Sequenza21/

The tremendously devastating earthquake in Haiti has brought forth a wonderful outpouring of donations from all corners, to a lot of fine organizations dedicated to helping these folk through the weeks and months ahead. Sometimes though, it takes a little extra prod to dislodge those few more dollars that, while so small here, can make an enormous difference in the survivor’s well-being.

That’s why musicians (including some of the regulars from around here) who regularly meet up on various sites around the web decided early on to make up an online CD of works, the proceeds from which will virtually all go to buying basic food relief for the survivors. Using the innovatory music platform BandCamp, The CD was created and made available literally within days of the disaster; BandCamp also provides an easy and efficient way for folks to pay online, and to get that money back and out to Food for the Poor. Each $20 donated buys 100 pounds of rice and beans, basic staples every Haitian needs now. 96% of all the money goes directly for food purchases; the artists involved aren’t making a dime.

There are 19 musicians who have donated contemporary/experimental/improvisational tracks for the CD; not only from the U.S. but the other sides of both oceans as well. The minimum amount to purchase and download the tracks is a mere $5.00, but you’re more than welcome to make your payment any higher amount, too. So far in just the first two days of its release a couple hundred dollars have already been raised, but of course they’d like to keep it coming.

Those of you have have already given directly to this and other relief organizations, we salute you. But if perhaps someone’s been a little slow, maybe this might help motivate them to part with just a little cash. Whatever it takes, if it brings in even a few more dollars then good things can happen.

In the old movies, when someone needed help the scrappy kids always said “let’s put on a show”!  Think of this as the 21-century version of the same idea, except with scrappy new-music composers and performers.

Full of food and drink, playing with those presents, a couple days now to relax… How about capping the holiday huddled around the warm, cozy glow of the old ‘puter?

Because this Sunday the 27th, beginning at 1900 (7pm) EST and running all the way until Monday evening at 1900 (7pm) EST, our new-music radio host-with-the-most Marvin Rosen is having his annual Viva 21st-Century – Women Composers Edition 24-hour broadcast marathon. We’re talking all-women, all-the-time, and all things written only from 2000 ’till today! You’re bound to be enlightened, and possibly even amazed, with much of what you’ll hear. Your geography doesn’t matter either, because wherever you’re at you only need click to WPRB’s live stream and you’re good to go.

So pay a visit; your ears will thank you. And if inclined give a shout to Marvin himself for pushing himself to push this music, and so push you into a greater awareness of all the wonderful stuff being written by women composers in the here and now. (Marvin sez: “Wake up phone calls during this marathon will be welcome“…)

WNYC’s acquisition of New York radio’s stalwart WQXR was a win/lose proposition. Win, in that a major classical station would stay alive; lose in that the new assigned frequency (which can conflict with a powerful Connecticut station on the same frequency) and reduction in broadcast power (from 6,000 watts to only 600 watts) reduces its reach by some millions of potential listeners. Not that it matters much to me, parked on my hiney here in Houston; I and so many others simply go online to hear the station’s stream, anywhere and anytime.

And a further win: Besides the station’s main — and predictably staid — broadcast stream, WQXR also carries another, different  internet-only stream called Q2. The music there reverses the current classical-radio standard: i.e., instead of mostly old and safe with a few tiny nuggets of the new, Q2 plays quite a bit new with far fewer chestnuts from classical music’s Ancient Dead Guys Club.

In the past few hours of this morning you could have been listening to Glass, Rautavaara, Ter Veldhuis, Torke, Greenstein, Part, with a just bit of Falla, Palestrina and Chopin sprinkled through for good measure. I know this because they have a great real-time updated playlist page, so you’ll never have to wonder what that work you just heard was. Q2 is just finishing a week-long Steve Reich celebration, and while you’re a bit late for the music you can still read and hear all kinds of interviews about the music from a range of artists, as well as tons from the “old man” himself.

Q2 also has a blog, “Do You Q2“, where you can learn about what’s on any number of musicians minds, and generally stay abreast of upcoming features.

Perfect? No; the new music programmed generally skews closer to the middle of the new road, while I — and I’m sure quite a few others — might like a veer toward the edge more often (or occasionally even off the path altogether!). But still, Q2 should definitely be a daily stop for new-music lovers.

