My two most recent posts have been about orchestras that specialize in performing contemporary music, ACO and BMOP. In keeping with that theme, I thought I should also say a few things about the new contemporary music series by the New York Philharmonic, called CONTACT!(I know, I know – that concert was a couple months ago – what can I say, I’m a slacker.) In Music Director Alan Gilbert’s first press conference, he highlighted his plans for a New York Philharmonic new music ensemble this season, and as it turns out, this isn’t just a new music ensemble playing the past century’s greatest hits: they are performing seven pieces by seven composers, all of which are world premieres. Not bad, Mr. Gilbert. Not bad at all.
Strictly speaking, the December CONTACT! concert was not a full orchestra performance, but more of the Sinfonietta variety. Basically one of every instrument represented on most pieces. I don’t really want to talk about the pieces, but you can find out more about the program and the upcoming April concert here. I really just want to give a tip-of-the-hat to the New York Philharmonic and other established orchestral organizations like the San Francisco Symphony, St. Louis Symphony, and I’m sure others, for not just recognizing the importance of bringing bloggers in to the concert hall, but also for realizing that blogs are not going away and are worth their attention. This CONTACT! concert was the first time the New York Philharmonic invited bloggers to a performance and hopefully they will continue to do it in the future. It goes without saying that they should do this again for the next CONTACT! performance, but it would be great to see the Philharmonic begin inviting bloggers to regular subscription concerts as well. Here is a link to all of the other blog entries that were written following the December concert by twelve people who were obviously NOT slackers.
Finally, I love that the New York Philharmonic New Music Ensemble (is that really their name or can the ensemble have a shorter, snappier name?) is performing in some different locations around town. Each of these CONTACT! concerts are being performed once at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and once at Symphony Space. I have to wonder, though, if there is a better location than Symphony Space. I appreciate that they may be making an effort to get away from the Lincoln Center campus, but if the renovated Alice Tully Hall is cool enough and hip enough for Alarm Will Sound, ICE, the Bang on a Can All-Stars and the Ensemble Intercontemporain, then isn’t it cool enough and hip enough for the Philharmonic New Music Ensemble? And, wouldn’t the sound be so much better there?
In the end I think that the Philharmonic, Alan Gilbert, and composer-in-residence Magnus Lindberg should be congratulated on this new (and I’m sure somewhat scary or uncertain) venture. I look forward to the April performance and especially to what they have in mind for the ‘10-’11 season.
We heard from Christian Carey last week that the American Composers Orchestra has brought on George Manahan as their new Music Director but that’s not until next season. Fortunately you don’t have to wait until next season to hear the orchestra – they are performing THIS weekend in New York (Friday, January 29th – Zankel Hall. 7:30pm) and Philadelphia (Saturday, January 30th – Annenberg Center. 7:30pm) with Conductor Anne Manson. I was able to get her on the phone for a few minutes last night to talk about the program, you can listen to our short conversation here.
The program includes two world premieres: Sebastian Currier’sNext Atlantis, inspired by New Orleans and written for string orchestra and pre-recorded sound, with video by Pawel Wojtasik; and Roger Zare’sTime Lapse, a piece for orchestra influenced by photographic techniques, commissioned by ACO as part of its Underwood Composers Readings for Emerging Composers.
Latin jazz innovator Paquito D’Rivera’sConversations with Cachao is the centerpiece of the program, and receives its New York City and Philadelphia premieres in these performances. A tribute to Israel “Cachao” López, the Havana bass player who made Cuban Mambo a worldwide phenomenon, the piece is a double concerto featuring D’Rivera’s clarinet and alto sax in dialogue with the double bass, played by Robert Black.
I was also able to spend some time talking with Robert Black last spring about working with composers. It has nothing to do with the ACO concert this weekend, but if you want to listen to him talk about some of his experiences working with composers you can get the audio here.
Big news in the orchestra world. Starting next season (2010-’11), George Manahan will become the American Composers Orchestra’s Music Director. He will continue as Music Director at the New York City Opera.
George Manahan
In my view, this is good news indeed. Manahan is a superlative musician; he’s conducted some excellent performances of contemporary fare at NYCO. One hopes that his name will entice new audience members to check out the ACO.
Kudos as well to outgoing director Steven Sloane, who’s done an admirable job with the ensemble since 2002.
Thoughts on the shakeup? The comments section is open below!
Does anyone remember the early August announcement that the American Composers Orchestra was going to begin a partnership with LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton to “Commission and Premiere New Music by Emerging American Composers”? Well, whether you can wrap your head around that pairing or not, the first concert is happening on Monday night (November 30th) in Zankel Hall with Erin Gee’sMouthpiece XIII: Mathilde of Loci, Part 1. Erin is the lucky recipient of the first commission through this new partnership.
