Month: January 2010

ACO, Conductors, File Under?, New York, Opera, Orchestras

Manahan takes the reins at ACO

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
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!

by Christian Carey
Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, San Francisco

Unwrapping Small Packages on a Saturday Night

Gyorgy Ligeti
Gyorgy Ligeti

I like to plan ahead.  But does that just mean I’m too old to decide where I’m going at the last minute, like the Generation Y and Z impulsives we hear so much about at arts participation conferences?  You know, the ones who don’t know where they’re going until somebody they’re following tweets their destination on the night of?

Mid-life insecurities and fuddy-duddiness aside, I know where I’ll be this coming Saturday evening: in the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s sweet new Concert Hall, taking in new short works by ten local composers, all presided over grandly by Gyorgy Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto for 13 instruments.  sfSound is the presenter, and they’ve cast a wide commissioning net to figures from our many micro-scenes.  Including, as my colleague Christian Carey reported earlier this month, Greg Saunier from avant-prog adventurers Deerhoof; plus Heather Frasch, a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley, Canner MEFE of underground harsh noise fame, Mills College Contemporary Music Co-Director Maggi Payne, and composer/improviser/performance artist Theresa Wong.

All of the composers were commissioned to make new works especially for this concert, entitled Small Packages. Some works are inspired by, and others are meant to contrast with, the regal Ligeti Chamber Concerto. The eight core sfSound performers, plus seven other veterans of the series, will spread their expertise around from the Ligeti work to each of the new pieces.

The San Francisco Conservatory of Music Concert Hall can be found at 50 Oak Street in San Francisco’s Civic Center neighborhood, convenient to the eponymous BART station.  Admission is $15.00, although those of us who are “underemployed” can take advantage of an $8.00 price.  If you don’t want to take your chances at the door, you can order tickets online from Brown Paper Tickets.

by Polly Moller
CDs, Charity, Click Picks, Contemporary Classical

New Music helping Haiti

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.

by Steve Layton
CDs, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Opera

Dr. Atomic as Opera or Symphony?

Many people are still talking about the New York production of John Adams’ latest opera, Dr. Atomic. But Adams wasn’t through with the material after its stage presentation.

Nonesuch recently released a symphonic version of music from Dr. Atomic; Dr. Atomic Symphony is paired with Guide to Strange Places on the CD.

There’s also a DVD release of the opera, in its Netherlands production, available on Opus Arte.

Sequenza 21 readers: How do you prefer Dr. Atomic, in its operatic or symphonic incarnation? The comments section is open for feedback.

by Christian Carey
Classical Music, Composers

Lawrence Dillon’s The Infinite Sphere Debuts

Our own Lawrence Dillon’s The Infinite Sphere will be given its World Premiere performances by the Daedalus Quartet tonight,  Friday, January 15 – 8 PM as part of the Discovery Series at The Barns at Wolf Trap  in Vienna, Virginia and on Saturday,  7:30 PM at Watson Chamber Music Hall of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem.

Commissioned by the Daedalus Quartet in conjunction with the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts, Dillon’s fourth quartet takes Pascal’s reference to “an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere” as the inspiration for a virtuosic wheels-within-wheels journey.

The fourth quartet in Dillon’s Invisible Cities String Quartet Cycle — a set of six quartets that explore connections between Classical forms and contemporary experience — The Infinite Sphere not only takes the form of a Classical rondo, it also adopts the rondo spirit, using popular dance music as material.

Winner of the 2007 Guarneri String Quartet Award from Chamber Music America, the Daedalus String Quartet is the resident quartet for the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University.

Lawrence is Composer in Residence at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and currently has commissions from the Emerson String Quartet, the Mansfield Symphony, the Boise Philharmonic, the Salt Lake City Symphony, the Daedalus String Quartet, the University of Utah Philharmonia and the Idyllwild Symphony Orchestra.

by Jerry Bowles
Composers

Tod Machover on Music & Technology

Technology has democratized music in ways that are surprising even to me, revolutionizing access to any music anytime with iPod and iTunes, opening interactive musicmaking to amateurs with Guitar Hero and Rock Band (which both grew out of a group I lead at the M.I.T. Media Lab), providing digital production and recording facilities on any laptop that surpass what the Beatles used at Abbey Road, and redefining the performance ensemble with initiatives like the Stanford iPhone Orchestra and YouTube Symphony.

– Tod Machover in today’s New York Times

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Concerts

Exclusive Photos From Hilary’s Bach Party

hilary hahn @petervidor
hilary hahn @petervidor

There are a lot of older men–myself included–who have had a crush on Hilary Hahn for an unwholesome length of time so I was not surprised when a couple of my best friends–professional photographers who normally wouldn’t pick up a camera unless there was money involved–volunteered to run down to the Village Gate…ur, Le Poisson Rouge for those of you with no respect for history–and shoot some pictures for free at her Bach Party last night.  The occasion was the release of Hilary’s newest album, Bach: Violin and Voice on Deutsche Grammophon.

“Ms. Hahn is even more enchanting in person than foretold,” Peter Vidor gushed in an e-mail to me today.  “Her every line and her every move bespeak surpassing eloquence and grace, and in speaking of her I feel like a stricken schoolboy.”

I haven’t heard from my other friend, Tomas Sennett.  He must have been too stricken to remember to snap a picture.

A couple of more photos after the break. (more…)

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

Glass on Colbert

Last night on The Colbert Report, Steven Colbert brought in Philip Glass to assist him in a parody of. . . Philip Glass.