On those longer, cooler, grayer days, stuck inside with a little time on our hands, one of the nicer pastimes for the music buff is to wander through the Flickr music photo pools. Two especially for the contemporary musician: the Classical Music pool and the Experimental Music pool. Between them, with some thousands of amateur-to-pro photographers clicking away in all corners of the world, you can get a feel for the people, activities and concerns that make our music live and breathe today. Often, a striking image will mention a name or two that will get me started googling (or is that “binging” now?), and lead me to some wonderful composer, performer or event that I might otherwise have never encountered. But more than anything it’s just that glimpse of all the people in that bigger world, who have our same shared passion and work at it every day, that puts a little smile on my lips while browsing.

Well, that is if the time happens to be this Tuesday September 08 from 7:00pm EDT, ’till 7:00pm EDT Wednesday September 09, and you pin your ear to Princeton’s WPRB (103.3FM). I’m just reminding you of what Elodie Lauten has already so nicely plugged a little while back on her own blog: that it’s once again time for radio host Marvin Rosen to serve up his annual Classical Discoveries Marathon.

And by “all new”, I don’t mean just the stock & standard 20th-century stuff; this year’s adventure is titled “Viva 21st Century – American Edition” — music by almost 100 composers alive and working in the here and now! It’s safe to say that there’s just about nothing else on the airwaves that can match that achievement, so you’ve got every reason to be there and not be square.

If that’s not enough, on Wednesday September 16th Marvin is hosting an 80th birthday celebration of George Crumb. From 11:00am till 3:00pm Crumb himself will join Marvin, along with Orchestra 2001 conductor James Freeman. And just prior, from 8:30 am until 11am, Marvin’s guest will be composer Derek Bermel.

Tune in and hang on; your crash-course in what’s been happening the last 8.5 years is about to begin! Infinite thanks to Marvin and his commitment to the cause of our new music.

Up and running for a few weeks now, The Cereal List blog/website attempts to goose the arse of the always-just-a-little-too-sacrosanct classical music world. Run by the shadowy “Milton Blabber”, “Randall Scandall” and “Miss Information”, the blog’s posts have their share of flats mixed with a few good sharps. Though some jabs have veered just this side of awful or even libel, when they get it right, with such gems as “Generate a New York Times Review of your Work“, they’re pretty spot on. My current fave though, has to be “How to Design a Classical Music CD Cover”:

Whoever they may be, and as low as they may occasionally go, it’s obvious that these are people who are definitely active  in “the scene” and know their target intimately. It may not be the first place I’m going to check each morning, but I don’t see much wrong with trying to knock a few bricks off the Temple of Art.

(Thanks to Kevin Austin, who runs the Canadian Electroacoustic Community e-mail list, for pointing this one out):

Every serious classical listener/collector has spent time probing through the hiss, pop and crackle of early monophonic 78 and 33 rpm recordings; though the sound is tinny and boxed in, they love the magical feeling of somehow being brought closer to some vital moment, performer or composer.  Until 1958 people could only buy monophonic records; some might have heard stereo sound previously in a few push-the-envelope films like Fantasia, but for at least a couple generations mono was all they had. Yet there had been a number of experimental tries at stereo sound, going back as early as the 1920s (the BBC’s first attempt at a stereo radio broadcast was in December 1925). One of these pioneering experiments has been wonderfully documented on the Stokowski.org website.

Leopold Stokowski might have had a bit of the showman in him, often shrewdly picking music, concerts and events with a little more than average glitz and spectacle. But especially early on, we can’t forget that he was very friendly with a lot of the avant-garde of the day, and had a keen interest in new ideas.  His Philadelphia Orchestra began broadcasting concerts in 1929, but he was disappointed with the poor fidelity. Stokowski approached Bell Labs looking for some way to improve the sound; there he hooked up with Bell’s legendary research director Dr. Harvey Fletcher. Fletcher was doing groundbreaking work on electrical recording, new microphones and recording equipment, constantly searching for ways to expand the frequency, dynamic range and spatial presence of recordings.

They worked out a deal where in 1931 Fletcher would install the latest equipment in the basement of the hall (the Academy of Music) that the Philly orchestra used for broadcasts, making the orchestra a test subject for their recording experiments. By the end of the year they were able to push the recorded spectrum all the way to an unheard-of 13,000 Hz (though still in mono) in a recording of Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture.

