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Some musicians tour year round with a band in support of their latest LP. But this December, Merge recording artist Julian Koster is instead going on a caroling tour. He’s taking along his trusty dog Rudolph (no joke!) and a singing saw. You can hear Koster’s deconstruction of holiday chestnut “White Christmas” below.

MP3:  White Christmas

For more holiday sawing, The Singing Saw at Christmastime is available on CD, LP, and digital download.

Better yet, why not have Koster and his carolers visit your abode? Details  below.

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You may invite the carolers to visit your house by emailing  musictapescaroling@gmail.com or by mailing a handwritten letter to  450 N. Harris St. Athens, GA   30601 (due to time constraints, please send an email to let the “caroling ambassador” know you are sending a letter). Be sure to include an email address or telephone number for reply.   Invitations where the hosts indicate that they would be willing to entertain outside guests on caroling night are preferred. Please note your permission to invite others from the area to your house and whether you can offer the carolers a place to sleep in your letter or email.

Once the limit on houses on a given night has been reached, the address of each house that will welcome guests will be distributed via email to all who email  musictapescaroling@gmail.com and ask to attend. The addresses of the houses will not be posted online.

Proposed Caroling Path:
December 7th, 8th, 9th: Georgia, Tennessee, Indiana & Lower Half of Illinois
December 10th, 11th, 12th: Chicago, Illinois, Michigan
December 13th, 14th, 15th: Ohio, Pittsburgh, Western NY
December 16th, 17th, 18th: Upstate NY, New England (CT, RI, VT etc)
December 19th, 20th, 21st: Philadelphia, NYC, Baltimore, DC, Chapel Hill

Kim Kashkashian

Neharót

ECM Records

Kim Kashkashian has done a great deal to expand the repertoire for the viola. Her latest recording for the ECM imprint, Neharót, brings together a range of compositions by living composers. Although disparate stylistically, what they have in common is, from the listener’s standpoint, most fortunate: all of them feature sumptuous writing that plays to the strengths of this talented violist.

Neharót Neharót, for viola solo, accordion, percussion, double string orchestra, and taped voices, was written by Israeli composer Betty Olivero in 2006-7, and is in some way a response to that time period’s violence between her homeland and Hezbollah in Lebanon. The tape’s mourning cries and harmonically dense swaths of accordion and strings provide sonic halos that surround the soulfully keening viola solo. Conductor Alexander Libriech leads the Münchener Kammerorchester in a balanced, sumptuous reading of this touching score.

Music composed and arranged by Tigran Mansurian features prominently on the disc. The evocative Tagh for the Death of the Lord, for Kashkashian and percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky, juxtaposes a folk-inflected viola part, featuring retuned scales, set against gongs from Thailand and a tersely chimed vibraphone. Mansurian plays a piano arrangement of Komitas’ Oror, a simply rendered yet beguiling lullaby. The main event in this grouping of Armenian concert music is Mansurian’s Three Arias (Sung out the Window facing Mount Ararat). Here Kashkashian collaborates with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, led by Gil Rose. It is a felicitous pairing. The violist’s darkly passionate cadenzas are met with equally intense passages from the orchestra, featuring clangorous percussion and brilliantly articulate brass writing. Set against these tangy elements are considerably more lustrous sections for strings and winds. This timbral duality is matched by a similar blending of disparate compositional materials. Mansurian’s language recalls modern Eastern European composers such as Bartók and Komitas, as well as the folk material they relied upon as touchstones. But the piece also features a post-Romantic sweep that serves as a poignant foil.

The recording closes with Rava Deravin, a piece for viola and string quartet written by Israeli composer Eitan Steinberg. Originally written for voice and chamber ensemble, the piece is based on a Hasidic melody for a poem by kabbalist Rabbi Yitzak Lurya. Kashkashian’s performance certainly emulates the lilt and inflections of a vocal performance, reflecting the intonations of the source material with vibrant portamento and, where required, subtle microtonal pirouettes. The Kuss Quartet parries her bold gestures alternately with wasp-like rejoinders and glassine verticals. The result is a piquant yet moving work.

On Neharót, Kim Kashkashian has selected composers who may not be household names, particularly here in the United States. But she makes a persuasive case for each of them. It’s likely that most listeners will leave the recording wanting to hear more, both from this talented violist and the composers she’s championed.

Dal Suono Sommerso is performing this weekend in Sardinia (announcement below). They’ll be playing my Bagatelles for Alto Flute and Piano, as well as works by Ken Ueno, Salvatore Piras, Ak2deru, and Emmanuel Louis.

