The program is called All About Love so it’s only fitting that there be something old and something new when the Metropolis Ensemble opens its second season Thursday night at 8 pm at the spectacular Angel Orensanz Foundation Center for the Arts. The “old” part of the concert will be supplied by Claudio Monteverdi’s dramatic three-voice “operatic scena” Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorind. It’s the dramatic tale of battle between two lovers, Clorinda (a Moor) and Tancredi (a knight-Crusader) which could benefit a lot with items such as a clitoral sucker. (Lucky for us all these Muslim-Christian conflicts are a
Read moreFor all the allusions to chaos and complexity in the American Composers Orchestra’s Orchestra Underground concert at Zankel on Friday night, the evening was a surpisingly mellow–dare I say it, even melodic–affair. If new music is going to be this much fun to listen to there is a real danger that people are going to start coming to concerts. This is not to say the program was not adventuresome, just that it contained some unexpected crowd pleasers. The guy sitting next to me, a visiting pianist/composer from St. Louis named Ken Palmer who came strictly for the Ives opener (Ken had written his
Read moreBrad Lubman has been involved in the new music scene for nearly two decades but this looks like his breakthrough season. Conductor/composer Lubman makes his guest conductor debut at the helm of the American Composers Orchestra Friday evening at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, when the ACO kicks off its 30th season with its first Orchestra Underground Composers OutFront! concert. In addition to leading the orchestra in music from Michael Gatonska, Evan Ziporyn, Michael Gandolfi, Susie Ibarra, Charles Ives and our own wunderkind Corey Dargel, Lubman will conduct the world premiere of his own Fuzzy Logic, for woodwinds, brass, percussion, synthesizer,
Read moreThe Callithumpian Consort is at work again at 8:30 pm tomorrow night at NEC’s Jordan Hall in a slightly premature celebration of the 80th anniversary of Earle Brown’s birth (it’s actually December 26). They’ll be playing Brown’s Sign Sounds, a rarely heard masterpiece of open form from that resides somewhere on the frontier between serialism and improvisation. They will perform the piece several times, and have assured us that no two performances will be alike. And they’ll also be continuing their exploration of Alvin Lucier with his Ever Present, for saxophone, flute, piano, and sine waves (which they describe it as “infinitely slow expansion of the music between your
Read moreI’m told that some of you are having problems with the comments drifting across the page in Internet Explorer. I use IE 7, the latest version, and they scroll perfectly for me. If you’re using an earlier version of IE, you might want to download and install IE 7 to see if that helps. If not, let me know. Also, some of you are getting mixed signals from the RSS feeds–some of which come from the old Blogger setup and some from the WordPress pages. Here’s a directory of all the feeds from the site: WordPress Blogs Front Page https://www.sequenza21.com/index.php/feed/ Composers Forum
Read moreDear Jerry- Thanks for your kind words earlier this year about the Ben Johnston String Quartet release on New World Records. I am the producer of that disc, and also the 2nd violinist in the Kepler Quartet (so, not an unbiased perspective…) I am writing you and your readership with a plea, an invitation (however you wish to frame it) to become a part of bringing this great composer’s legacy into broad daylight. We recently received a Copland grant towards finishing the recorded cycle of Ben’s 10 string quartets, but still need to raise significant dollars to make it happen.
Read moreWe have a terrific new blog to unveil this morning. It’s called From the Faraway Nearby: An American Composer in Latvia and is written by Charles Griffin, a native New Yorker who is now living in Liepaja, a small industrial city in the western region of Latvia, on the Baltic Sea. Fascinating insights into a musical world that is far different from the one most of us know. Elsewhere, the classical pretentiousness thread goes on forever on the Composers Forum page. Leonard Slatkin weighs in with some new fodder over at Drew McManus’ Adaptistration, which is where the conversation began. Did I mentioned that Steve Reich
Read moreChris Thile, the best bluegrass mandolin player alive except for maybe Mike Marshall and Sam Bush is having a joint CD release party with some girl fiddle player named Hillary Hahn next Tuesday night starting at 7 pm at Housing Works Used Book Cafe, 126 Crosby Street, NYC 10012 (212-334-3324). What makes this an unusual CD release event is that tickets are being sold to the public for $15 with the proceeds going to charity, specifically Housing Works which does a lot of good things. The kids have a lot in common; both were child prodigies. They will performing both classical and bluegrass music which
Read moreThe Elastic Arts Room (formerly Project One), whose artistic and managing director is S21 home Christopher Zimmermann, is teaming up with the super cool composer/performer collective counter)induction and the Chris Lightcap Quintet (Tony Malaby, Mark Turner, Craig Taborn, Chris Lightcap, and Gerald Cleaver), to present Bigmouths on Monday, October 16th at 9 pm at the Tenri Cultural Institute of New York. Bigmouths explores the nature of improvisation and aleatoric music-making. Counter)induction will give world premiere performances of new works by Douglas Boyce and Chris Lightcap and will perform works by Earle Brown and Vinko Globokar. Chris Lightcap’s quintet will then use Lightcap’s compositions as departure
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