But most amazing of all was the work of another of Fletcher’s researchers, Arthur C. Keller. He’d devised a system that could use two microphones at once, each cutting their own sound to a separate groove on the master disk. With this new stereophonic setup, in 1932 Keller recorded Stokowski and the orchestra performing Scriabin’s Prometheus: Poem of Fire (part 1; part 2). As far as we know, this is the oldest stereophonic music recording in existence, and for all those lovers of the 78 rpm records from this period the quality is just stunning. It would still be more than a quarter-century before the technology could advance enough to where everyone could finally listen at home in stereo.

Arthur Keller came out of retirement in 1979, and assisted by Ward Marston made the modern transcriptions you hear here, from the original master disks stored at Bell Labs. All thanks to them, and to the folks at Stokowski.org for sharing the story (there’s plenty more to learn there too, so don’t forget to go check out the site).

Mauricio Kagel’s 1984 “Der Eid des Hippokrates” (“The Hippocratic Oath”), for piano 3-hands. Kagel wrote:

This aphoristic composition was inspired by the publication in January 1984, in a medical magazine, of an article on my latest work. Whiling away the time in hospital waiting rooms, I began to think about the generous Hippocratic oath. I could not say if it was because I was wondering about the influence this Greek practitioner had — but there I was, writing a piece for two left hands, while also calling on the right hand [....] One hand keeps on providing a muted drumming, on a corner of the piano, as if transmitting extracts from the early oath in Morse code: “I swear by the doctors Apollo, Aesculapius, Hygieia and Panacea, by all the gods and the goddesses…”

The players here are András Hamary, Markus Bellheimand Armin Fuch, from a 2008 concert.

It’s sometimes said that composers are either German or French, and American vanguard one Frederic Rzewski, with his much vaunted admiration for Beethoven, is clearly on the German side.  But how could he not be when some of his composition teachers like Dallapiccola and Babbitt forsook a flowing lyric line for a jagged dramatic one, whose aim is not to seduce the ear, but to wow with intellectual rigor?  But that doesn’t mean that Rzewski’s work is insincere, or lacks power — it has that in spades — but that it tends to be aimed at the mind and not the heart. It’s often confrontational, too. But that’s a good thing because any real musical interaction, like any real human one, has a built in   confrontational element, and confrontations help us grow.

Rzewski’s 1976 solo piano piece The People United Will Never Be Defeated (El Pueblo Unido Jamas Sera Vencido) is certainly a work in which he confronted the musical possibilities of all kinds of things that had been appearing in his output until then.  He was 38 at the time he wrote it and his discoveries here power lots of his subsequent work. I t’s as much as a watershed piece for him as Glass’ massive ensemble work Music In 12 Parts (1971-74) was for him.  It’s also a kind of compendium of rhythmic, harmonic and coloristic approaches to Chilean composer Sergio Ortega’s song for Salvador Allende on which it’s based. There are 6 variation sets of 6 each plus a coda, and Rzewski seems to use every possible pianistic device in it. Read the rest of this entry »

Most S21 regulars know about these already, but for all our newer visitors I thought I’d mention how most of us keep on top of what’s what, day-to-day, in the classical and “non-pop” world.  The secret is to visit a few of the aggregation sites intrepid volunteers have set up, that comb the news sites and blogs for current tidbits of interest. It’s really pretty easy on your part, requiring just three quick clicks (besides our humble and happy abode, of course!) once a day (or twice or thrice, even better):

NetNewMusic Reblog — Jeff Harrington’s site probably has the most eclectic mix of news, gathering not only classical sites but experimental, art-jazz, electro-whatever and etc. as well.

Chris Foley’s Classical Pageflakes — Chris’ effort focuses more strictly on the classical end of things; the bonus with Pageflakes is that you can see snapshots of each website’s homepage.

Blognoggle | New Music — Our own fearless leader Jerry Bowles’ contribution to the mix, the site tracks 100 of the most read and most pertinent blogs, whether classical, jazz, new-music or even a few more general art sites.

There’s not much better way to easily find the major (and much of the minor) news of the day, than to give these three links a daily visit.  Bookmark ‘em, Danno…