Author: Steve Layton

Broadcast, Chamber Music, Click Picks, Contemporary Classical, Downtown, Improv, Video

A Tale of Two Riffs and Two Rituals

What better way to ring in the year than to take in a couple ensembles, from opposite ends of the spectrum, showing in much the same way what the whole point of playing is?

Wojciech Kilar is a Polish composer from the same 60’s group that gave us Penderecki and Gorecki, but is notable for his detour into film music (Like Coppola’s Dracula). This is his utterly simple/hard 1988 piece Orawa (there are a bunch of other video performances of this on YouTube, but this one with Agnieszka Duczmal conducting the Chamber Orchestra “Amadeus” has them all beat for pacing and enthusiasm. Just ignore that couple-second blast of other music at the start):

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ri-RNT03DL8[/youtube]

 

For all his jazz-lite leanings, David Sanborn (with Hal Willner’s savvy music coordination) has always had my eternal gratitude for hosting one of the most phenomenal major-network music offerings, NBC’s Night Music, which ran between 1988 and 1990. Not least for this wonderful clip of Sun Ra and the Arkestra taking us all to a higher plane:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsKDbuCsTkk[/youtube]

Two really different approaches perhaps, but both seem to work some of the same ground and head to the same place in the end. May what we attempt in the coming year get lucky enough to find that place too, at least once or twice…

by Steve Layton
Click Picks, Performers, Video

Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow

I know, almost everyone’s felt stuck in the icebox as of late, and probably getting a little stir-crazy. Well, why not take a cue from the good folk of Nunavut and cheer up with a bit of throat singing? Let Lois Suluk-Locke and Karen Panigoniak from Arviat (pop. 2000 and some spare change) show you how it’s done:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1YkYh43V_Y[/youtube]

by Steve Layton
Choral Music, Click Picks, Composers, Contemporary Classical

Happy Birthday Already

Jean BergerYep, Elliott Carter has gotten (and is getting) his proper due, so time to jump ahead and perpare for some 2009 action… Though it’s a little sparse for 100th-year blockbusters, there’s always Elie Siegmeister, Grazyna Bacewicz, Harald Genzmer, Rodolfo Cornejo, Robin Orr, John Raynor, Thorleif Aamodt, Paul Constantinescu, Gianandrea Gavazzeni, Georgi Aleksandrovich Mushel, Sergius Kagen, Arwel Hughes, Ādolfs Skulte, Henk Bijvanck, and Vagn Holmboe. And the one I want to give a little shout out for, Jean Berger. One eventful (and as nearly long) life, that touched a lot of places and people. I’m pretty sure almost every kid in middle or high school choir remembers singing his “The Eyes of All Wait Upon Thee“. But far fewer tackled something like his “The Good of Contentment”, and far, far fewer still as part of such a stellar high school choir as the 1962 kids at Sanford H. Calhoun High in New York, under S. Talbot Thayer’s direction. Not a bad piece at all, for somebody to plan working up for next fall…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3LDrMYXLfw[/youtube]

by Steve Layton
Click Picks, Contemporary Classical, Performers, Video

What’s on the Tube? – #1

We’ve spent a lot of time at S21, spotlighting various composers and their recordings that can be found online. But what about all that video hanging around out there, that you might otherwise never catch? So I thought I’d start a semi-regular post showing off some of the interesting stuff that’s caught my eye and ear.

First up is a reminder that Sarah Palin is not what all Alaska is about… Shawn Savageau is studying percussion at UA Fairbanks (not far from the grubstake of that other diametric-Palin-opposite, the composer John Luther Adams). He was forward-thinking enough to upload videos to YouTube, of his Junior percussion recital in February of this past year, as well as his work with the student ensemble 64.8 (the latitude of Fairbanks, get it?). There’s a tasty smorgasbord of works from the likes of John Cage, Henry Cowell, Toru Takemitsu, Keiko Abe, Steve Reich, Bill Cahn, Morton Feldman… But it doesn’t get more basic than in Temazcal by Mexican-born composer Javier Alvarez:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k4-xDozVkk[/youtube]

As you can see in the link above, Shawn’s own website currently is just FaceBook. If you’re on there, add him, poke him, buy him, or just tell him thanks and wish him the bright future I’m sure he’s going to have.

by Steve Layton
Contemporary Classical, Criticism, New Age, Piano

Same Old Story for a New Age

From the cover of Kevin Wood's Luke Gullickson is a composer, pianist, and writer currently working on a Master’s in composition at UT in Austin, Texas. He keeps a blog, Sonatas and Interludes, where he recently pondered how “new age” can reach out and bleed into even the “avant-garde”:

