At 66, baritone Thomas Buckner says he’s busier now than he was when in his forties. Last month, when we sat down to chat, he had just come back from a week of master classes and music making at Mills College. Next week, he has a terrific-sounding concert at Greenwich House, and, in June, he’ll play a leading role in a festival featuring Robert Ashley’s operas in Ferrara, Italy. This is all in addition to the Interpretations concert series, which he curates, and running his record label, Mutable Music.

Though growing up he was an enthusiastic participant in family holiday sing-alongs, when he went off to Yale, it was expected he would go into business like the rest of his family. But in his Sophomore year he dropped out and went west. After working in a factory for a year, he re-enrolled in college at UC Santa Clara, majoring in English. While at Santa Clara, Buckner began to exercise his composition chops by writing incidental music for drama club productions. Soon the town came to host a summer Shakespeare festival; he scored their shows, and, gradually–propelled in part by a performance of Webern’s five pieces for string quartet–he found himself gravitating to the experimental music scene.

During the late 60s and into the 70s, Buckner was busy as a composer, singer, and impresario. His music company, 1750 Arch Records (named after its address in Berkeley), produced hundreds of concerts of avant-garde and experimental music, and, soon, LPs as well. But a trip back to New York in 1979 planted in him the idea to join the vibrant scene back east as a singer, a role which, he felt, ultimately suited him better than composition. Though he considered moving to France because of some satisfying work he had done there, Buckner decided to stay in the States and be a part of his native musical culture.

Soon after he moved back East, the recording market began to turn towards CDs, and, instead of trying to transfer 1750’s catalogue to the newer medium, he reformed the label as Mutable Music and began producing CDs featuring the music of composers and performers who, like Webern years before, showed him new things music could do. Buckner enjoys the freedom and collaborative nature of experimental music and is a frequent performer (and teacher) of vocal and group improvisation. His concert at Greenwich House, however, will be more straightforward that his usual projects. He wanted to present an evening of song. On the program are songs about love and songs that tell stories. Texts come from such stand-bys as Percy Shelley, e.e. cummings, and Walt Whitman. The composers, however, are among Buckner’s fresh-voiced comrades: Noah Creshevsky, Roscoe Mitchell, W.A. Mathieu, and others share the spotlight. Attendance is urged.

Elizabeth Brown and other cutting-edge stuff coming up at the Issue Project Room… All kinds of funny business going on at the Brooklyn Philharmonic, world premiere by Susan Oetgen coming up there… Philadelphia Biblical University pays tribute (5 April) to the late composer Harry Hewitt (no better link, I’m afraid)… 13 April–tribute to women composers from Musique a la Mode – some GREAT performers on this one… Alarm Will Sound has a call for scores for NYC-area composers. Huzzah! Deadline: 1 April, y’all… Okay, my conscience (and inbox) is clear.

The Columbus Symphony Orchestra (OH) is in dire straits. It is possible the orchestra could fold in the very near future. The problems are financial and organizational, and management and labor are not seeing eye-to-eye at all. According to principal clarinetist, and Sequenza21 friend, David Thomas, the press coverage has been terribly one-sided, and the musicians’ point of view is not getting out. Here’s a website where you can show your support, and here’s another where news is always coming in. David has kindly forwarded me his version of events, and I am posting it in the comments section.

Growing up in central Ohio, I have some important musical memories because of the CSO: hearing Respighi for the first time, taking lessons from their second-chair clarinetist, and, more recently, having had a terrific performance led by Peter Stafford Wilson, their assistant conductor. Central Ohio without the CSO is hard for me to imagine, but all too easy, one supposes, for most people who live there.

This Saturday night at Greenwich House, composer Ted Hearne pays loving tribute to the glorious achievements of state and federal officials in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. An hour long song cycle, Katrina Ballads enshrines the immortal words of Barbara Bush, Dennis Hastert, Anderson Cooper and others in all the dignity they deserve.

Or (ahem) roasts the above named folks to a crisp.

Either way, tickets are $15 and $8 depending on your social status – so it’s cheap. Workers around the world unite.

I.

