The last concert I attended that involved one of the great minimalist composers was a concert over the summer at the Dream House–a three hour long close encounter (small, hot and sweaty room) with La Monte Young and crew. While I enjoyed the music, I felt that I had my fill of hot and sweaty […]

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David Lang, who you will recall won this year’s Pulitzer with his piece The Little Match Girl Passion, will be submitting himself to the hard-hitting S21 interview next week.  I’ll be asking him what he plans to do about the financial meltdown, the war in Iraq, and whether he stands by his selection of Sarah […]

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This September marks the 50th anniversary of musical Minimalism, an artistic revolution which critic Kyle Gann has described as “the most important musico-historical event of my lifetime.” I’m delighted to announce that Sequenza21, in collaboration with the exciting new concert series Music On MacDougal, will be celebrating this important milestone with a concert of early […]

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKXy1FPTdvg

Steve Reich’s seminal 1967 Piano Phase has always been a fantastic challenge for any two pianists. But here is the Russian Peter Aidu (b. 1976) going them all one better, by performing both parts solo, on two pianos at once.
Released on the netlabel Top-40, the complete recording is available to freely download at Archive.org. (There’s […]

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…Who needs an aerobic DVD? The clip title is roughly “Maraca Driven Crazy”, but I don’t think that’s the only thing coming unhinged here. Though this was posted around a year ago, I can’t help feeling that somewhere in Italy they’re still running through this phrase, over and over… (The piece rehearsed is Reich, but […]

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Our regular listen to and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online:
Hanne Darboven (b. 1941 — DE)

What better way to mark a new year than with […]

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Steve Reich turns 70 today.  There will be the usual superlatives–greatest living composer, most important musical thinker, and other fun, but largely unreliable, speculations. We won’t burden Reich with any of them.  The path of music history is already littered with the ghosts of greatest livings whose work has since fallen into neglect and obscurity.  Others fade for awhile only […]

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