Classical Music

Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, Piano, S21 Concert

If a Frog Had Wings He Wouldn’t Bump His Ass so Much

The brilliant and talented piano and TabletPC genuis Hugh Sung has a terrific post about the Sequenza21 concert where he was a star performer.  Hugh is also one of the nicest people alive.

Kyle Gann, who drove two hours down and two hours back to Bard for the concert, has some nice words about the concert here.  Kyle turned 37 yesterday.

Our congratulations to regular Darcy James Argue who is one of the 29 recipients of the latest round of the American Music Center’s Composer Assistance Program (CAP).  The complete list is here. 

Altman was one of the best.

Update:  Speaking of birthdays, today is Gunther Schuller’s 81st.  Richard Buell tells me that when Schuller was 16 and the first horn of the the Cincinnati Symphony, he auditioned for the Ellington band, playing Johnny Hodges’s charts.

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Composers, Uncategorized

One day, two musicians, three anniversaries

There are three anniversaries today of important events connected by a fascinating thread. November 22nd is remembered by many for the assassination of John F Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, while on a happier note Benjamin Britten was born in Lowestoft on this day in 1913, and quite appropriately today is also the name day of Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of musicians. The connection between these three anniversaries also involves folk singer, political activist and pioneering conservationist, Pete Seeger. The full story is at Benjamin Britten – We Shall Overcome

by Pliable
Classical Music, Composers, Uncategorized

New music and the wider culture

‘If you’re talking about “relevance to the wider culture” and “speaking to our times“, and all that Greg Sandowian stuff, I couldn’t possibly care less … People seem to forget that there’s always going an audience for whom Beethoven’s 5th or La Boheme is a brand new experience’ – writes Henry Holland today in Killing classical music in the US. Well worth the click, and my photo is of the audience queueing for core classical repertoire at the 2006 BBC Proms.

by Pliable
Classical Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Music Events, S21 Concert

Let the Countdown Begin

We’re just hours away from the first real-world Sequenza21 concert which begins promptly at 7:30 on Monday night at the Elebash Recital Hall at the CUNY Graduate Center, 34th Street and Fifth Avenue.  Admission is absolutely free and there will be wine and cookies.  I hope to see you there.

We are enormously grateful to the following folks for their financial contributions which have made it possible to actually pay the musicians and put together a program.

Concert Sponsors:
Bridge Records
Metropolis Ensemble

Contributors:
Activist Music
Anonymous
Carrie and Yorke Brown
Mr. Galen H. Brown
Mr. Eric Bruskin
Mr. Jeffrey Harrington
Mr. Franklin Hecker
Jeffrey W. James Arts Consulting
Mr. Ian Moss
Ms. Annette Salvage
Mr. David Salvage
Mr. Jordan Stokes
Mr. David Toub
Mr. Scott Unrein
Mr. Tom Myron
Mr. James Wilson

 

I also want to thank Steve Smith for the shoutout in TimeOut this week.  Much obliged. 

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Composers, Uncategorized

Really nice to see so many young people

All too often today, appealing menus of new music turn out to be measly meals relying heavily on technical gimmickry, self-serving cliques, bitchiness and cynicism. By contrast the Britten Sinfonia at Lunch project is a nourishing meal whose courses include imaginative commissioning, innovative and open-minded programming, a truly international perspective, and some damn hard work from the musicians.. But don’t take my word for it. Here are the words of clarinettist Joy Farrall (above) as she introduced the Huw Watkins first performance at today’s Britten Sinfonia at Lunch concert – ”It is great to see such a large audience for this concert, and it is also really nice to see so many young people here.

For the full story of a pioneering contemporary music project visit New music lunch box

by Pliable
Classical Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Music Events

More Famous Than You or Me

Fresh from the lede in a New York Times article this very morning (“provocative star turn”), Corey Dargel is performing tonight at The Tank, 279 Church Street btw Franklin and White in Manhattan. 

Corey will perform new and unreleased material including “policy-anthems” in alternative tuning systems and a set of songs about the Virgin Mary. Joining Dargel are composer/violinist Jim Altieri and expert videographer Oleg Dubson.

Kamala Sankaram and Squeezebox will present bloodletting, an original horror film with live music, depicting (it says here) the tension between artmaking and the daily survival of young working artists. Borrowing from the stylistic sensibilities of German expressionists like F.W. Mirnau, the film’s unsettling visual environment provides a poignant frame for Sankaram’s intimate and deceptively simple songs.Dargel and Sankaram open the evening with two songs from Nick Brooke’s Tone Test, a chamber opera for two vocalists and phonograph, based on experiments in which Thomas Edison invited audiences to compare the sound of his newly invented phonograph to the sound of a live singer. Tone Test premiered at the 2004 Lincoln Center Festival.

If any of you can attend and want to write about the show for S21, send Corey a note and he’ll get you in free.  If you haven’t seen Corey in action, you should.  I saw Streisand in Funny Girl in 1963 (my first Broadway show) and she was pretty good, too. 

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, S21 Concert

So What Will a Sequenza21 Concert Sound Like Anyhow?

I know I haven’t contributed much to the intellectual discourse on these pages since the new format of the site went live, but–believe me–it hasn’t been that I’ve lost interest. In one of life’s strange convergences, the reformat of Sequenza21 occurred almost simultaneous with my return from China at which point I have plunged myself into a torrent of freelance writing assignments in order to pay for the 82 CDs and suitcase of books I brought back. I’m only now starting to get unburied. Plus, of course, the NewMusicBox deadlines never go away but that’s the same no matter what so it’s no excuse.

Anyway, I wish I could have written that I haven’t had a chance to write in because I’ve been so crazed on a deadline to complete a musical composition.  We all know how much spending time on S21 takes away from composing! Ironically, as luck would have it, Sequenza21 is actually contributing to my work as a composer this month since a piece of my music will be featured on their debut concert next Monday night at the CUNY Graduate Center.

And while I can think of fewer honors greater than having a soloist of the caliber of David Starobin performing a work of mine, part of me wonders if a real “Sequenza 21” concert ought instead be a group composition that one of us starts (pretending to write a solo work in the Berio tradition), perhaps followed by everyone in the audience sequentially creating variations on it in turn for the rest of the evening. But who knows what else everyone else is cooking up for next week. You’ll just have to show up to find out!

by Frank J. Oteri
Classical Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Music Events

A Little Water Music

Tania León, a wonderful composer and musician and one of the nicest people in this crazy business of ours, is the featured composer this week at a spectacular new classical music space called the Gatehouse, a beautifully renovated old Romanesque Revival building that once served as a pumping station for water flowing from the Croton Reservoir to the taps of New York City.

The new space is operated by Aaron Davis Hall Inc., Harlem’s long time center for the performing arts, which has been re-named Harlem Stage.  Of course, the actual Aaron Davis Hall, which is just across the road from the Gatehouse, is still Aaron Davis Hall.  Got it?

The inaugural program at the Gatehouse is called Water Works, with this week’s installment devoted to the Cuban-born Leon.  The program will include the premiere of Reflections for Soprano and chamber ensemble, Batey, Ritual, Momentum  and Tumbao  for solo piano and O, Yemanja from Leon’s opera Scourge of Hyacinths. 

Tuesday through Saturday nights at 7:30, 150 Convent Avenue, at West 135th Street, Hamilton Heights, (212) 650-7100, harlemstage.org; $35.

Sequenza21 concert.  Next Monday night.  Free.  Live Music. Cheap wine.  Be there or be square.  See the bum (actually Ian Moss) on the left for the address and details.  Did I say it was free?

Update:  David Salvage’s mom is bringing home baked cookies.

by Jerry Bowles