File Under?

This in from Nadia Sirota and the gang at WQXR’s Q2:

Listen in to Q2 now through Sunday to JacobTV on the Radio: a 5-day celebration of the omnivorous creative world of the game-changing Dutch composer, JacobTV. Festival features include:

• JacobTV as DJ, introducing many of his seminal works (full archival versions to 20+ pieces available on-demand)
• Full on-demand concert audio from Ethel Plays JacobTV: a recent New Sounds Live performance from Merkin Concert Hall with the string quartet Ethel
• Hours of rare, never-before-heard recordings from live concerts and private recordings
• Videos from upcoming pieces, recent collaborations, documentaries, and live performances
• A limited time download of his break-through Grab it! inspired by the documentary Scared Straight!

Q2 | www.q2live.org

q2@wqxr.org

facebook | Q2

twitter | Q2music

ETHEL Quartet’s forthcoming release (June 2010, Thunderbird Records) chronicles their series of collaborations with eleven young composers from the Chickasaw nation; the first-ever recording of Native American student composers.

Q2 has posted podcasts about the recording project here, providing a preview and some context for this fascinating endeavor.

Over the years, Ethel has engaged in a number collaborations with Native American musicians. Here’s a video of them performing with Navajo singer James Bilagody.

Program Notes

Duo for alto saxophone and piano (2009) had its beginnings in an earlier work for alto flute and piano. Substantially reworked and revised to better suit the sax, it still retains the same core compositional goals. Certain gestures – trills, angular melodies, and widely spaced arpeggiations – are set against more conjunctly articulated lines and stacked verticals. This gestural vocabulary evolves in its juxtapositions throughout the piece, providing a variety of vantage points. A plausible non-musical analog to its structure might be gradually unfolding an abundantly contoured map. (World Premiere, William Paterson University, 4/21/10)

Swedenborg Variations for violin and piano (2010) takes as its jumping off point my recent fascination with the works of 19^th Century landscape painter George Inness. In 2008, I wrote a trio (for clarinet, viola, and piano) based on his painting Sunset (1893). In addition to a series of musical reflections on this enigmatic and inspiring artwork, I also incorporated aspects of his working methods and artistic philosophy into my making of the piece. The latter concern drew heavily on both the writings of the Transcendentalists and on a spiritual approach to making art that reflected the tenets of Swedenborgianism. The violin-piano variations are a reworking of the last movement of the trio in a duo context, re-envisioned to better suit the virtuosic capabilities of both instruments.  (World Premiere, Connecticut College, 5/13/2010)

Composers Now: an Interview with Laura Kaminsky

Composer, arts administrator, educator, and now, festival curator, Laura Kaminsky is exactly the type of advocate contemporary music needs to ensure its survival. Until recently a dean at the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College/SUNY (she remains on the faculty), she’s currently Associate Artistic Director at Symphony Space. Since her arrival, Kaminsky has done a great deal to enhance the music programming at the venue.

“Symphony Space has long been known for its literary events. But in recent years we’ve been hard at work to create an increased role for music in our programming: both in terms of performances and in our educational activities. We’re trying to create a home at Symphony Space for all different kinds of music. I’m particularly pleased with our incorporation of Latin American music into various projects. We are lucky to have both classical composer Tania León and jazz musician Arturo O’Farrill and his Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra involved in our programs.”

Despite the currently gloomy economic times, she’s helped to organize an ambitious weeklong undertaking spotlighting contemporary music: Composers Now. It all started with a conversation she had with León.

“Tania pointed out that poets and playwrights generally have a much greater public presence than composers. Oftentimes performers become the focus of an event and, apart from their music, we don’t get to know the composers too well. So, we decided to help to organize a festival that gives composers in New York a public face.”

The Composers Now festival has involved dozens of presenters, ensembles, and organizations. And Kaminsky is quick to eschew any notions of single-minded leadership, remarking instead that, “This was very much a team effort. I lived for a time in West Africa and I learned there that it really does take a village. The idea of Composers Now took shape gradually and somewhat informally, beginning as a series of conversations over lunch or a cup of coffee with various area presenters and arts professionals.”

“It seemed as if it was just as we were getting started that the economy took a drastic turn for the worse. For a little while, our informal group of organizers was reluctant to broach the issue, but eventually we started to talk openly about the funding challenges we were all experiencing; about being nervous about the future of our organizations and of this project.”

“I learned something very valuable from those conversations: when people trust each other enough to speak the truth, great things can happen. Once we had had voiced our concerns, we were able to set about finding ways to make Composers Now a reality. By getting creative, we found a solution. The organizers were able to find a week in the ’09-’10 season when we could all commit to programming contemporary music or involving composers in some way.”

Kaminsky and company didn’t look at this as an event exclusively open to composers of concert music. In likeminded spirit to her work at Symphony Space, Composers Now has welcomed a wide range of styles and genres, including Latin American music and jazz. Within the confines of its contemporary classical programming, the composers highlighted have been from a similarly catholic array of styles, ranging from a concert by ‘downtowners’ Bang on a Can to a Composers Portrait of Benet Casablancas at Miller Theatre.

“If all goes well, we want Composers Now to stretch beyond the boundaries of New York City in coming years. I don’t see why this shouldn’t be a nationwide program that raises awareness of composers with events throughout the United States.”

