On Thursday, I’m giving a talk about Milton Babbitt’s life and work to high school composers at Westminster Choir College’s Composition Camp. It seems only fitting to introduce them to Babbitt as part of the week’s activities. He lived near WCC’s campus, attended a number of events at the college, and until it closed some years back, could often be found at the Annex at lunchtime. Many of our students knew Milton best because they’d waited on him there! Another reason that I want to share my interest in Milton’s music with them: he was the first composer that I
Read moreUpdate (July 5, 2011): The Villiers Quartet has revised its guidelines for its new music competition. The most notable change is the age restriction, which has been raised to 35. Good luck! London’s Villiers Quartet is seeking new works by composers under 35. If you’re an emerging composer looking for an international performance opportunity, check out the guidelines to have your work premiered next season by this exciting, young ensemble. I’ll let the ensemble’s first violinist, James Dickenson, explain: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ9bzsWGJEQ[/youtube] And here are their guidelines, which can also be found at the Villiers Quartet’s web site. The 2012 Villiers Quartet
Read moreIf you’re in the LA area this Sunday, and can spare 4 hours and then some (4 hours for the concert, then some for the commute and parking), 3 young musicians attending the Music Department at University of California, San Diego will perform Morton Feldman’s For Philip Guston. While Feldman performances at UCSD are common enough, the sheer scale of For Philip Guston makes any production a rare event: 4 hours of late Feldman. Rachel Beetz will play flute (can you imagine playing a wind instrument for 4 hours with no breaks outside of the rests the composer gave you?),
Read moreBarriers between various musical genres continue to be gleefully destroyed by insightful musicians and collectives. One such divide that has been crumbling over the last few years has been any distinction between “bands” and “chamber groups.” Beyond the ensembles made up of visually traditional combinations (“string quartets” such as Kronos and Ethel) are more unusual outfits like Clogs, a bassoon-viola-guitar-percussion quartet. The final, June 10th concert of the 2011 Tribeca New Music Festival featured SWARMIUS, a band from San Diego with an intriguing quartet configuration of violin, saxophone, percussion and laptop/electronics. Led by composer Joseph Waters (whose nom de band
Read moreSo I happened to be in the city over the weekend and didn’t have any interviews or other meetings today, so I figured “Hey, I’ve got a laptop…why not liveblog the Bang on a Can Marathon over at the World Financial Center? One press pass and sweet front row seat later, and here I am. I’m not sure if I’l be insane enough to make it to midnight, but I’ll try to give y’all a sense of as much of the festivities as I can. Started in 1987 by David Lang, Julia Wolfe, and Michael Gordon, the Marathon has turned
Read moreLeague of Composers/ISCM has their season finale tonight at Miller Theatre. Louis Karchin conducts a program of five recently composed works. True to form, the evening is chock-full of premieres, including the US debut of Elliott Carter’s Concertino for Bass Clarinet. How many concerts can boast a new orchestra piece written by a centenarian? The concertino features longtime Carter associate Virgil Blackwell as soloist. David Rakowski is also represented by a new concerto. His Talking Points, written at the behest of the League of Composers, features the estimable soloist Fred Sherry as its protagonist. Shulamit Ran’s Silent Voices, written for
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Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Festivals, Performers, Premieres
Full disclosure: I co-founded San Diego New Music in 1994, served as its first Executive Director, and have been a board member since 2000. This isn’t a review or a comprehensive report so much as some of my impressions and observations about what’s going on at The Athenaeum in La Jolla, California, this weekend. If you think I overlooked anything, please feel free to contribute more in the comments section below. After core members of NOISE, the resident ensemble of San Diego New Music, dispersed across the continent (flutist/director Lisa Cella to Baltimore; percussionist Morris Palter to Fairbanks), it became
Read moreIf you read S21 regularly (and why wouldn’t you) you probably know that my all-time favorite composer Leoš Janáček had one of the greatest third acts in the history of musical composition. Most of his extraordinary late-life production was inspired by a certain sly and aloof–but nonetheless foxy–married lady half his age named Kamila Stösslová. One of the works that she inspired is the opera The Cunning Little Vixen which, as fate would have it, the New York Philharmonic is doing a fully-staged production of on June 22-25. The Vixen is being sung by the stunning and incredibly talented Isabel
Read moreThis Spring, Baltimore-based composer David Smooke composed Criminal Element, a “nonopera” in a fabricated language, for Rhymes with Opera, a company devoted to presenting opera in nontraditional spaces. Alongside works by Martin Zimmerman, Ryan Jesperson, and George Lam, it premieres Friday, June 17th in Brooklyn at Cafe Orwell. The program, titled Criminal Intent (hopefully Dick Wolf won’t sue), will be repeated in Baltimore, Hartford, and Boston. As if it weren’t hard enough to compose an opera, non or otherwise, in the midst of a busy semester teaching at the Peabody Institute, where Smooke is a faculty member, the composer decided to
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