There are two other world premieres on the program:
1) Donal Fox: Peace Out for Improvised Piano and Orchestra. Mr. Fox was the first African-American composer-in-residence with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and he will perform as soloist, improvising his part along with a fully composed score for the orchestra.
2) Curt Cacioppo: When the Orchard Dances Ceased. The work includes parts for Native American folk voice and percussion instruments, both of which will be performed by the composer.
And, of course, there’s more… there will also be two New York premieres:
1) Huang Ruo’s piece, Leaving Sao, is written for soprano or high male voice in folk style and chamber orchestra in memory of his grandmother. Sao in Chinese means sorrowful predicament. I’m not totally sure, but I think he will also be the one singing this vocal part.
2) Charles Ives: Tone Roads Nos. 1 & 3. It looks like this will be the only piece on the program in which the composer is not also performing. Couldn’t the ACO find a way to get Charles there as well?!
You can also find lots of video and audio content about all of these works here.
While well-known for his writings about music, including books about Elliott Carter and George Gershwin, David Schiff is also a prolific and active composer. A professor at Reed College, he’s visiting New York this week to hear the American Composer’s Orchestra premiere a revamped version of Stomp, a piece that celebrates the music of James Brown. The concert, part of the Orchestra Underground series, also includes premieres by Margaret Brouwer and Kasumi, Rand Steiger, Fang Man, and Kati Agócs.
Carey: Stomp was written in 1990 for Marin Alsop. How did you decide to write in homage to James Brown?
Schiff: I was asked for a concert opener and somewhere in the process I realized that one of my rhythmic motives was from James Brown’s “I Feel Good” (as recorded Live at the Apollo). I then re-conceived the piece as a tribute.
Carey: Have other rock or jazz legends figured in your music?
Schiff: There’s a big Motown section in my Scenes from Adolescence (1987) and my Slow Dance for orchestra (1989), written for the Oregon Symphony, has a lot of Charles Mingus in it, but I have also had the great honor of working with two living legends in jazz, Regina Carter and Marty Ehrlich.
Carey: What’s “re-lit” about this new version for the ACO?
Schiff: ACO asked me to reduce the size of the orchestra slightly to fit in Zankel Hall. This gave me the opportunity to re-score the entire piece. The wind section now is much better suited to the style of the piece: flute, E flat clarinet, two saxes, trumpet horn, trombone and tuba.But there are also a lot of musical changes everywhere. I think that in the years since I first wrote Stomp I have become more experienced with the style. The new version is much hotter than the original–even though the orchestra is smaller.
Carey: You’re currently at work on a book about Duke Ellington. Is that research infiltrating your composing at all?
Schiff: Ellington’s music influences everything I do. I go to school with his music every day and I find his melodies, rhythms, harmonies and instrumentation endlessly inspiring.
It’s minimalist week in the Center of the Universe, highlighted on Friday night by the John Adams 60th birthday concert at Carnegie Hall. Adams will be conducting the American Composers Orchestra in performances of My Father Knew Charles Ives, The Wound-Dresser (with bass-baritone Eric Owens) and the Violin Concerto, with Leila Josefowicz doing the honors.
Meanwhile, also on Friday, in a nearby universe, Michael Riesman, Music Director of the Philip Glass Ensemble and concert pianist, will be performing the world premiere of his marvelous new transcription for solo piano of Glass’ score to the 1931 classic horror film, Dracula. The gothic walls of the Orensanz Foundation for the Arts provide a perfect backdrop to Reisman performance, which will done live to film. Tickets are $20 ($25 at the door).
On a more somber note, there will be a public memorial service for composer and pianist Andrew Hill, who died last Friday, at Trinity Church (89 Broadway at Wall Street) this Friday, April 27, at 2:00 pm.
For all the allusions to chaos and complexity in the American Composers Orchestra’s Orchestra Underground concert at Zankel on Friday night, the evening was a surpisingly mellow–dare I say it, even melodic–affair. If new music is going to be this much fun to listen to there is a real danger that people are going to start coming to concerts.
This is not to say the program was not adventuresome, just that it contained some unexpected crowd pleasers. The guy sitting next to me, a visiting pianist/composer from St. Louis named Ken Palmer who came strictly for the Ives opener (Ken had written his dissertation at Yale on the Concord Sonata), even allowed that he would like to hear a couple of the pieces again and ventured that this weird Corey Dargel dude could be some kind of “breakthrough something or other” hit.
The evening began with orchestrated versions of Charles Ives’ Four Ragtime Dance, Nos. 2 and 4, originally composed for piano. The thievery from Scott Joplin and Hubie Blake would be offensive if it were not so disarmingly obvious and re-mixed with church songs and marching band ditties with such consummate wit. By the time we got to “Bringing in the Sheaves” (or “bringing in the sheep,” as we sang just to be naughty when I was a kid), everyone in Zankel Hall had a grin on their face.
