Cellist Maya Beiser and pianist Pablo Ziegler appear at Le Poisson Rouge on Wednesday, February 1st at 7:30 (doors open at 6:30). They are performing Canyengue, the Soul of Tango, a program that features the works of Astor Piazzolla.

From 1978-’88, Ziegler was a member of Piazzolla’s band. His arrangements for cello and piano translate Piazzolla’s compositions, such as Libertango and Adíos Nonino, to a more intimate medium, but retain the genre’s vibrant spirit. The duo will also perform several pieces by Ziegler, and Beiser will take a solo turn, performing Osvaldo Golijov’s Mariel.

Below, hear a stream from File Under ?’s Tumblr page of the duo playing Fuga Y Misterio, a somewhat lesser known piece by Piazzolla, arranged by Ziegler.

“Fuga Y Misterio”

Le Poisson Rouge is located at 158 Bleecker Street (between Thompson and Sullivan), in the West Village, NYC.  Tickets are $15, available through the club’s website, www.lepoissonrouge.com, or call 212/505-FISH (3474).

Although I only taught at Manhattan School of Music for a year, one of the great joys and privileges of that experience was meeting and working with composer, vocalist, copyist, and teacher Hayes Biggs. This past Fall, Hayes helped us to organize the Sequenza 21/MNMP Concert, going through stacks and stacks of scores as an adjudicator and, as a composer, contributing one of his own: the beautiful last movement of his string quartet O Sapentia/Steal Away.

After twenty years on the faculty at Manhattan School of Music, Hayes is finally getting a solo show there: a composition recital that features the world premiere of his song cycle Psalms, Hymns & Spiritual Songs (2011), performed by soprano Susan Narucki and pianist Christopher Oldfather. Attendees will also get to hear Hayes’s string quartet in its entirety, performed by the Avalon Quartet: the group that not only commissioned and premiered it, but also recorded Steal Away/O Sapentia for the Albany imprint. Event details are below. If you’re in the area, I hope you’ll make the trip uptown to hear Hayes’s music: it is very special work.

Event Details

Sunday January 15, 2012 at 7:30 PM

William R. and Irene D. Miller Recital Hall,

Manhattan School of Music,

120 Claremont Avenue (entrance on 122nd and Broadway), New York, NY

Free admission

In a mailing yesterday, I wrote on behalf of Manhattan New Music Project’s 100 donor December initiative. The letter is quoted below. I know everyone is inundated with funding requests at this time of year, but if it’s a cause and organization that moves you, I hope you’ll help them continue their mission to help both kids and new music composers, performers and teaching artists. I did.

Christian Carey (right) with fellow composer Hayes Biggs. Meet a Composer: Christian Carey Christian Carey (pictured, right) is an active composer and music theorist, as well as a Contributing Editor at the classical music blog Sequenza21. In October, Sequenza21 and MNMP joined forces to bring the American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME) to Joe’s Pub, performing the work of eleven composers chosen through a call for scores. “We wanted this to be an inclusive and community-building experience,” says Carey, “so I’m particularly proud that we agreed from the outset to make it an open call: no entry fee, age limit, or geographic restrictions. This allowed many composers who don’t often get a chance to participate in competitions, which often include high fees and age requirements, to be included. We ultimately received over 260 eligible entries, from as far away as the UK, Italy, South America, and even Uzbekistan. We even got a review in the New York Times in which Steve Smith praised our community-building activities!

ACME’s Clarice Jensen. “On the night of the concert, I heard over and over again from the composers about how impressed they were with their experience. Several of them remarked that they rarely, if ever, had had the opportunity to hear their pieces performed after their initial premieres; and certainly not by musicians of the caliber of the members of ACME. “What our organizations were able to do together made a big difference in these artists’ careers and provided them, and the audience, with a memorable musical experience that they will cherish. That’s why even in the tough economic times we are all currently experiencing, events like these are so important and sorely needed.”

My article today in Musical America reviews the NY Philharmonic’s Contact! Concert on 12/16 at the Met Museum. While I enjoyed the music – hearing HK Gruber perform Frankenstein!! was a particular treat –  I took issue with the announcement at the event of Alan Gilbert being awarded Columbia University’s Ditson Prize, which recognizes a conductor for his advocacy for American composers. This season, the Contact! series includes only one American: Elliott Carter. It’s a far cry from their inaugural season just two years ago, when they featured Sean Shepherd, Nico Muhly, Arlene Sierra, and others. Perhaps Maestro Gilbert will take the opportunity of being acknowledged for past programming decisions to reinvest future seasons of Contact! with a commitment to emerging American composers.

Yesterday’s post on File Under ? previewed Saturday evening’s concert by the Talea Ensemble at Merkin Hall (details here). Talea’s Artistic Director Anthony Cheung, a composer and pianist, was kind enough to answer some questions about the show and tell us about the ensemble’s upcoming activities.

