The Original New Music Community
Mstislav Rostropovich died this morning in Moscow. He was 80 and suffered from intestinal cancer. Tim Page has an appreciation here.
Updates: Alex Ross, Charles T. Downey, Guardian Tributes, Marc Geelhoed, Bruce Hodges, Pliable, Kenneth Woods, Steve Hicken, Jessica Duchen, Scott Spiegelberg, Jeremy Eichler
It’s minimalist week in the Center of the Universe, highlighted on Friday night by the John Adams 60th birthday concert at Carnegie Hall. Adams will be conducting the American Composers Orchestra in performances of My Father Knew Charles Ives, The Wound-Dresser (with bass-baritone Eric Owens) and the Violin Concerto, with Leila Josefowicz doing the honors.
Meanwhile, also on Friday, in a nearby universe, Michael Riesman, Music Director of the Philip Glass Ensemble and concert pianist, will be performing the world premiere of his marvelous new transcription for solo piano of Glass’ score to the 1931 classic horror film, Dracula. The gothic walls of the Orensanz Foundation for the Arts provide a perfect backdrop to Reisman performance, which will done live to film. Tickets are $20 ($25 at the door).
On a more somber note, there will be a public memorial service for composer and pianist Andrew Hill, who died last Friday, at Trinity Church (89 Broadway at Wall Street) this Friday, April 27, at 2:00 pm.
Architect Jean Nouvel has won a competition to design the new Philharmonie de Paris building at Parc de La Villette in the French capital.
The 2,400 seat auditorium is due to open in 2012.
Sure looks like Boulez has some influence on the design. Check out the Flash show at the architect’s web site.
It seems somehow fitting after a week of inexplicable madness that Julia Wolfe’s My Beautiful Scream will get its New York premiere tomorrow night when the Kronos Quartet joins the Brooklyn Philharmonic for a concert called Kronos+Cosmos.
Wolfe describes My Beautiful Scream as a kind of non-concerto for string quartet. The work is a gradual unfolding and unraveling of a slow motion scream: the quartet aspect of the music is quiet and fine while the orchestra aspect is violent and menacing. Co-commissioned by the Orchestre Philharmoniue de Radio France, the Basel Sinfonietta, and the Brooklyn Philharmonic, My Beautiful Scream was originally premiered in February 2004 at Festival Presence in Paris.
Wolfe began writing My Beautiful Scream shortly after 9/11. As she describes the time in which the piece was written: “I lived in downtown Manhattan not far from where the towers stood. At night I would have this strange sensation that I was going to die. In general my life was very beautiful, so it was this strange existence of living in beauty and having the sensation of a long drawn out internal scream.”
The concert will also include a performance of the visionary symphonic work, Gustav Holst’s The Planets, and Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. Each of the seven movements of The Planets will be accompanied by exclusive film footage provided by NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Here’s a bit of good news for a change. Our regular Rob Deemer has accepted an offer from SUNY-Fredonia for its tenure-track composition chair position starting in the Fall of 2007.
Galen’s Take a Friend to Orchestra (TAFTO) piece is up today on Drew McManus’ Adaptistration blog. Good reading for a nasty, rainy day.
Frank J. Oteri will be interviewing Olga Neuwirth at the Philadelphia Center for Arts and Heritage tomorrow in a special one-on-one composer discussion produced by the Philadelphia Music Project. Details here. If you’re in Philadelphia and want to go and write about it, let me know and I’ll get you in.
Catch Corey Dargel on this week’s episode of Steve Paul’s Puppet Music Hall. The whole episode is ici and free.
Some good morning music for your dining and dancing pleasure. A nice piece called “Baile” by Argentinian composer Francisco Colasanto, played by Marco Antonio Mazzini, who thinks it may be the first and only work for contrabass clarinet and electronics written in South America.
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A million wet puppy kisses to Alex Ross for the Sequenza21 shout out in this week’s New Yorker. We love you, too.
The big news out of Los Angeles this morning is that Gustavo Dudamel, the 26-year-old Venezuelan wunderkind, will replace Esa-Pekka Salonen when he leaves the LA Phil at the end of his term in 2009. Salonen plans to spend more of his time composing.
For those of you who may not be familiar with it, there is a seminal document called The Cluetrain Manifesto that defines a new style of communication in an age in which everyone and everything is electronically connected. Its premise, to which I subscribe, is that the internet is fundamentally different from mass media like television because it allows lots of people to have “human to human” conversations (with all the complexity and difficulty that implies) rather than being force fed a one-sided party line or mass marketing message.
