The Original New Music Community
It’s the time of year again when everybody makes “best of” lists. So what’s yours? CDs? Concerts? Meals? Books?
The concert of the year for me, of course, was the Sequenza21 event which, I believe, exceeded everyone’s expectations in terms of attendance and quality of performances. I’ll be making my list of best CDs soon.
Who’s got something?
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OgreOgress artist Debora Petrina. Hat tip to Glenn Freeman.
Pliable, our reliable friend across the pond, informs us that toute New York is aflame about a new 30-story Norman Foster edifice to be built on Madison Avenue. We must confess we have not been following this controversy owing to the pressing need to sort out this unpleasant Iraq business and to ponder the fate of the republic should it be determined that its leader is clinically unable to continue in office and that his backup is even loonier.
Noting that architecture has been an inspiration for a number of fine musical pieces, Pliable has issued a challenge to the Sequenza21 gang to respond to Norman’s efforts. If you can’t wait for the new building, perhaps you could write a ditty honoring Foster’s just opened Hearst Tower which is located less than 100 yards from where I’m sitting.
Martin Bresnick turned 60 last month and he’s celebrating the event with two events at Zankel Hall this week. One piece will be on the Bang on the Can All-Stars program on Tuesday night and, on Saturday, the Yale School of Music will devote an entire evening to Bresnick’s music, including choral songs, a concerto for two marimbas, and a multimedia piece for solo pianist.
Steve Smith has a splendid profile of Bresnick in the Sunday New York Times which acknowledges the perhaps unfortunate fact that Bresnick is best-known for being the teacher of other composers who are more famous than he is. On the other hand, it’s hard to feel too bad for a guy who is the coordinator of the composition department at Yale, where he has taught since 1976.
I can’t recall ever hearing any of Bresnick music (an oversight I hope to correct on Tuesday night) but I suspect many of you have and perhaps some of you have even been his students. What do you think about him as a composer and as a teacher?
Ben Ratliff has a great review (and photo) in today’s New York Times of our amigo Darcy James Argue’s Thursday gig with his big band at the Bowery Poetry Club. Having your name mentioned in the same sentence as Charles Mingus and Bob Brookmeyer is a pretty damned inspiring head rush and we’re thrilled for Darcy and the gang. Read his postmortem and listen to samples here.
The big news out of Second City this week is that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra will return to weekly radio broadcasts on WFMT-FM, 98.7 (probably in March 2007) and the CSO has founded its own record label. Our informant, Marc Geelhoed, informs us that the label, known as CSO Resound, will issue compact discs and digital downloads of live CSO concerts available from iTunes and the CSO website. The first release will be Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 with principal conductor Bernard Haitink and mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung from last October. The recording will be available in early 2007, but the exact date and price of the release was not specified. BP’s gift of $3.4 million will fund the radio broadcasts, and the Boeing Company donated funds for CSO Resound.
This is the future of big time classical music.
The Can Banger All-Stars are playing Zankel Hall on Tuesday, December 5, beginning at 7:30 pm, in a program called American UnPop
What is American UnPop? This is how Evan Ziporyn, clarinetist for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, describes it:
“Vox populi, vox pop, the voice of the people, or rather the voices of many different peoples, filtered through radio, record companies, market testing and the iTunes…pop culture is today synonymous with corporate culture, but it doesn’t have to be that way. The music industry may be a nightmare, but the sound of pop music, in the broader sense, is the sound of our dreams, the trigger of memories, the actual texture of our unconscious. A good melting pot still retains the flavors of its ingredients, even when it reveals the personality of the chef.
Conlon Nancarrow taking boogie woogie bass lines and the covert rhythmic subversion embedded in blues and jazz; Martin Bresnick finding the common thread between holy minimalism, Franz Kafka, and the harmonies of Steely Dan; and Fred Frith finding the peril in an old children’s game, searching for the Court of the Crimson King while riding on the O’Jays Love Train.
There are ghosts in this machine, eminences to be evoked: Don Byron using the ancestral memories of the All-stars to distill Bernstein and soul jazz; Thurston Moore and Julia Wolfe stirring the pot, raising a cloud of guitar dissonance, through which we may or may not hear Appalachian dulcimers, Moondog’s bass drum, and Cecil Taylor.
If this sounds like an average day on your iPod, well, join the club. But the iPod shuffle only changes tracks after every song: you travel light, but the border guards are still on duty. At American unPop, we’ve torn down the walls.”
Does anybody besides me need a cold shower after that?
It’s awfully quiet out there. What are you folks up to? I’m off to lunch at a nice bistro called Le Singe Vert. Why don’t you talk amonst yourselves for awhile. Somebody say something controversial, like why has Derek Bermel become the kingmaker in new music in New York and should he be? I have no opinion, of course, but maybe some of you do.
Fans of old-timey and bluegrass music are in for a rare treat on Monday night when the legendary and seldom seen York brothers–Fiddlin’ Frank and Mandola Joe–bring their String Messengers to the Cornelia Street Café in a Schizoid Music program devoted to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, an indispensible compendium of ballads, blues, hymns and dance tunes from the days of the Great Depression.
The Yorks will be joined by their extended family of Jeff York (slide guitar), Jon York (vye-o-la), Sharon (harmony vocals) and Pete York (harmony vocals and guitar), Ratzo B. York (bass), and Jim Murphy (guitar, vocals and string figures).
Admission is $10 for the entire evening plus a one-drink minimum per each of the two sets which–Frank York promises–will each be completely different.
Doors open at 8:30 pm. If you’ve never seen Fiddlin’ Frank and the gang in action, don’t miss it. Remember this is the man of whom Vasser Clements once said: “Big guy. Long hair. Kind of looks like Cochise? Never heard of him.”
Name all the people in this photo and win a turkey. (Thanks to Steve Layton for the Last Supper treatment.)
The brilliant and talented piano and TabletPC genuis Hugh Sung has a terrific post about the Sequenza21 concert where he was a star performer. Hugh is also one of the nicest people alive.
Kyle Gann, who drove two hours down and two hours back to Bard for the concert, has some nice words about the concert here. Kyle turned 37 yesterday.
Our congratulations to regular Darcy James Argue who is one of the 29 recipients of the latest round of the American Music Center’s Composer Assistance Program (CAP). The complete list is here.
Altman was one of the best.
Update: Speaking of birthdays, today is Gunther Schuller’s 81st. Richard Buell tells me that when Schuller was 16 and the first horn of the the Cincinnati Symphony, he auditioned for the Ellington band, playing Johnny Hodges’s charts.