- For those who aren’t up on the lingo, how would you describe Inharmonic and (X)enharmonic music? Do you think of them as different varieties of microtonal music?

Inharmonicity simply means a sound/timbre whose overtone frequencies aren’t pure whole number multiples of a fundamental, i.e. not a perfectly consonant spectrum. Inharmonicity is a common preoccupation with composers associated with spectral music, as it’s a way to measure degrees of dissonance; if one takes purely harmonic spectra to be consonance, stretching (contracting or expanding) the spectrum can lead towards greater perceived dissonance, eventually crossing the threshold to “noise.”

Xenharmonic music was a term invented by microtonal pioneer Ivor Darreg – a contemporary of Partch – to describe any harmonic system that doesn’t fit the 12-note equal tempered system of tuning that has dominated western music of the last two centuries or so. So it basically applies to everything on the program. And my not-terribly-clever play on the word, putting the parenthesis around the letter “X”, points to the word “enharmonic” embedded within. Enharmonic equivalents (i.e. B# and C ) can be radically different in a non equal-tempered scale, resulting in startling microtonal intervals. These differences were once the subject of much debate, e.g. between theorist-composers such as Rousseau and Rameau.

-How many different tuning systems are represented on the show?

It’s hard to pin down exactly, because there is certainly just intonation within various limits, as well as the more “approximate” use of micro-intervals in classic spectral music (a term which cannot be pinned down by any particular system), and then there are many hybrid systems, like in my piece and Enno Poppe’s. Wyschnegradsky, for instance, uses quarter-tones in his second string quartet, but really views his language not as microtonal, but “ultra-chromatic.”

-Which pieces are premieres?

No world premieres, but two US, my Discrete Infinity (written for the Ensemble Modern earlier this year) and Enno Poppe’s Holz (written for the Klangforum Wien in 2000).

-Does Dean Drummond use the Partch tunings (with non-Partch instruments) for his piece?

He uses various just tunings. He programmed several presets for the Yamaha DX7 synth, and the violin part is also written with mostly pure ratios. It’s interesting to be presenting a piece of Dean’s without Partch instruments or the 31-tone zoomoozophone, which he invented, since they are so associated with his music and the hand he’s had with maintaining Partch’s legacy. But in terms of tuning accuracy, the synthesizer cannot fail, and the sounds themselves are quite otherworldly.

-Are there ways that you can get microtones out of Talea’s pitched percussion instruments?

In terms of the retuned percussion, this really is Dean’s domain. A number of composers are writing now for specially tuned instruments. Earlier this year Rand Steiger wrote us a piece with custom-made vibraphone bars tuned to specific just intervals. Certain pitched percussion instruments have inherently complex, inharmonic timbres, such as almglocken and gongs, and these always blend nicely in the context of microtonal harmonies.

-Is the piano being retuned/detuned at all for the show?

No, unfortunately not. One of the earliest ideas I had was to do either the Ives quartertone pieces for two pianos, or a selection of Wyschnegradsky’s quartertone preludes, also for two pianos. Then logistics and costs got in the way; you wouldn’t imagine how expensive it is to retune a piano. My dream is to one day hear Wyschnegradsky’s Ainsi parlait Zarathoustra for four quarter-tuned pianos, or his works for 3 pianos in sixth-tones. But other instruments will be retuned, such as in my piece.

-What’s coming up for Talea? Any plans to get into the recording studio in 2012?

Lots coming up in the spring. We have a recording project at EMPAC of Romitelli’s music, which will be presented along with a portrait concert. Also, concerts of recent Austrian music, a trio of new string quartets from Japan, residencies planned at Stanford, Cornell, Ithaca College, and a trip to Darmstadt in the summer, where we’ll present two concerts. And we’re in the process of recording some chamber works of mine, which we’ll finish up later next year. So it’ll be a packed few months ahead!

Alexandre Lunsqui’s Fibers, Yarn, and Wire is receives its premiere performances tonight at the Met Museum and tomorrow at Symphony Space as part of the New York Philharmonic’s Contact! program. The Brazilian-born composer has been blogging about the preparing the work for Q2: his entries are titled “Contact! High.”

John Zorn will be featured on a Composer Portrait concert at Miller Theatre on Friday at 8 PM.

He’ll also be playing an 11 PM set, on the pipe organ at Columbia University’s St. Paul’s Chapel.

Here’s Zorn  below: talking about shaking the building with some of his registrations!

John Zorn Organ Improvisations Preview from Miller Theatre on Vimeo.

Courtesy of Boosey and Hawkes, Bridge Records, and Naxos Records, we have another special giveaway that will benefit those not able to attend Elliott Carter’s 103rd birthday party on Thursday in New York.

