Hannah Lash’s The Peril of Dreams premieres in Seattle
I was gratified to discover that Lash’s 45-minute work manages to avoid the clichés and sentimentality to which much of the harp repertory is prone.
Revisiting Tippett’s The Ice Break
When Michael Tippett composed The Ice Break, he was already in his early 70s. Set in a contemporary country (the US is strongly implied), and with characters caught up in…
Kopatchinskaya and Hong perform Kurtág in Seattle
Few composers have embraced the Webernian aesthetic of brevity more closely than the Hungarian György Kurtág (b.1926). Starting with his earliest canonical work, the Op. 1 String Quartet (1959), he…
Closing out the twenty-tens: Schell’s picks for 2019
Though our decade technically has another year to go, the marketing appeal of “Hits of the XXs” type formulations tends to overwhelm such semantic niceties. So as we leave the…
Woody Vasulka (1937–2019): a musician’s appreciation
It’s tough to say goodbye forever to Woody Vasulka, pioneer of experimental video and co-founder (with his widow Steina) of The Kitchen in New York. It was his 40-minute “video…
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Seattle
Boulez and Berio highlight Morlot’s farewell [untitled] concert at Seattle Symphony
Seattle Symphony’s [untitled] series was inaugurated in 2012 by its then-new Music Director, Ludovic Morlot. Three Fridays a year, small groupings of Symphony and visiting musicians set up in the…
Piano Drop at Seattle’s Jack Straw
Destruction and reclamation, gimmick and avant-garde One of the odder fads bequeathed to us by the 1960s is the ritual destruction of musical instruments. It’s a custom most famously associated…
Noteworthy in 2018: Schell’s picks
Unlike those big-media favorites lists that appear in mid-December to grease the skids of the Great Shopping Season, my year-end reckonings dawdle until the last moment and don’t claim to…
Abrahamsen’s Schnee at Seattle Symphony’s [untitled]
[untitled] is the moniker given by Seattle Symphony to its thrice-annual Friday night new music events. Staged in the lobby of Benaroya Hall, it’s a semi-formal atmosphere in which the…
A year without Matt Shoemaker (1974–2017)
One year ago the Pacific Northwest’s new music community was stunned by the suicide of Matt Shoemaker: painter and musician, enthusiastic traveler, frequent performer with Gamelan Pacifica, and accomplished creator…