The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
We Are at War – Philip Glass
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

It’s clearly a spoof of Einstein on the Beach–or “Einstein on the Beeyotch,” as Colbert says at the end of the show when he thanks Glass and mentions the recently released recording of Glass’s A Toltec Symphony.  Colbert is one of the most knowledgeable television hosts on the air when it comes to contemporary classical music–and he expects his audience to get the joke.  (He’s also on the advisory board for New York’s Symphony Space, although not necessarily for music, since they also present film, theatre, dance, and literature.)  Yet one question remains: How can Colbert present Downtown music from a studio in Midtown?  Pick a side, Colbert–we’re at war!

by Galen H. Brown
Composers, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, Exhibitions, Experimental Music, Festivals, New York

Gone but not, not forgotten

PhilipsPavilion1958-450

An illegal immigrant with a civil engineering degree in Paris, fugitive from his native Greece for his WWII resistance activity (for which he nearly died, and lost one eye) Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) eventually found himself working for the famed architect Le Corbusier, first as one of any number of assistants but soon enough as collaborator. Yet he was always drawn above all else to the need to compose music. Nadia Boulanger, Arthur Honneger, Darius Milhaud –all were either rejecting or rejected. It wasn’t until Xenakis stumbled upon Olivier Messiaen that he found a teacher that saw past the inexperience and willfullness:

I understood straight away that he was not someone like the others. […] He is of superior intelligence. […] I did something horrible which I should do with no other student, for I think one should study harmony and counterpoint. But this was a man so much out of the ordinary that I said… No, you are almost thirty, you have the good fortune of being Greek, of being an architect and having studied special mathematics. Take advantage of these things. Do them in your music.

Thrown almost at once into the hotbed of post-WWII modern music, surrounded by the likes of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Jean Barraqué, and Pierre Schaeffer, yet still working for Le Corbusier, Xenakis soon found ways to integrate his love of mathematics and architecture with new musical forms based on points and masses, curves and densities, later even physics and statistics — but somehow always tied to a deeply Greek historical and humanistic root system. During this transformative period, he stumbled upon a fascinating discussion about trang web cá cược bóng đá hợp pháp, which piqued his interest and added a unique dimension to his multidisciplinary explorations.

In the late 1950s Le Corbusier received a commisson to create the Phillips Pavillion for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. Le Corbusier made a preliminary sketch, but it was Xenakis who would develop and see the structure through to completion. Not only that, Xenakis (along with Edgard Varèse) would create music to inhabit the space, complementing a multi-projection visual program by Le Corbusier himself.

While only standing a short time, the echo of that space, event and music would continue well past 1958; it was constantly mentioned in all the books while I was a university student, and the pieces made for it have become “classics” in the field of early electronic music, still listened to and loved today. (There’s a small documentary on the Pavilion that you can see on YouTube.)

The reason I’m telling you all this? Because from January 15th through April 8th, The Drawing Center in New York City is hosting the show Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary. And in conjunction with this show, the Electronic Music Foundation is sponsoring a number of Xenakis events, including on the 15th a virtual recreation of the experience of the Phillips Pavilion at the Judson Church (55 Washington Square South).

We’ve asked The Drawing Center’s Carey Lovelace and the EMF’s own Joel Chadabe to give us some background and info, which follows just after the jump:

(more…)

by Steve Layton
Contemporary Classical

Introducing Syzygy

SyzygyIn a city like New York, with so many first-rate musicians moving to town every year to try to “make it,” promising new chamber ensembles spring up all the time, and I think this is a great thing.  One of 2009’s most promising new groups was the Syzygy New Music Collective, which gave their debut concert at St. Anthony of Padua church, in the West Village, on December 4th.

Founded by Jessica Salzinski and Danielle Schwob, two composers who recently graduated from NYU, Syzygy is dedicating itself to the presentation of music by young and emerging composers, and indeed most of the music on the concert was by composers I hadn’t heard of.  After the concert I overheard them encouraging some composers from the audience to send them scores and recordings, and their website includes detailed information on sending submissions.

The concert was very enjoyable.  All of the performances were solid, and I liked most of the pieces.  The reverberant acoustics of the church served some pieces better than others, but that’s a pretty common problem. The acoustics were especially well suited for Angelica Negron‘s meditative “Technicolor” for harp and electronics.  Conrad Winslow‘s chilled-out (or did it only seem that way because of the space?) “Slippery Music” did a remarkably good job of integration live acoustic instruments and an electronic tape part.  Noam Feingold‘s violin/cello duet “A Knife in the Water” meandered attractively across its modernist landscape.  Jessica Salzinski‘s impressive “Piano Sonata No. 1” was a bit muddied by the acoustics, but it came across well anyway.  The usually sweet sound of flute, harp, and vibraphone was somehow given a satisfyingly dark or even slightly ominous edge in Danielle Schwob‘s “Shiver.”  And Syzygy cunningly programmed a lovely Nico Muhly piece at the end of the concert.

I say “cunningly” because they attracted an impressively large audience for a first ever performance by a new-music group.  Part of that may have been the appeal of the Muhly name.  But I don’t want to diminish the other strategies they employed.  First, to fund the concert they raised money through kickstarter.  They then leveraged all of the other social media tools at their disposal, and it all worked.  This marketing savvy is in some ways the most promising thing about the group.  It’s one thing to put together a good ensemble and program and deliver a strong concert, but to stand out requires a business savvy that evidence suggests Syzygy posesses.

Syzygy’s next performance will be April 22nd, at the Nabi Gallery on West 25th street.

by Galen H. Brown