Laurie San Martin teaches at UC Davis. She’s one of our featured composers on the fast approaching Sequenza 21/MNMP Concert (October 25 at Joe’s Pub). In the guest post below, she talks about her work Linea Negra, which will be performed on the program. Linea Negra The faint, dark, vertical line that appears on a very pregnant woman’s belly in the weeks before she bursts is called the linea negra. So it seemed like a fitting title for the solo marimba piece that I was writing during the final weeks of my first pregnancy in the summer of 2004. Real-life deadlines work
Read more[Ed. note: Please welcome one of our newest S21 shipmates, violinist/ composer Cornelius Dufallo. The New York Times‘ Steve Smith writes “As a violinist and a composer in the string quartet Ethel and the collective ensemble Ne(x)tworks, Cornelius Dufallo has made substantial contributions to New York’s burgeoning new-music scene.” I couldn’t agree more, and look forward to his contributions to come. So take it away, Neil!] Life in ETHEL is frantic these days. In the midst of meetings, emails, conference calls, and intense rehearsals, I sometimes (sadly) lose touch with the sense of wonder that originally drew me to a
Read moreThe newly revived Roulette (on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn) is the site for a premiere this coming Friday (details here). Guitarist-composer Joel Harrison’s Still Point – Turning World (a veiled reference to a line in “Burnt Norton,” one T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets) is a polyglot work for diverse forces. In addition to Harrison’s jazz quartet, it also features the Talujon Percussion Quartet, and Anupam Shobhakar, who plays the sarode, an Indian stringed instrument. Still Point… requires its performers to be in a flexible collaboration, reveling in polystylism. “Crossover” is a term that’s overused and sometimes misused these days. All too often the results
Read moreFOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Press contact: Christina Jensen PR 646.536.7864 | christina@christinajensenpr.com ACME: American Contemporary Music Ensemble The Sequenza21 Concert presented by S21 & Manhattan New Music Project Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 7pm Joe’s Pub | 425 Lafayette Street | NYC Tickets: FREE. Reserve tickets & tables at 212.539.8778 or www.joespub.com. ACME: www.acmemusic.org Sequenza21: www.Sequenza21.com MNMP: www.mnmp.org New York, NY – ACME (American Contemporary Music Ensemble) will perform a free concert at Joe’s Pub (425 Lafayette St., NYC) on Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 7pm presented by online contemporary classical community Sequenza21.com and theManhattan New Music Project. The works to be performed were selected through an open call for
Read moreAmong the many interesting composers, groups and musicians who “syndicate” (a fancy way of saying “republish”) their blogs through Chamber Musician Today is the estimable eighth blackbird who are currently on tour in Australia. Through the miracle of RSS, their latest post poured in earlier this evening and it contained some thoughts that seemed worth sharing with the keen minds who frequent this URL. Written by cellist Nicholas Photinos, the post is titled Should Hard Music Sound Hard? It was occasioned by Nicholas on a night off having heard Alban Gerhardt playing the tricky Shostakovich first cello concerto with the
Read moreSpeaking of the very busy, very approachable John Corigliano, Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic are finishing up a month of 9/11 tributes and memorials on September 30 with a performance of John Corigliano’s One Sweet Morning, a four movement song cycle each set to a poem from a different age and country, sung by mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe. The first is Czeslaw Milosz’s “A Song on the End of the World,” written in Warsaw in 1944; though tranquil in feel, there is a hint of “chaos to come,” says the composer. A section of Homer’s Iliad provides the words for the
Read moreI’m excited to share a piece of music that is very close to my heart: Marc Chan’s My Wounded Head cycle, the third installment of which will be performed this Sunday at The Stone. The title comes from a set of five chorales from Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion, “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” (“O Sacred Head Now Wounded”). These chorales have become an obsession for Marc, and each station of his cycle forges a new “road trip” through the notes, patiently spinning them out into strange and beautiful patterns. Number 3, for solo piano, pushes this patience into sublime
Read moreAfter a long summer, students have returned to the University of Michigan. With all the excitement surrounding a new year of school, I found myself most eager to resume my role as an audience member at the School of Music, Theater and Dance’s perennially fantastic concert and recital offerings. The season opened up in a big way last Friday evening when Joseph Gramley – Michigan’s beloved, charismatic and preeminent Professor and Coordinator of Percussion – graced the stage of the Moore Building’s McIntosh Theater with a program this concertgoer is not soon to forget. The evening’s theme, “Made in America”,
Read more[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/29161015[/vimeo] About to turn the ripe old age of 8, Matt McBane‘s crazy idea of a 20-something composer/performer creating an annual new-music festival in a bump in the road north of San Diego has not only survived but thrived. Something about a last late-summer outing, to an idyllic village parked right at a Pacific beach, seems to consistently draw a crowd from both Los Angeles to the north and San Diego to the south for this three-day affair. And, well, maybe it’s just a little about the music, too… Excellent string quartets, pianists and ensembles mix it up with rock
Read moreHouston’s Musiqa opens its season with the Houston premiere of composer John Corigliano’s Mr. Tambourine Man for amplified soprano and chamber ensemble and texts by one of the most influential lyricists of all time, Bob Dylan. Karol Bennett is the soprano, and Robert Franz conducts. The concert also includes a performance of John Harbison’s Songs America Loves To Sing and a reading by Justin Cronin, the award-winning author of The Passage. Musiqa’s five member Artistic Board will also premiere a series of Musiqa Minatures in celebration of its 10th anniversary season. The lyrics Corigliano chose for this song cycle, including
Read more