There’s a problem in new pretty piano music. I call it the “new age” problem. The thing is, we’ve been Jim Brickman-d, David Lanz-d, Yanni-d, and now we can’t hear Keith Jarrett the same way anymore. We are all familiar with the warm sounds of new age piano music; it’s been a weird but persistent classification. On the surface, Jarrett’s Köln Concert, the albums of George Winston, and contemporary postminimal piano music by Peter Garland or William Duckworth sound similar, but the genre underpinnings, and their associated politics, are vastly different in each case. The worlds of jazz, pop, and classical, respectively, have merged together into this zone where superficial similarities are in danger of overriding the differences in intent between these disparate artists.

The argument goes a little farther in Luke’s original post, so take a little time to read it all if you’re thinking about commenting.

(Personally, the first-mentioned few make me groan and zone… But I defy anyone telling me Tim Story‘s 2001 Shadowplay isn’t at heart a Po-Mo masterpiece.)

by Steve Layton
Composers, Photographs

Googling Life As We (may not) Know It

Google‘s latest coup is the digitization and online offering of essentially the entire photo archive of Life magazine. They’re currently up to around 20% of the entire ten-million picture archive, so there’s lots more to keep looking for in the future. Of course you can search to your heart’s content for just about any subject matter; but a quick search for “composer” returns some really truly spiffy photos of various and sundry greats (and a few “who dat?”‘s), many I’ve never seen before and all wonderful images… Like this one, from 1955, of Alan Hovhaness buried in his work. The images on Google are all much larger than this, and quite vivid.

by Steve Layton
Composers, Contemporary Classical, Exhibitions, Scores

I Like to Look

Steve Roden - When Stars Become Words - 2007 My first year in college (1974-5), we were treated to an exhibition of the original score pages selected by John Cage and Alison Knowles for their highly influential 1969 book Notations (currently available as a free PDF download at UbuWeb).

For young composers at the time, these bits and pieces of anything-but-standard notation were eye- and ear-opening, sent us scouring the library stacks for more, and led us all to go a little crazy trying to mimic or out-write what we saw there.

Then as sequel this year, Theresa Sauer carried the idea up to our own time with Notations 21, an updated compendium of all the fruit that’s come from those first flowers.

Wadada Leo Smith- Cosmic Music - 2007 I’m mentioning this because down here in Houston I just received a little whiff of that wonderful déjà vu this afternoon. The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston has a show up and running through December 7th, titled Perspectives 163: Every Sound You Can Imagine. It’s kind of a mix of both Cage/Knowles-old and Sauer-new, with a scattering of more traditional scores by some of the recent “big names” (Lou Harrison, Rorem, Glass, Reich, Riley, Dresher, Adams — John and John Luther –, Bryars, Crumb, Nyman, etc.).

The list of old mingling with new is long: Steve Roden (image above right), Wadada Leo Smith (image left), Cage, Brown, Bussotti, Feldman, Ashley, Mumma, Brandt, Stockhausen (dad and son), Xenakis, Wolff, Dick Higgins, Knowles, Yasunao Tone, Subtonick, Cardew, Curran, Per Norgard, Phill Niblock, La Monte Young, Stephen Vitiello, Kaffe Mathews, Maja Ratkje, Nancarrow, Daniel Lentz, Elena Kats-Chernin, Jennifer Walshe, Stephen Scott, Wallace Berman, Marina Rosenfeld, Christian Marclay… etc., etc….  If your travels take you down this way, be sure to make room for a visit.

by Steve Layton
Awards, Click Picks, Competitions, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Festivals

Dang, Beat Me to It.

He’s been on my list for a while now, to make famous (ha ha) as an S21 “click pick”. But before I get the chance to feature him, Huck Hodge goes and wins this year’s Gaudeamus Prize:

At the final concert of the International Gaudeamus Music Week 2008, which took place in Amsterdam from 1 to 7 September, the Gaudeamus Prize was awarded to the American composer Huck Hodge (1977).

The Gaudeamus Prize, an award of 4,550 Euros, is intended as a commission for a new work to be performed at the next edition of the International Gaudeamus Music Week. Hodge received the prize for Parallaxes, a composition for ensemble, performed on September 3 at the “Muziekgebouw aan ’t Y” by the Asko|Schönberg Ensemble conducted by Bas Wiegers.

His site will fill you in on his work, with plenty of good listening. From his C.V. it looks like he’s taking a post up in my old hometown of Seattle, teaching composition at the University of Washington. Bully for them, and bravo to Huck.

by Steve Layton