There can be negative aspects to this ubiquetous connectedness. Some people hide behind the mask of anonymity on the internet to say and do cruel and destructive things. But, in the best case scenario, the web allows us to talk to each other and–under the right conditions of respect, transparency, and honesty–to learn and even grow into a community where people can disagree without being disagreeable. I believe Sequenza21 is one of those rare communities and that makes me proud.
The first of the Manifesto’s 95 theses is this: “Markets are conversations.” In other words, if people are talking seriously about your product, or your Whitney concert, that is a positive thing from both a human and commercial point of view.
Just an old hippie (and professional marketer’s) point of view.
p.s. We need a new conversation started over on the Composer Forum page. If you don’t have a user name or password to post something let me know and I’ll fix you up.
Lots of terrific new reviews over on the CD Review page.
I listen to the fantastic Counterstream radio (see toilet seat icon) while I work and yesterday heard a terrific piece by Ezra Sims and it occurred to me that somebody ought to voluteer to write a regular column here every week or every other week called something like “Underrated,” which would focus on composers we don’t hear much about.
Contrary to speculation that the mystery man in Friday’s photo is a Guantanamo detainee or a middle school crossing guard, the fashion-forward gentleman in question is, in fact, the Dutch composer Jacob ter Veldhuis, aka JacobTV, whose work (it says here in the press release) “…has had a huge impact on the European music scene in the past decade, but he is far less known in the U.S.” It could happen.
The Whitney Museum of American Art, that well-known new music venue, is concluding its Spring 2007 Whitney Live series with Grab It!, a three-day festival dedicated to JacobTV, Wednesday to Friday, May 2-4, 2007 at the Whitney at Altria in mid-town Manhattan. The festival is the first large-scale examination of his work on this side of the pond, featuring some of his signature pieces as well as recent compositions and premieres, video, instrumental work, and a new evening-length dance piece set to his boombox music. He will also unveil a major CD/DVD anthology of his work on the Dutch label Basta, which includes orchestral music, boombox works, chamber music and video.
That would explain the “three pounds” of CDs I got from the Whitney which, by the way, are still up for grabs although, frankly, judging from the catty comments, you folks are not taking this opportunity nearly seriously enough.
Among the participants and performers in the festival are PRISM Quartet, Miro Dance Theatre, New Century Quartet, Frank J. Oteri, Kevin Gallagher, Electric Kompany, Margaret Lancaster, Dorothy Lawson, Meehan/Perkins Duo, and Kathleen Supové
The back story is that Limor Tomer, who curates the “Whitney Live” events, heard JacobTV’s music when the Prism sax quartet did a whole evening of his work at Symphony Space last year (Prism performs on the May 2 concert, then again twice in Philadelphia a few days later). She went wild over the music and decided to take the risk of programming three nights of his work, although no one here is really familiar with it. She hired the terrific new music publicist and all-round hottie Aleba Gartner to promote the show and, of course, we all know about my character flaws in the area of pretty gals.
Speaking of which, Aleba is also promoting the June in Buffalo Festival June 4-10 this year. This is one of the top festivals in America and it gets surprisingly little coverage although we always try to do our part. Anybody live in the Buffalo area who would like to “audit” the festival, do a little deep immersion, and keep a daily Sequenza 21 diary of the event? Something can be arranged.
Other stuff: I was having a Rome withdrawal attack last night and tuned into Showtime’s new Tudors mini-series. Pretty good, actually, but my favorite part is when a scruffy young man turns up at the cathedral with a letter from the Bishop of Canterbury introducing him as Thomas Tallis, a bright prospect who plays the organ, flute, sings and “composes a bit.”
And, finally, if I haven’t said so already, I think Steve Layton does a fantastic job week after week with his Click Picks. Thanks much, Steve. You’re a big part of our little success.
The concert is on Sunday, April 8 at 8:00pm in the Marshall Room in the Music Building at Boston University (855 Commonwealth Avenue).
The concert includes–in addition to the Cage–pre-existing pieces by Kyle Gann, Eve Beglarian, Richard Whalley, and Dai Fujikura (for toy piano and violin pizzicato–the violinist will be Peter Zazofsky). There are new pieces, which will be having their first performances, by Lyle Davidson, Pozzi Escot, Stephen Feigenbaum, Michael Finnissy, Philip Grange, John Heiss, Derek Hurst (with electronic sounds–i.e. on my boombox), Matthew McConnell, Matthew Mendez, Nico Muhly, Ketty Nez (for toy piano and piano–Ketty will be the pianist), Dave Smith, Jeremy Woodruff, William Zuckerman, and me (for clavichord and toy piano–the clavichord player will be Peter Sykes). (I’m pretty sure that’s everybody.) The pieces are all really good and all really different from each other.
I hope you can come to this (what can only be described as an) unusual concert.