The Original New Music Community
If you know this gentleman or his work and have some original thoughts about same,
and you want to write (for real, now) a decent sized post about said mystery person and work,
and you are not Frank J. Oteri or Samuel Vriezen,
leave your reasons for wanting to write said post below with your mailing address (or if you’re squemish about the internets, send me an e-mail.
Winner will get in the mail about three pounds of CDs of said person’s work.
Next to the Mountaineers winning the NIT (okay, so it’s the tournament of losers…we won), the most exciting news in the world today is that our lil’ buddy Ian Moss is having his second annual Capital M world premiere extravaganza at Tonic next Wednesday. The concert will feature new works by Ian Dicke, Mike Gamble, Caroline Mallonée, Ian Moss, Edward RosenBerg III, Jonathan Russell, and Kyle Sanna. Noted provocateurs and ne’er-do-wells Anti-Social Music will follow with their particular brand of “punk classical” madness.
The nice folks at the American Music Center had a launch party for their latest cool initiative–Counterstream Radio–last night. If you haven’t checked it out yet, click on the toilet seat icon in the right column and some incredibly fine and varied music will follow you around the internets all day. Some members of the Counterstream team above, foreground: AMC president Joanne Hubbard Cossa, with Trevor Hunter, Lyn Liston, Lisa Taliano and Molly Sheridan. Sorry for the crummy picture, guys, and apologies to Frank J. Oteri and Randy Norchow whose picture didn’t work out at all.
On the Verge
Chamber Music by Sebastian Currier
Music From Copland House
Koch International
With last year’s magnificent New World release Quartetset and this equally outstanding recording of four fairly recent chamber pieces (including the Grawemeyer-awarding winning Static), Sebastian Currier has elbowed himself into the honorary “little music” seat at the big table where the Glasses, Adamses, and Reichs go to chew the fat. So he’s a minaturist, but would Vermeer have been Vermeer on a Frank Stella-sized canvas?
Currier is something of a music jokester, with performance directions like “almost too fast,” “almost too much,” “almost too little” and “bipolar” but it is his uncanny ability to re-imagine music you think you’ve heard before that most frequently draws a smile and a sense of good companionship. Nobody since Stravinsky has done it better.
Debut
Lowell Libermann
Trio Fedele
Artek
There is more than hint of powered wigs and petticoats in Lowell Libermann’s gracious, stately chamber music for ladies and gentlemen of quality. No 20th century angst here. Dvořák sounds like a wild man by comparison. The flute, cello and piano pieces are pleasant enough and expertly played by the Trio Fedele but I couldn’t help imagining a live performance where Borat would wander in with a plastic bag filled with poop and ask the cello player what to do with it.
Chamber Musics III, IV, V
Aulis Sallinen
Virtuosi de Khlmo
CPO
Another music jokester but more in the William Bolcom tradition, relentlessly tonal and melodic, drawing mirth and drama out of genre references to tango and jazz. Easy listening? Sure. Nobody writing “classical” music today writes better hooks. That’s not necessarily a criticism in my book.
Okay, I started making a list for friends called 13 great movies that you probably never heard of. Here’s what I’ve got so far:
1. Leolo (Canadian) Young French-Canadian kid named Leo believes his mother was impregnated by a Scilian tomato which is why he only answers to Leolo. And he’s the sanest member of his family. The filmmaker Jean-Claude Luzon died at 43 with his girlfriend when the Cessna he was piloting crashed but he lived long enough to tell Norman Jewison to go fuck himself when offered the chance to direct a Gene Hackman thriller and to tell Jamie Lee Curtis, a judge at Cannes, that he wanted to chew her up like a piece of liver.
2. Lovers of the Arctic Circle (Spanish) Directed by Julio Medem. Otto and Ana fall in love as children, become accidential brother and sister, become lovers, fall apart, and never quite find each other again, despite heroic efforts to that end. I’ve watched it six times and it breaks my heart every time.
3. Off the Map (American) Inept IRS man tracks down deliquent family in desert, falls in love with wife (who is standing naked in the garden) at first site, comes down with a fever, bonds with depressed husband, takes up painting and becomes famous at it although he doesn’t really care. Told from the perspective of the young daughter of the family.
4. Last Life in the Universe (Thai) Directed by Pen-Ek Ratanaruang. Suicidal Japanese librarian on the run from Yakuza moves in with Thai prostitute because there are two dead guys in his apartment.
5. Morvern Caller (Scottish) Lynne Ramsey’s second film (the first was the equally extraordinary Ratcatcher) stars the incredible Samantha Morton as a grocery store clerk who wakes up on Christmas morning to find that her boyfriend has killed himself in the kitchen, leaving behind the manuscript of a novel and the addresses of some publishers. She changes his name to hers and sends it in and then heads off to Spain with her girlfriend for a holiday.
