriguing selections. She does have a “real” website here; no sound and it’s a jumbly mess, but between the two you’ll get a pretty good idea of her restless and cheeky-smart character.

Hakoneko (JP)

Hakoneko’s real name? I’m not sure we’ll ever know. The only biographical line we have is this: “I started making music with PC while cherishing my sweet cat in my room.”…. Released about a year-and-a-half ago on the excellent Portuguese netlabel Mimi, Hakoneko’s Umi no drone (Drones of the Sea) is one of the most ravishing examples of so-called “ambient” or “drone” music I’ve ever heard — and I’ve heard a lot! This kind of music is all about color and volume, something that palpably fills the listening space and makes its own atmosphere (in an almost literal sense). There are many excellent, high-profile artists in this style, but that they can be in every way equalled, even bested, by a kid sitting in their bedroom in Japan is why it pays to always keep the ears open and let the music, not just the official hype, do the talking. …And to marvel at this web, which can cut out all the business-wonk and connect a bedroom half-a-world away directly to my living room.

by Steve Layton