There are three anniversaries today of important events connected by a fascinating thread. November 22nd is remembered by many for the assassination of John F Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, while on a happier note Benjamin Britten was born in Lowestoft on this day in 1913, and quite appropriately today is also the name day of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of musicians. The connection between these three anniversaries also involves folk singer, political activist and pioneering conservationist, Pete Seeger. The full story is at Benjamin Britten – We Shall Overcome
The kids done good. I was proud. Thanks to all of you who came out–we actually had a crowd–and to all the wonderful musicians who played their hearts out. It was a great evening. David Toub has the early bird report here.
See Jeff Harrington’s pictures from the concert.
Tonight’s the big night. The kids have worked hard and it’s going to be a great show. I hope to see you all this evening at the first ever Sequenza21 Concert, CUNY Graduate Center, Elebash Recital Hall, 34th and Fifth Avenue. 7:30 sharp.
The street address, by the way, is 365 Fifth Avenue.
Thomas Ades is back in town, and this season he will have five different programs showing Los Angeles his range of talents as composer, pianist, and conductor. We saw the first of these yesterday: a performance of his opera “Powder Her Face” (1995), with Ades conducting, by the USC Thornton School of Music. This was fully staged, including full simulations of each of the sex scenes in the first act. A few older members of the audience debated leaving at intermission, but most stayed, finding the music to be worth being occasionally offended.
And the music has real treats to offer, particularly in the second act as the opera descends from sexual comedy and social satire to the near-tragic destruction of the woman who had become a duchess. If you listen to the music’s clips available from Amazon or iTunes, you can hear how Ades uses melodies or rhythms from popular music, supported by the Duchess’ recollection that songs were once written about her and her beauty. You can hear how much musical color Ades gets from his chamber resources. The sound clips of the interludes, however, only hint at how effectively the 24-year-old Ades developed music to move the plot from scene to scene. Yes, there are weaknesses; I’d start with the libretto. But seeing and hearing this was well worth braving the USC campus on football day and negotiating the way to Bing Theatre through the tail-gate parties. Probably we wouldn’t have done so without having heard such a good sampling of Ades in last season’s residency.
Thornton School had double-cast three of the four roles, and the singers did commendably. The tenor (the recipient of the sexual favors in the most notorious scene), appearing in all performances, seems exceptionally talented. Three musicians from the Phil supplemented the orchestral resources, as concertmaster, clarinetist, and horn, respectively.
Next week Ades will serve as pianist in a Philharmonic chamber music program at Disney. It’s a delectable program (Francaix, Stucky, Faure), and I will be out of town. Real world commitments prevented me from writing about last week’s piano recital by Aki Takahashi at REDCAT. It was a lovely concert, and the Feldman was perfection, ending with a nice recognition of James Tenney.
‘If you’re talking about “relevance to the wider culture” and “speaking to our times“, and all that Greg Sandowian stuff, I couldn’t possibly care less … People seem to forget that there’s always going an audience for whom Beethoven’s 5th or La Boheme is a brand new experience’ – writes Henry Holland today in Killing classical music in the US. Well worth the click, and my photo is of the audience queueing for core classical repertoire at the 2006 BBC Proms.
A Couple of Other Things: I meant to mention this earlier this week but kept putting it off because I found it just too depressing. Dawn Upshaw has breast cancer.
Anybody here speak PHP? I mean, know it really cold. If you don’t know what that means, don’t apply, but if you’re the dude (or dudette), send me an e-mail. We could use a template tweak or two.
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:
John Mark Sherlock (b. 1970 — Canada)
I first discovered John’s work years ago on the venerable MP3 site Vitaminic. It’s often intimate, long, subtle and irrational; from some other things I’ve heard out of there, I think the breath of Feldman blew out of Buffalo, took a detour around Montréal, and ended up finding a home in Toronto. From an article by Michael Maclean: ….John Mark Sherlock is connecting to the music as well. The Toronto composer toils happily, if somewhat obscurely, in the city’s contemporary music scene, writing commissioned pieces for performers and small dance companies. He is in love with old electronic keyboards: Hammond organs, Rhodes pianos. His music blends their sounds with traditional orchestral instruments. His works are a response to the music he loves, from pop songs to classical works to jazz. Composing for him begins with what he envisions as a kind of musical shipwreck, “with all this flotsam and jetsam floating around on the surface, and I’m just hanging on to a piece of something”. A generous selection of listening awaits under the “audio” button.
Ava Mendoza (US)
I’ll just let Ava’s own direct, no-B.S. words do the talking:
“I am a guitar player, composer and quasi-electronic musician in Oakland, CA. I play improvised music/weird rock/original compositions. Improvised music was the first type of music that I got seriously interested in as a teenager, and I suppose any musical roots I have are in free improvisation.. That said, some of my music does not involve any improvisation at all — I indulge the anal retentive side of my personality by composing tape (fixed media electronic) pieces, and also sometimes very through-composed instrumental pieces. Some of my solo guitar compositions draw a lot from early country and blues music, sort of reworked in my own way. I am an extremely curious person and love a lot of very different sorts of music. I started improvising as a teenager, when I luckily met some socially-ostracized kids who introduced me to free jazz. At the time I was at Interlochen Arts Academy studying classical guitar. Soon after, I happily abandoned the classical guitar and began improvising on electric guitar. (My first electric guitar was a Peavey Raptor, which is not a very good guitar at all.) I graduated from Mills College, where I studied electronic music with John Bischoff and Maggi Payne. I spent a lot of my time at Mills ignoring my guitar and focusing on tape (electronic) composition. I call myself a quasi-electronic musician because I really don’t do much with electronics live, I though I’ve worked intensively on tape pieces. My recent focus has been on playing amplified acoustic guitar and trying to get a range of electronic-like textures out of the instrument without using many effects. I’ve been working a lot on playing solo, both fixed compositions and freely improvised.”