We’re giving away two signed CDs of “Music of Elliott Carter: volume 5” (Bridge 9128), and two of String Quartets Nos. 2, 3 and 4 (featuring the Pacifica Quartet; Naxos 8.559363), along with a signed 8×10 photo to accompany each.

Once again, I’ll be selecting the winners via a random drawing. If you’re interested, send me an email at: S21managingeditor@gmail.com. The contest will be open until noon on Thursday.

Ekmeles at the Italian Academy

Last month at Columbia University’s Italian Academy, I was formidably impressed by an evening of madrigals old and new performed by the vocal ensemble Ekmeles. One of the revelations of the evening began with an idea ofensemble director Jeff Gavett. He thought that the madrigals of Carlo Gesualdo might benefit from Nichola Vicentino’s 31-tone equal tempered scale, most famously employed in the tuning of an instrument of his design, the archicembalo.

While, as Gavett admitted in the concert’s program notes, there is not direct evidence that they were ever performed this way in the presence of Gesualdo, there is some documentary evidence that Vicentino’s writings and an archicembalo were available to the composer. But here, the proof was in the singing. Gesualdo’s music sounds glorious in 31-TET. Indeed some of its idiosyncratic cross-relations and chordal voicings glisten: equally, wonderfully, strange, but somehow refocused.

Ekmeles contains several youngish singers with winsome voices: Gavett, soprano Mary Mackenzie, and countertenor Eric Brenner are notable standouts. Their interpretative maturity and skill in preparing the challenging works on the program bely the freshness of Ekmeles’ sound. The group also brought in a “ringer of ringers” for the second act. New music superstar soprano Lucy Shelton joined Ekmeles for a spirited rendition of Elliott Carter’s late Ashbery setting Mad Regales.

The program also featured several deconstructions of the madrigal aesthetic. Peter Ablinger’s Studien der Natur,in which sounds of nature and commerce alike are recreated using only voices, was a rather charming one-upping of Josquin’s El Grillo. Johannes Schöllhorn and Carl Bettendorf took the madrigal into postmodern, often craggy, territory. Martin Iddon’s hamadryads required the group to play water-filled glasses and employ headsets to grok its very expanded Pythagorean tuning,  notated down to 100ths of a cent! Incredibly challenging to perform. But then, Ekmeles revels to be challenged.

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This Thursday, composer Randy Gibson’s work will be in full force on the Music at First series. The concert features the world premiere of Gibson’s Circular Trance Surrounding the Second Pillar with The Highest Seventh Primal Cirrus, The Utmost Fundamental, and The Ekmeles Ending from Apparitions of The Four Pillars (fit that title on a postcard!), a concert length work in just intonation for sine wave drones and seven voices. Also on the bill is a set from Canadian harpsichordist Katelyn Clark.

Performance details

Date: Friday, November 18th 2011
Time: 7:30pm
City: Brooklyn, NY
Venue: First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn
Address: 124 Henry Street
Admission: $10

Despite and Still: Melissa Fogarty Sings Samuel Barber
Melissa Fogarty, soprano; Marc Peloquin, piano
Aureole Records CD

Soprano Melissa Fogarty has an excellent voice, well-suited to interpret the songs of Samuel Barber. Her instrument possesses both the required flexibility for melismatic writing and a sumptuous legato tone for the creamy lyricism of Barber in balladic mode. On Despite and Still, Fogarty performs some of the more famous selections from the composer’s song repertoire – including the perennial favorite “Sure on This Shining Night” and the oft-programmed cycle Hermit Songs: settings of Celtic monks’ verse and marginal annotations.

Fogarty also includes the 1969 set mentioned in the title, and Op. 45, another late group of songs. These reveal a streak of melancholy that one might ascribe to some of the frustrations Barber encountered late in life: the colossal flop of his opera Antony and Cleopatra among them. Or, one might instead just consider this to be a natural stage of autumnal growth for a composer who was a consummate craftsman, fully aware of the importance of varying his oeuvre. Either way, Fogarty sings these pieces quite beautifully, with considerable grace and poignancy.
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Melissa Fogarty will celebrate the release of her second solo album, “Despite and Still – Melissa Fogarty Sings Samuel Barber,” on Friday, November 11 at St Luke in the Fields, NYC.

“A Last Song, and a Very Last, and Yet Another,” will feature an all-American song program with less known gems by Barber (such as “Despite and Still”), as well as Leonard Bernstein‘s cycle “I Hate Music!,” and Tom Cipullo‘s cycle “Another Reason I Don’t Keep A Gun in the House,” among others. Pianist Marc Peloquin will accompany Fogarty.

WHEN: Friday, November 11 at 8 P.M.

WHERE: St Luke in the Fields,

487 Hudson Street, New York City

TICKET: Free

INFORMATION: 212.633.2167 | www.melissafogarty.com