Early in our conversation yesterday, Hilary Hahn, loquacious and genial throughout, was chatting openly about music and athleticism; about how half her practice time was geared towards staying in shape; how solo recitals were more physically draining than chamber and concerto performances; how different halls, players, even A’s demanded great flexibility; and how flexibility and one’s ear were integral to the athleticism she strove to maintain. I commented on how some pieces were meant just to be big flashy fluffs, and that this was fine; have fun, play fast, show ’em you can hit those notes – not everything’s supposed to be late Brahms. But this, she replied, was not how she saw things. All the music she plays, she believes in entirely; were she to suspect a piece of superficiality, she would not play it; practice time is precious and is for profound music alone.

II.

This April, Hilary Hahn (via Deutsche Grammophon) brings us that feste Burg of twelve-tone serialism, the Schoenberg violin concerto. Hahn’s been wanting to record the piece for years. First she needed to book some performances to force herself to learn the (very difficult) piece. Though no orchestras she contacted had actually played it, she was able to muscle enough of them into agreeing to the project that she could let her interpretation grow on the concert stage for a few years before entering the recording studio. She decided to pair the Schoenberg with the Sibelius violin concerto, and Esa-Pekka Salonen (naturally) conducts. The two concertos show off one another very, very well. The Schoenberg’s tense chromatic saturation finds release in the expansive diatonic washes of the Sibelius. Hahn sees the project as an attempt to release each concerto from narrow pre-conceptions: the Schoenberg is really more Romantic than academic, and the Sibelius is more international than Finnish.

III.

Hahn was born in Virginia, but home, as one suspects and as she frankly admits, is on the road. She enjoys the non-stop traveling and hotel stays. Her life, she claims, is simpler when touring than when staying put. While on tour, she keeps an online journal, in which recently she’s been pretty active. (She once considered doing a creative writing MFA.) Her journal is intended for anyone who might come across it, she says, but young people considering a musical career are her primary audience. Having been blessed with good connections in the local music community as a kid, she wants those who aren’t so lucky to feel connected to what actually happens when concerts are made. She wants kids to realize international music stars go through many of the same aches and pains as everyone else. Currently concertizing in Switzerland, before the end of the spring Hahn will be back in the States playing, among other programs, some concerts with Josh Ritter. She is taking the summer off to row.

Quick–whodunnit?

Classical music; in the twentieth century; with the… twelve-tone row?  PhD?  Rock music? New York Phil?

Wrong!!!

(The corpse he’s mistaking for classical music is in fact his idea of what classical music was. I say: Kill it! Kill it! Kill it!)

And go support our pal Jeffrey Phillips tomorrow. His Cadillac Moon Ensemble is making their NYC debut at the Nicholas Roerich Museum. They will be rendering works by Berio, Christian Wolff, and some guy named Jeffrey Phillips. Hmm…

Wordless Music packed The Church of St. Paul the Apostle last night by offering what was a surprisingly snoozy program. The chief somnambulists were Gavin Bryars and John Adams. Bryars’s The Sinking of the Titanic and Adams’s Christian Zeal and Activity both underscore pre-recorded tape tracks with autumnal, string-choir textures. Passive and reflective, both pieces are pretty; but, as sometimes happens when reflecting, the same tracks get tread over and over again, and the process, if drawn out for too long, becomes an essay in narcissism. To that end, Bryars’s Sinking lasts a lip-smacking forty minutes; Adams’s Zeal clocks in at a more sober fifteen. (Bryars’s fans can scream about “conceptual art” in the comments, but I’m not biting.)

Fortunately Jonny Greenwood had some vigor in him. By contrast with the other pieces, his Popcorn Superhet Receiver for string orchestra was a downright wild time filled with contrast and surprise. Just by boiling down a few diatonic washes into unisons, he evidenced the widest tonal pallet on the program. And for around ten minutes, Greenwood sustains a satisfying form. Things go wrong, however, with a poorly integrated up-tempo section which threatens to get incongruously poppy. But this quickly comes to a halt, the beautiful surges that define the earlier music return, and in the end Greenwood proves himself an auspicious new voice on the contemporary classical scene.

