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It’s hard enough delivering an orchestra commission when you’re hale and hearty; but despite losing most of his vision during the course of its lengthy gestation (2001-’6) York Höller managed to complete his work Sphären. His efforts amidst considerable adversity have garnered him the 2010 Grawemeyer Award.

Although now almost completely blind, Höller continues to compose. Abetted by assistants, samplers, and a new software called Jaws, he is soldiering on. One hopes that the Grawemeyer’s $200,000 prize will assist in this endeavor.

So, composers,  next time you’re planning to tell your commissioner why the piece isn’t done, you’ll need a pretty good excuse:  Höller has upped the ante!

Hear Sphären at Boosey’s website.

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.

On December 7th, the UN meets in Copenhagen in hopes of ratifying a wide-ranging accord seeking to combat climate change. Over at Time for Climate Justice’s website, you can learn more about the Tck Tck Tck campaign, which enlists artists, scientists, and political leaders to raise awareness about this issue.

A number of musicians have contributed to a remake of Midnight Oil’s “Beds are Burning,” available for free download from the site.With updated lyrics (sanctioned by the band), the single brings together a number of pop stars in a global, cross-genre collaboration. While I would have liked the new version to have kept the Midnight Oil rendition’s driving rhythmic sensibility – the new one sounds like it would fit in well on “Glee” – I applaud the enthusiasm and commitment of its participants.

More and more, computers and other technology play a role in my composing. This is particularly true of a project for the theatre which I’m developing now.

Once tech is in the mix, there are always newer ways and newer gear to “push around the sounds.” Is anyone familiar with ways/materials that relate to the laundry list below?

-How do readers go about organizing their digital music, particularly if they have music on more than one machine? Do they like a particular method of syncing up libraries?

-What’s a good sequencer in which to spruce up Finale files (convert to MIDI, of course)?

-What’s a decent keyboard to use as a controller?

-Which sound cards should composers with a PC investigate?

-Are there any libraries of prepared piano sounds out there? How about microtonal instruments?

-Speaking of microtones, are there any programs for modelling alternative tunings and microtonal tunings that are effective?

- In terms of precomposition, which programs do composers use to model post-tonal designs: arrays, matrices, etc.

-Which platforms do folks use for live electronics, both as composers and as improvisors?

San Francisco rockers Citay have made the lead off track from Dream Get Together, their forthcoming third album, available for download.

Careful with that Hat

The song combines sunny accents and psychedelic guitar solos into a catchy, propulsive six-minute jam.

Dream Get Together will be released on January 26th on the Dead Oceans imprint.

Antonin Dvořák

Piano Concerto, Op. 33; selections from Poetic Tone Pictures, Op. 85

Vassily Primakov, piano; Odense Symphony Orchestra, Justin Brown, conductor

Bridge CD 9309

Dvořák wrote his Piano Concerto in 1876, nearly two decades before his watershed work in the genre, the Cello Concerto. And while the later work is superlative, with this stirring new Bridge recording pianist Vassily Primakov makes a strong case for the Piano Concerto to have a place in the repertoire as well. The piece is reputed to have an unidiomatic solo part. But Primakov for the most part plays the original version of the work, preferring it to later editions which reconfigure some of the passage work.

Brahms has long loomed large as a strong influence on Dvořák’s music; this seems to be the case here, especially in terms of rhythmic construction. The first movement of the concerto features innumerable delightful hypermetric twists and turns as well as syncopations galore, maintaining a supple profile that recalls Brahms at his wiliest.  The middle movement is quite lovely, with a pastoral-sounding horn solo and elegant wind-writing set in counterpoint against diaphanous piano passages. The Bohemian dance music of the finale creates quite an impression as well, allowing concerto to give way to symphony for a short period of time before reasserting the soloist’s importance with some dazzling dotted rhythm interjections and coruscating runs.

This is an excellent piece to showcase Primakov, who balances sensitive dynamic contrasts and nuanced phrasing with con fuoco virtuosity where required. He also successfully inhabits selections from the more innig Poetic Tone Pictures, allowing them to be sensuous, even pictorial, without ever seeming overly programmatic.

Shearwater releases their third Matador LP, The Golden Archipelogo, on February 23rd. Matador’s posted a video premiering some of the tunes here. From these tantalizing glimpses, it sounds like the band’s adopting a more anthemic sound this time out.

In C Remixed

Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble

Innova CD

Innova  Records released Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble’s In C Remixed project this week. On paper the concept seems simple enough. GVSU’s performers present their own rendition of Terry Riley’s watershed minimalist work In C. The listener is then treated to a host of recreations by both contemporary composers and electronica artists.

Of course, this ’simple’ concept would have quickly gone awry if either GVSU faltered or its collection of remixers weren’t a creative bunch of talented genre-busters. Happily, the ensemble has their finger on the ‘pulse’ of Riley’s music. Happier still, they’ve enlisted some A-list collaborators.

Some, like DJ Spooky(In Sea of C), create beat-centric versions that seem ready-made for the IDM club. Others such as Nico Muhly (In C with Canons and Bass) and Phil Kline (In Cognito) take things in an experimental direction. Muhly even has the chutzpah to interpolate pitches from ‘outside’ the diatonic in order to spice things up — notably drone F#s. Kline further distresses the source material, adding layers of reverberation, chimes, and soundscaping. In his Simple Mix, David Lang similarly seeks to rework Riley’s piece towards a more atmospheric aesthetic; this time the proceedings heighten the affects of glissandos and de-emphasize metricity.  The results in both the Kline and Lang remixes are eerily lovely.

As is more so the case in recent years, some remixers sit astride the pop and classical traditions. Yale-trained composer Dennis DeSantis leads something of a double musical life  in concert music and electronica. His remix is a melange of beat overlays, synthetic additions, and restructuring that provides much to please both ear and intellect.

A remix project is always a hodgepodge of disparate approaches. But to this listener, it seems as if Innova has gotten it right, engaging artists who both enjoy Riley’s music and relish the chance to make  In C in some way their own.

Cold Cave

Love Comes Close

Matador CD

After a sold-out self-released run back in August, Cold Cave’s 2009 debut LP, Love Comes Close, has been given wider release on the Matador imprint. The recording combines edgy synth-pop instrumentation with more organic noise-rock energy. This juxtaposition is no doubt due in part to lead singer Wes Eisold’s tenure in several hardcore bands.

After decamping, Eisold found himself enamored with old school electronics. Hence, Cold Cave’s curious, yet affecting, hybridization of these seemingly disparate stylistic categories.He’s joined with two particularly simpatico collaborators in Dominick Fenrow (Prurient) and Caralee McElroy (Xiu Xiu).

There’s a bleak kind of Neoromanticism to be found on Cold Cave’s ballads. It’s particularly affecting on “Heaven was Full,” a song that is simultaneously tuneful and a bit forbidding.

More propulsive, even danceable, are the uptempo “The Laurels of Erotomania” and “Youth and Lust:” some of the best dystopian club fare to hit the airwaves in ‘09.