If a village’s worth of arts presenters can achieve what Composers Now 2010 has done in NYC, imagine what arts organizations across the whole country could do?

Sure, the recession has caused for cutbacks in the arts. But composers are a resilient bunch. This week, New York City will be the site for the first Composers Now festival. Coordinated by Symphony Space Associate Artistic Director Laura Kaminsky and composer Tania León, the festival involves a host of area venues and organizations.

The activities start Monday morning with a panel discussion and a marathon concert from 12-6. Tonight alone, there are events at Symphony Space, the Schomburg Center, the Morgan Library, the Jazz Gallery, and the Flushing Branch of the Queens Library.

Composers Now will run throughout the week – and so will our coverage on Sequenza 21. Steve Layton’s started things off with an interview of Michael Hersch. I’ll be posting an interview with Laura Kaminsky. We’d love to hear reports from attendees about the various Composers Now events: a truly ambitious undertaking that we hope lots of you will be able to enjoy.

For those readers who won’t be in the New York area this week: take heart. If all goes well, Composers Now hopes to create festivals in many more venues in years to come.

Serial...chance ... trumpet concerto?

John Cage: Sixteen Dances

Boston Modern Orchestra Project; Gil Rose, conductor

BMOP Sound 1012

Sixteen Dances comes at a transitional time in Cage’s career. Completed in the beginning of 1951, it intimates the importance of chance in his works from then onwards, but still retains a fascination for serial procedures and precompositional planning: a remnant of his 1940s studies of Webern. The overall plan of the piece involves a constantly morphing 8×8 array, albeit one which Cage deployed freely and in a wide variety of permutations.

At nearly an hour in duration and for large forces, it’s also a departure in terms of his music to accompany dance. Indeed, it’s Cage’s first evening length piece for the Cunningham company. To add still another layer, the movements are subtitled as progressions through the emotional states of classical Indian aesthetics. However, the composer’s reaction to these various emotions is anything but conventional. One can hear a particularly idiosyncratic response – to “The Heroic” in an audio excerpt below (courtesy of BMOP).

In a new recording by the estimable Boston Modern Orchestra Project, one also detects another strand of influence: there’s a lot that’s jazzy about the score. Indeed, in places it seems like a post-swing trumpet concerto colliding with avant-garde percussion. One of the numbers, No. 10 (Interlude), was even conceived of as an (unorthodox) blues. While one often associates Cage with rhythmic variety and even a seemingly unfettered flow of events, here is the place where the composer most thoroughly incorporated early bop’s own experimentations with pulse, swing, and the freedom that would lie beyond.

After Sixteen Dances, Cage immersed himself in the I Ching. It might be fanciful, but at least to my ear, during his work on Sixteen Dances, he was immersed in the music of Dizzy Gillespie.

MP3; No.7 [TheHeroic]

Can’t find Cage at your local record seller? Get the BMOP disc via their website.

I have the utmost respect for Eighth Blackbird as musicians and new music advocates. In fact one of my fondest dreams as a composer would be to have them perform my chamber Sextet. But I was very disappointed to learn that the ensemble’s new Call for Scores requires composers to pay a $50 application fee to have their scores considered. While, as one of my colleagues put it, this may convince composers to be ‘a bit self-selective’ in their submissions, it’s also a handy way to self-fund the commission of a new work for the ensemble.

As much as I’d like to have Eighth Blackbird consider my work, I don’t want to participate in a process that feels exploitative.

I was fortunate to have flutist John McMurtery and pianist Ashlee Mack perform on my recital this past Sunday. New music specialists, members of the Society of Chromatic Art and Luna Nova, they are dedicated advocates who excel in the modernist end of contemporary classical: Babbitt, Carter, Ferneyhough, etc.  They have also commissioned works from several American composers.

Both are also active as educators and performers of more mainstream repertoire. John plays in the New York City Opera Orchestra, while Ashlee teaches at Knox College in Illinois.

Tomorrow, they’re making a return trip to Westminster Choir College, giving a talk at 7 PM in RC 1. They’ll discuss commissioning and working with composers, performing new music, and extended techniques on their respective instruments. If you’re in the area, please consider joining us! (Need directions? Send me a message via the comments section below)

Despite the impending snow this weekend will be a packed one.

I’m attending the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s concert this Saturday at Carnegie Hall. Pianist Angela Hewitt will be appearing with the ensemble, performing as soloist in Bach’s Concerto for Piano and Strings in D minor. Christopher Taylor will be the piano soloist in the premiere of a new work by Peter Maxwell Davies. The latter piece, Sea Orpheus, is a trope on Bach’s chamber concerto style, using Brandenburg #5 as its inspiration. Dvorak’s E major Serenade for Strings and Stravinsky’s Basel Concerto round out the program. I’ll be reviewing the concert for Musical America.

Domino is slated to release These New Puritans’ sophomore release, Hidden, on March 2nd.

The band is sharing a teaser MP3, “Orion,” here. The song clearly takes arranging cues from the burgeoning indie classical movement, featuring the New London Children’s Choir, Japanese Taiko drums, chains, roto-toms, etc.

While it is nice to see so many bands incorporating contemporary classical signatures into pop music, one likes it even more when the results as as fetching as those on “Orion.”