Emerging from Elliott Carter’s “What Next?” for me paralleled uncannily the experience of the characters onstage, all of whom have just endured “some kind of accident” whose significance and impact, however powerful, remain baffling. Details from the libretto and the set design suggest a multi-car collision has occured, and, amid the wreckage, the victims intermittently soliloquize about their plight and attempt to comfort each other, though all — physically, at least — are unhurt. But an absurd, profound interpersonal disconnect ultimately predominates, and the opera ends with a pair of oddly fastidious road workers who, after they clear the debris, lead the accident victims to safety.

A post 9/11 work written a few years before the event itself, “What Next?” externalizes the “musical deeds” in Carter’s later music and reveals his emotional landscape to be one founded on catastrophe and alienation. The opera is a comedy, but not the sort that makes you laugh. And nor is the piece something to awaken audiences’ sympathies for the characters: “What Next?” throws all such reactions back onto listeners like light hitting a mirror. My pulse only quickened in the opera’s final measures, when the clamorous opening percussion sounds return (the “accident” sending us off) and a soprano’s lonely high note rises to the rafters. In these moments, the opera at last irretrievably sheds its pretentiousness, and it becomes clear that, while not a cuddly work, “What Next?” is art at its truest and deserves the long life its creator has enjoyed.

“What Next?” has two more performances at the Miller Theater. The libretto is by Paul Griffiths, and the performance and production are first rate.

The versatile performing duo known as “The Kenners” played a terrific concert Saturday night at the Tenri Cultural Institute. The program featured works by Charles Wuorinen, Toru Takemitsu, and Jason Eckhardt, and premieres of one form or another by Kate Soper, David Brynjar Franzson, and Petr Bakla. The Kenners’ catch is that each musician plays more than one instrument. Saturday’s program required Eliot Gattegno to switch between alto, tenor, and soprano saxophones; Eric Wubbels alternated between piano and accordion. (Sometimes he performs live electronics as well.)

Soper and Franzson provided the world premieres. I liked Soper’s I Had a Slow Thought on a Hard Day for accordion and alto sax. A meditative piece interspersing lyrical gestures with pitch-less pulling and pushing of air through both instruments, the music successfully sustains a slow rate of development and builds elegantly into more continuous passages. Franzson’s aggressive and noisy piece for the same combination, Closeness of Materials, reminded me pleasantly of Salvatore Sciarrino. But the music ends before much of a shape has been established.

Receiving its New York premiere was Petr Bakla’s WAFT for piano and tenor sax. Reminiscent of Shih’s work, the piece blurrily taps up and down the chromatic scale without quite doing enough to compensate for the inevitable intervallic monotony. But timbrally the piece is attractive. Jason Eckardt’s Tangled Loops for piano and soprano sax is an extravagant, virtuoso work with some sumptuous dissonances and out-of-this-world passage-work; but the composition’s block-like construction seems at odds with the very pregnant material with which Eckhardt fills the sections.

Charles Wuorinen’s Divertimento is a great piece, and I don’t feel the need to comment about it here (again), other than to say I felt the Kenners’ performance brought out wonderfully the music’s emotional contrasts. But hands down the best work on the program was Toru Takemitsu’s stunning Distance for soprano sax and off-stage accordion. The saxophone’s wild outbursts of multiphonic music dance over an accordion drone which, somehow, manages to foreground and expand upon the on-stage solo. Imaginative, clear-eyed, and intensely emotional, the piece was also the most convincingly paced work on the program. Its progress felt both surprising and inevitable. Let us hope The Kenners themselves enjoy a similarly successful progress.

Two contemporary African-American composers shared the spotlight with Bach, Turina, Ellington, and Piazzolla at the Sphinx Organization Gala at Carnegie Hall last night. Cellist Tahirah Whittington held a sold-out Stern captive with Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s “Perpetual Motion” from his Lamentations Suite for solo cello. A fierce, prolonged flourish perfect for a charismatic performer, its aggression contrasted nicely with the similarly Bluegrass-inspired Delights and Dances for string quartet and string orchestra by Michael Abels. Performed by the Harlem Quartet, Delights is a pleasant work which Edgar Meyer fans will find plenty congenial. The zippy, high-flying finale had the audience on their feet (though not this reviewer), and one left the hall grateful for the good work Sphinx does. Congratulations to them on their tenth anniversary.