The chaos part of the evening was supplied by Brad Ludman’s Fuzzy Logic, four short movements of dazzling electronia augmented by Lauren Bradnofsky on amplified cello and various orchestral instruments, as well as a dandy video by Boom Design Group. I liked the way each of the movements began on a confident, assertive trajectory, became more convuluted and accelerated until they split apart, and then dissolved with a kind of a whimper. Not sure what it means except maybe it doesn’t matter where you begin you’re going to wind up lost anyway so you can stop anywhere. Silvestrov does that, too, although his music starts out tentative before it totally wimps out.
Michael Gandolfi’s two-movment piece As Above was also a video collaboration (with Ean White), with the first short movement called “Touch” based on natural images and the second called “Electric” based on more urban images. Touch was more chaos, a kind of jerky musicial cubism, based on the science of fractals, but Electric drew from vanacular musical languages, including rock, blues and some super-infectious ”flying down to Rio” Latin rhythms. It had a beat and you could dance to it.
The major complexity element of the evening was supplied by Michael Gatonska’s After the Wings of Migratory Birds, a brilliantly rendered tone poem based on the composer’s re-imagination of the sounds made by swallows gathering in migratory flocks–the way they sound when they move at the same time, the way they all flap their wings in unison, the way they suddenly fall perfectly still at the same time. The orchestration was dense and often breathtaking, with some stunning moments of pure beauty in the strings. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that this is a La Mer for the age of complexity.
Susie Ibarra did a piece on a drum set which was short and not too loud, qualities I appreciate in a drum solo. The evening ended with Evan Ziporyn’s Big Grenadilla, a concerto for bass clarinet, which he performed admirably himself with impressive breath control. Ziporyn’s music is so competent, so assured, so well-constructed that I really, really hope to like it someday. I’m sure the fact that it leaves me cold is my failing, not his.
One of the several fun points of the evening was the beginning of the second half when a recording of Charles Ives hammering away at a piano and singing some hardy patriotic World War I ditty was played for the amusement of those assembled. The recording was a little blurry but I could have sworn Ives said “That sucked” at the end. It couldn’t have been that, although the sentiment was certainly accurate.
And, of course, the hit of the evening–the peoples’ choice–was our own boulevardier Corey Dargel, who brought down the house with a tres amusant song called All the Notes and Rhythms I’ve Ever Loved about composer boyfriends who, knowing that he can’t orchestrate, steal his stuff and use it in their own pieces which is a kind of “sadistic, back-handed compliment.” It was the usual Corey brilliant mix of satire and truth.
My new friend Ken in the next seat over is right; Corey is destined to become some kind of “breakthrough something or other” hit. Anybody need an intellectual Peter Allen?
Brad Lubman has been involved in the new music scene for nearly two decades but this looks like his breakthrough season. Conductor/composer Lubman makes his guest conductor debut at the helm of the American Composers Orchestra Friday evening at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, when the ACO kicks off its 30th season with its first Orchestra Underground Composers OutFront! concert.
In addition to leading the orchestra in music from Michael Gatonska, Evan Ziporyn, Michael Gandolfi, Susie Ibarra, Charles Ives and our own wunderkind Corey Dargel, Lubman will conduct the world premiere of his own Fuzzy Logic, for woodwinds, brass, percussion, synthesizer, piano, and amplified cello and video. Lauren Radnofsky is amplified cello soloist and Boom Design Group creates the visual designs.
The program will be repeated at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia on Sunday, October 15 at 7:30pm.
If you miss those shows, Lubman’s new music group Electric Fuzz will be gigging Friday, October 20, starting at 7 pm, at Joe’s Pub Electric Fuzz was formed in 2006 by performers and composers who played together as members of the Musica Nova Ensemble at the Eastman School of Music. The group is currently collaborating with Boom Design Group, a team of virtuoso visual artists and web designers, who draw on their own performance backgrounds to produce improvised and interactive video installations.
The Joe’s Pub event will feature the premiere of a new Lubman work named for Electric Fuzz; plus Jumping to Conclusions, a quartet with electronics; and several pieces for violin, cello and synth that Lubman has co-composed with ensemble member Lauren Radnofsky. Music by David Lang and Pierre Boulez rounds-out the event.
Lubman has enjoyed a busy and multi-faceted career, but is probably best known among new music insiders as a gifted utility infielder who can deliver a superior performance from any world-class orchestra or ensemble on a moment’s notice, a talent honed by having been Assistant Conductor to the mercurial and (in my view) inexplicable Oliver Knussen at the Tanglewood Music Center from 1989-94.
We heard from Christian Carey last week that the American Composers Orchestra has brought on 
Does anyone remember the early August announcement that the 
For all the allusions to chaos and complexity in the American Composers Orchestra’s Orchestra Underground concert at Zankel on Friday night, the evening was a surpisingly mellow–dare I say it, even melodic–affair. If new music is going to be this much fun to listen to there is a real danger that people are going to start coming to concerts. 
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