Don’t visit expecting to hear chamber concertos, but do expect some young, unafraid and vital soundplay.
Federico Rueben (b. 1978 — Costa Rica / EU) & Mauricio Pauly (b. 1976 — Costa Rica / EU)
Two composers, both native to Costa Rica but currently living in Europe (Rueben in the Netherlands and Pauly in England), team up to share this website. Quick bio sketches:
Federico Reuben trained as a pianist since the age of 9. He studied politics for two years at the Universidad de Costa Rica in San José before leaving to the United States in 1999 to study composition with Lawrence Moss at the University of Maryland. Since September 2002 he has been living in The Netherlands and studying at the Koninklijk Conservatorium with Gilius van Bergeijk and Martijn Padding where he earned his Bachelors Degree in 2003. Currently he is enrolled as a postgraduate student at the same institution studying composition with Louis Andriessen and Richard Ayres.
Mauricio Pauly studied composition in San José (Costa Rica), Miami and Boston (USA) with Lukas Foss, Richard Cornell, Fredrick Kaufman and others. As a bass player, Mauricio recorded two live albums with Costarican pianist Manuel Obregón and toured most of Central America with the legendary José Capmany and Café con Leche. In the US, he worked as a free-lance bassist and teacher. Currently is in the process of moving to the UK to begin a research-based PhD at the University of York. He is a founding member of the áltaVoz ensemble, a group of five composers of Latin-American origin who are now spread around America and Europe, organizing concerts in collaboration with other ensembles and performers, for the promotion of their music.
Don’t let the quirky website (navigation on the right half calls up stuff on the left) defeat you; each has a link to “works” that will give you lots of listening to highly varied and imaginative pieces. (Rueben’s are marked as MP3s; Pauly’s recordings are found as ZIP files by clicking on the work’s title). The site also chronicles other projects they’re involved with, with some further listening.
We’re just hours away from the first real-world Sequenza21 concert which begins promptly at 7:30 on Monday night at the Elebash Recital Hall at the CUNY Graduate Center, 34th Street and Fifth Avenue. Admission is absolutely free and there will be wine and cookies. I hope to see you there.
We are enormously grateful to the following folks for their financial contributions which have made it possible to actually pay the musicians and put together a program.
Concert Sponsors:
Bridge Records
Metropolis Ensemble
Contributors:
Activist Music
Anonymous
Carrie and Yorke Brown
Mr. Galen H. Brown
Mr. Eric Bruskin
Mr. Jeffrey Harrington
Mr. Franklin Hecker
Jeffrey W. James Arts Consulting
Mr. Ian Moss
Ms. Annette Salvage
Mr. David Salvage
Mr. Jordan Stokes
Mr. David Toub
Mr. Scott Unrein
Mr. Tom Myron
Mr. James Wilson
I also want to thank Steve Smith for the shoutout in TimeOut this week. Much obliged.
All too often today, appealing menus of new music turn out to be measly meals relying heavily on technical gimmickry, self-serving cliques, bitchiness and cynicism. By contrast the Britten Sinfonia at Lunch project is a nourishing meal whose courses include imaginative commissioning, innovative and open-minded programming, a truly international perspective, and some damn hard work from the musicians.. But don’t take my word for it. Here are the words of clarinettist Joy Farrall (above) as she introduced the Huw Watkins first performance at today’s Britten Sinfonia at Lunch concert – ”It is great to see such a large audience for this concert, and it is also really nice to see so many young people here.
For the full story of a pioneering contemporary music project visit New music lunch box
Fresh from the lede in a New York Times article this very morning (“provocative star turn”), Corey Dargel is performing tonight at The Tank, 279 Church Street btw Franklin and White in Manhattan.
Corey will perform new and unreleased material including “policy-anthems” in alternative tuning systems and a set of songs about the Virgin Mary. Joining Dargel are composer/violinist Jim Altieri and expert videographer Oleg Dubson.
Kamala Sankaram and Squeezebox will present bloodletting, an original horror film with live music, depicting (it says here) the tension between artmaking and the daily survival of young working artists. Borrowing from the stylistic sensibilities of German expressionists like F.W. Mirnau, the film’s unsettling visual environment provides a poignant frame for Sankaram’s intimate and deceptively simple songs.Dargel and Sankaram open the evening with two songs from Nick Brooke’s Tone Test, a chamber opera for two vocalists and phonograph, based on experiments in which Thomas Edison invited audiences to compare the sound of his newly invented phonograph to the sound of a live singer. Tone Test premiered at the 2004 Lincoln Center Festival.
If any of you can attend and want to write about the show for S21, send Corey a note and he’ll get you in free. If you haven’t seen Corey in action, you should. I saw Streisand in Funny Girl in 1963 (my first Broadway show) and she was pretty good, too.