Last Wednesday, February 28, I had the pleasure of seeing two superb up-and-coming chamber ensembles on a double bill at Music On MacDougal in downtown Manhattan.    The Moët Trio (Yuri Namkung, violin; Yves Dharamraj, cello; Michael Mizrahi, piano) had the first half of the program, and they opened with John Zorn’s Amour fou.  The Zorn was a surprisingly modernist piece for a composer who is known as a pivotal figure in the downtown scene, and while I can’t say I liked it I definitly respected it.  It was one of those pieces where every note was exactly the right

Yesterday I got an e-mail from a PR person at The Rebel Media Group.  One of her clients, John Wesley Harding, has a new album and it’s being promoted with a somewhat unorthodox tiered pricing scheme which ranges from CD plus download plus live disc for $15.98 to a package which includes the aforementioned plus a bunch more swag plus the artist coming to your house and putting on a show for you and your friends, all for $5,000.  BoingBoing posted about it, and The Rebel Group’s Stef Shapira sent me a brief personal e-mail with that link and the

If you’ve been following the stimulus bill, you probably know two things: It includes $50 million for the NEA, and on Tuesday the Senate Democrats announced that they don’t have the votes to pass it and they’re looking a ways to cut it down.  John Gizzi at the conservative publication Human Events reported tuesday that, in a press conference on Monday, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs indicated that cutting the NEA funding was not likely.  I’m not sure about Gizzi’s interpretation of Gibbs’s statements, but as they say: interesting if true. Also on Tuesday, according to the best FL sportsbooks Reviewed on Thesportsdaily,

Check out this video from the 2008 Comedy Festival Gala in Melbourne.  Make sure you watch all the way to the end of the bit, where it goes all “I Am Sitting In A Room.” [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i69Xb2ZMgGI[/youtube]

Corey Dargel’s remarkable “theatrical song cycle” Removable Parts is being reprised at the HERE Arts Center.  The run started yesterday and goes through Sunday (Jan 7-11).  The show, which is performed by Corey Dargel (voice) and Kathleen Supové (piano), is a sort of cabaret show about Body Integrity Identity Disorder which, in a strange and wonderful way, ends up dealing with questions of love, the self, and of what “normal” really means.  I saw and reviewed the show when it was premiered in September 2007, and I loved it. The Removable Parts website has audio and video samples. UPDATE: Corey

Interesting piece by Martin Kettle in Friday’s Guardian, but one very strange line: “The musical establishment may continue to agonise over the important question of whether a bad man can produce a great piece of work. . .”  Are there really people who ask that question, or is it simply a rhetorical flourish?  My sense has always been that Carmina Burana is loved by audiences but doesn’t get a lot of respect from the establishment, but that the reasons are musical rather than based on Orff’s politics.  Would we think any more of Wagner’s music if he hadn’t been a

I first wrote and posted this two years ago, but maybe it will lighten the mood as everybody in the Northeast freaks out about their travel plans and the current and impending meteorological conditions.  Stay safe out there. A Visit From J.S. Bach By Galen H. Brown, with apologies to Henry Livingston, Jr. ‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the city The critics were trying their best to be witty; They printed their lists of the past year’s best fare, In hopes that their trendy young readers would care; But the readers were nestled all snug in their

Such is my devotion to you, dear reader, that last Wednesday in spite of a bad cold I went to the latest installment of the Music On MacDougal series at the Players Theatre in downtown Manhattan.  Music on MacDougal, as you may recall, is the concert series that S21 helped kick off with our M50 concert celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Minimalism.  Wednesday’s bill was split between Mantra Percussion and the Talea Ensemble [Talea shown above, in a recent performance of Daniel Iglesia‘s Contrapositive Antidote; how cool is it to get to wear 3D glasses while playing? -ed.]. Mantra opened

Composer, artist, Fluxus member, Scratch Orchestra member, John Cage associate, and chemist George Brecht died in a nursing home in Cologne, Germany, on Friday, December 5th.  Brecht, who was born George MacDiarmid but took Bertolt Brecht’s name in homage,  was one of the most significant and influential avant garde artists of the 1960s.  The title of this post refers to a document (page 17 of the linked PDF file) Brecht wrote for Fluxus in 1969 in which he proposes “moving landmasses over the surface of the earth” using conveyances such as icebergs or massive amounts of styrofoam, since his made-up

Those of you who were at the first Sequenza21 concert two years ago may remember that pianist Hugh Sung played my piece Systems of Preference or Restraint.  What you may not have noticed was the technology he used to do it.  That technology is now considerably more accessible to the average performer, and I encourage you to keep reading after the cut.