On Friday, January 22, 2016 the wulf in downtown Los Angeles presented a diverse concert of electronic music by four groups of artists. A standing-room only crowd turned out for an evening of intense sounds created by computer algorithm, spectral analysis and traditional percussion. The room was filled with all kinds of amplifiers, speakers, mixers, patch panels and miles of cable. The four sets made for a varied program that challenged both the mind and the ear. First up was PDRM, by John Krausbauer and David Kendall. According to the program notes this piece is “…constructed from a ‘just’ tuned, three-string
Read morePOSTPONED DUE TO WEATHER! Thanks to Joshua Banks Mailman for this post about Augustus Arnone’s Babbitt recitals. Augustus Arnone performs Milton Babbitt’s Time Series and other solo piano works at Spectrum, Sunday January 24, at 2pm This year marks the centenary of the legendary composer Milton Babbitt (1916-2011). To my ears, his extensive body of piano works especially channels his singular charm as a raconteur. Over the decades a number of pianists have championed some of Babbitt’s major piano works, for instance Robert Helps and Robert Miller performing and recording his Partitions (1957) and Post-Partitions (1966) in early days and much more recently
Read morePierre Boulez, one of the great composers and conductors of our time, has passed away.
Read moreThe extraordinary pianist and composer Paul Bley, has passed away.
Read morePianist Jenny Q. Chai is a versatile artist. Her repertoire includes works by contemporary Europeans such as Phillipe Manoury and Marco Stroppa (her dissertation topic), and she recently recorded an excellent portrait CD on Naxos of music by Nils Vigeland. She also performs standard repertoire, such as Robert Schumann and Claude Debussy. On January 10, in a program entitled Where is Chopin? (subtitled “Steampunk Piano 2”), Chai creates a juxtaposition of Carnaval by Schumann with brand new pieces that feature artificial intelligence, performing the music of Jaroslaw Kapuscinski, a Stanford University-based composer who uses the AI program Antescofo. It supplies
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