We covered some great shows coming up this month in the Bay Area and NYC, now it’s Seattle’s turn. For the next two weekends (June 4-6 & 11-13) On the Boards will be hosting the 2010 NW New Works Festival which features “emerging and established artists from a variety of performance disciplines” and “highlights artists who are pushing themselves to take on new challenges.” Looking over the list of showcases it seems that the festival is primarily focused on new theater and dance, but there are a few music related sets in there if you look hard. The Mint Collective,
Read moreBenjamin Lees died of heart failure on Monday, May 31 at North Shore Long Island Jewish Hospital in Glen Cove, New York at the age of 86. Lees’s work rose to prominence in 1954 when the NBC Orchestra performed his Profile for Orchestra in a national broadcast. He was later awarded Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, allowing him to live in Europe for seven years and present his works throughout the continent. Upon his return to the United States in 1962, Lees was appointed Professor of Composition at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, where he served until 1964. He later taught
Read more[Polly writes about great events happening in the Bay Area, here. And, I’ll have a few cool things happening in Seattle soon. In the meantime here are some interesting performances coming up in NYC ] It looks like the first couple weeks of June are going to be full of tough choices. Like, on Saturday, June 5th will I check-out, a) The JACK Quartet on the opening night of the Tribeca New Music Festival, b) Wet Ink meets Yarn/Wire at Roulette, or c) Feldman performed by Flux Quartet and Evan Ziporyn? Here’s what’s coming up, choose wisely: June 2: Da
Read more2010 celebrates 35 years of the new music festival June in Buffalo and the 25th year that it has been under the direction of composer David Felder. Based at the University of Buffalo, the festival has brought many leading composers and performers together since Morton Feldman started it in 1975 (a wonderful online exhibit on June in Buffalo has been put together by the UB Library and can be found here). This year’s festival kicked off last night with performances of Steve Reich’s Sextet and Double Sextet by the chamber ensemble Signal, who have quickly become a major force in
Read moreThe beginning of June has taken on a certain meaning to the San Francisco Bay Area new music community, and every single one of us would erase that meaning if we could. It’s once again time for the Matthew Sperry Memorial Festival, held every year around this time in memory of one of our own, lost to us in a tragic accident on June 5, 2003. The eighth annual festival happens this week, and the theme is “Homegrown”, since organizers are taking a break from the out-of-town headliners who’ve graced the event each year up till now. First up, on
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Choral Music, Commissions, Conductors, Contemporary Classical, Grammy, San Francisco, Women composers
A year ago at this time, Susan McMane, Artistic Director of the San Francisco Girls Chorus, had no idea what a hot-button issue immigration would be in June 2010. For her, the works of immigrant composers formed a compelling programmatic mix for her five-time Grammy-winning ensemble’s concert series, which she’d entitled A New Land, A New Song. Now, in the midst of nonstop political debate and a deployment of additional National Guard troops to the border, SFGC will celebrate the contributions of immigrant composers to the choral music oeuvre. Composers come literally from all over the map, from Russia with
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