6. Barbarian Invasions (Canadian) Directed by Denys Arcand. A fairy tale about dying not simply with diginity but with joie de vive.
Who has something to add to the list?
Well, okay, so it’s recorded but we now have in-house music for your dining, dancing and surfing pleasure thanks to our friends at the American Music Center and their new Counterstream Radio. Click on the blue thing with the white toilet seat in the right column and up will pop a dandy little player that delivers an amazing variety of “new” music–in the broadest possible sense. If your tastes run from Judith Lang Zaimont to Cecil Taylor to Miguel Frasconi, you’ve come to the right place. Nice going Frank, Molly, Ian and gang.
Lots of neat things happening involving some of our favorite people this week at the MATA Young Composers – Now festival in Brooklyn. Brian Sacawa and Jenny Lin are playing in tonight’s performance. Alex Ross will lead a panel discussion before Saturday night’s concert.
Grant Gershon’s L.A. Master Chorale is premiering an extremely ambitious work by Christopher Rouse at Disney Hall on March 25th– a 90 minute Requiem for double chorus, children’s chorus, baritone soloist (Sanford Sylvan) and large orchestra. A couple of weeks ago Grant gave an informal talk on the piece at the piano for the chorale’s board of directors. An enterprising staff member videotaped it, edited it and posted it on Youtube. Good stuff. Have a look and listen.
[youtube]1SDSBrGsw8Y[/youtube]
I have the following CDs available for review:
Philip Corner – Extreme Positions – The Barton Workshop
Stirling Newberry – Xaos and Capricorn -Two string quartets on each. (Steve Hicken not eligible since he wrote the intro)
Terry Riley – In C – Ars Nova – First version with voices
Da Capo package (3 CDs) – Langgard, Pettersson, Romantic Trombone Concertos
Huang Ruo – Chamber Concerto Cyle – ICE
John Adams – Complete Piano Music
Recipients must accept (and review) a second CD of my choosing.
Serious inquiries only.
Tired of playing with yourself? Well, you don’t have to anymore. Take a look at e-jamming, a web site that lets you hook up with other musicians online to write, rehearse, record and play together in real-time.
Who is Nico Mulhy and should I care?
Sebastian Currier has won the 2007 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for “Static,” a six-movement piece for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano.
Currier, who teaches at Columbia University, studied at the Manhattan and Julliard schools of music. His winning work was commissioned by Copland House of Cortlandt Manor, N.Y., for its resident ensemble, Music from Copland House, with funds from Meet the Composer, a national organization supporting new works by composers.
The ensemble premiered the piece at Columbia’s Miller Theatre in February 2005 and recorded it for Koch International Classics. Frank has details over at NewMusicBox.
And speaking of Mr. Oteri, he’s mad as hell about the second-class citizenship of post-classical composers and he’s not going to take it anymore…in the Composers Forum.
Let’s go to the old mailbag and see what’s happening in the exciting world of new music. Ah, here’s something. Our friends at the American Music Center are launching Counterstream Radio, a showcase for new music by U.S. composers, on March 16 at 3 p.m. EST. To mark the official station launch, Counterstream Radio will broadcast an exclusive conversation between Meredith Monk and Björk. No word on who gets to wear the chicken suit.
Actually, the station is streaming right now so you don’t have to wait until the 16th to try it out. Any chance of getting a popup player over here so people can listen while they’re reading S21? Tech people?
Oh, wow. On Bach’s 322nd birthday, March 21, 2007, C.F. Peters is celebrating the publication of a new set of variations, 13 Ways of Looking at the Goldberg, based on the Goldberg Variations theme, with a mini-concert and reception at Steinway Hall. Blair McMillan will perform six of the twelve variations. The composers are C. Curtis-Smith, Jennifer Higdon, Mischa Sarche Zupko, Stanley Walden, Bright Sheng, Derek Bermel, David Del Tredici, Fred Lerdahl, William Bolcom, Lukas Foss, Ralf Gothoni, and Fred Hersch.
And then there’s this. The NY Times web site is running a group blog in March called “The Score” that will include writings by Glenn Branca, Alvin Curran, Michael Gordon and Annie Gosfield. They will also run audio excerpts from an exclusive interview with Steve Reich conducted in February.
In a March 5 piece, Michael Gordon attempts to answer the eternal question faced by all contemporary composers: What Kind of Music is That Anyway? (My favorite answer–“Post-Ugly”–is attributed to his co-conspirator David Lang.)
Alas, the feature is on TimesSelect, which is a pay service that costs about $8 a month but they have a free two-week trial offer if you want to check it out. Or, Michael sent me an e-mail copy…nudge, nudge, wink, wink.