It’s always a wonderful surprise when your music gets to visit somewhere you haven’t yet traveled! Many thanks to the group and “In bocca al lupo!”

L’Associazione Culturale DAL SUONO SOMMERSO ha il piacere di invitarti, domenica 22 novembre alle ore 18 presso il MuseumCenter di Tempio Pausania, all’ascolto di “SOLO PER DUE”, concerto di musica contemporanea con l’esecuzione di lavori per flauto e pianoforte scritti da giovani compositori europei e americani.

Giuseppe Pelura al flauto e Maurizio Paciariello al pianoforte, concertisti con esperienza nazionale e internazionale, interpreteranno nuove partiture provenienti da Italia, Belgio, Spagna e Stati Uniti. Verranno eseguite Pas de deux e Anicroches cine-matique di Salvatore Piras,Transiponeologica e (Cod.) di Ak2deru (entrambi giovani compositori sardi); Bagatelles per flauto in sol e pianoforte di Christian Carey e Solemnity and agitation di Ken Ueno (USA); Vertigo dello spagnolo Jesus Rueda, appositamente scritta per Giuseppe Pelura, e infine The last five days without water, in cinque movimenti per flauto e pianoforte, di Emmanuel Louis, eclettico compositore e chitarrista belga.

L’ingresso al concerto sarà gratuito e sarà possibile accedere alla sala dalle 17.30.
Ti aspettiamo.

The Swimmers

People are Soft

Mad Dragon CD

On their second LP, People are Soft, the Swimmers add synthesizers to what was previously a prevailingly retro-rock palette. The result adopts some familiar signatures from Eighties pop, but distills it into an indie rock guise that results in fresh-sounding, buoyant music. Particularly delightful are the dance-pop anthem  ”Give me the Sun,” the Neoromantic ballad “What this World is Coming to,” and the lushly attired mid-tempo synth-rocker “Shelter.”

While some bands fall back on familiar sounds in order to stack the deck, giving listeners the aural equivalent of a cozy blanket, the Swimmers are keen on engaging these old-fangled instruments and mannerisms on their own terms, creating tuneful, substantial fare.

A few composition students have lately asked me about abandoning pieces. They’ve expressed excitement at the beginning of the compositional process, but soon lost enthusiasm for their work. They aren’t sure how to capitalize on a promising beginning and feel stuck mid-piece. One confessed that he sometimes feels it’s easier to jettison a piece at this stage and start from scratch, hoping for that spark of beginning “inspiration” again.

Sometimes we do write ourselves into a corner, but more often getting stuck means we haven’t thought through the full implications of that initial creative impetus. We’re stuck in a foreground moment instead of thinking about the large scale structure. Our initial inspiration is only the first step in what may be a long gestation process.

While there are no catchall cures for “getting stuck,” I would suggest trying to work with the material you already have instead of abandoning it too quickly. One exercise that I’ve found helpful is to make daily appointments for a week to go over the troubled fragment – a half hour or hour will suffice – before abandoning it for a new piece. Even if you can’t think of a new path or helpful revision on the first day, keep at it. Edit what you have, evaluating what you like and what doesn’t work about the drafts thus far. Chances are, you’ll find a new pathway forward or, at least, something worth keeping.

LA band Fool’s Gold is well-versed in a variety of international styles. One can particularly detect a marked affinity for Afro Pop in the boisterous  dance anthem “Surprise Hotel” and “The World is All There is.”    Chorused vocal chants, Middle Eastern Inflections, and a neo-New Wave sensibility combine in savory fashion on “Ha  Dvash.”  ”Nadine” takes indie rock on an international sojourn, with Luke Top’s charismatic singing and guitarist Lewis Pesacov’s fluid guitar lines both soaring atop a fulsome mid-tempo groove.

Some purists decry American bands that create music with wide-ranging,  internationally inflected palettes as sonic brigands and cultural appropriators. On the contrary, I find Fool’s Gold debut LP to be the near-inevitable byproduct of increasing globalization, expanded diversity in the US, and the natural  curiosity  of  a talented octet of young musicians.

MP3:  Surprise Hotel

MP3:  Surprise Hotel remixed by Micachu and the Shapes

MP3: Nadine (Weird Tapes version)

Stop motion photography has come a long way, as evidenced by the new video for the title cut from Low Anthem’s Oh My God, Charlie Darwin LP. The video combines a rustic medium with a homespun feel with modernized elements of sophisticated shading: much as Low Anthem’s music does for the alt-folk genre.

Video (courtesy of Vimeo): Charlie Darwin