Robert Gable at his aworks blog flagged this gem of news from Dennis Bathory-Kitsz’s We Are All Mozart site: Beginning this summer, we are bringing back Kalvos & Damian — not the old format of the New Music Bazaar, but rather Kalvos and Damian: In the House! … We shut down the show in September 2005 after 537 episodes, but the demand for our show has never quite relented. We will start with the four interviews we did not broadcast during the show’s initial run, and then continue with Art Jarvinen and, if things go well, with Lisa Whistlecroft. By
Read more[youtube]qKXy1FPTdvg[/youtube] Steve Reich’s seminal 1967 Piano Phase has always been a fantastic challenge for any two pianists. But here is the Russian Peter Aidu (b. 1976) going them all one better, by performing both parts solo, on two pianos at once. Released on the netlabel Top-40, the complete recording is available to freely download at Archive.org. (There’s also a link there to further information on the pianist and release, and the MP3 download at Archive.org is fine, but I would recommend NOT visiting directly the Top-40 homepage. There may be some malware lurking there!)
Read moreJames Combs, composer… Ah, where to start?… I met James years ago, in our formerly-shared hometown of Seattle. Truly a “regular-Joe” in person, giving little hint of the ornate wheels spinning underneath. An anecdote on James’ blog seems a perfect illustration of the man and the work: A Minimalist Experience A boring Sunday, really not so much different than any other Sunday. March 16, 2008, I went for a drive to run some miscellaneous errands. My wife informed me that we were in some need of household items which could be purchased at the nearest store. So heading to the
Read moreTim Risher is a composer that I bumped into a long time ago on this here web thingy. His illustrious career has taken him from making new music in Florida, to a long stint producing radio in Germany, to currently doing — well, something or other — in deepest, darkest Durham, North Carolina. One of Tim’s latest personal ventures involves the wildly-popular virtual world of Second Life. There, people seem to carry on just like they do out here in the real world, except they get to make it — and even themselves — into anything they can dream up. Like the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic,
Read more(OK, OK I know, the puns don’t come any worse than that…) No F.Z. music, but rather a reminder that The excellent U.K. ensemble Psappha (with help from Lancaster University and the BBC Singers) is in the middle of a great webcast series. You can watch and listen already to any of the pieces from the first two concerts, the third concert available March 31st. Webcast #1 includes Larry Goves’ Four Letter Words, Gyorgy Kurtag’s Signs, Games and Messages and Scenes from a Novel, and Gyorgy Ligeti’s Aventures & Nouvelles Aventures. Webcast #2 is all Claude Vivier: his Et je reverrai
Read moreUBUWEB is playing online host to an excellent hour-long WDR documentary on Mauricio Kagel. Of course it’s in German, but don’t let your lack of the lingo stop you from clicking over there and watching. Scenes of Kagel rehearsing his Divertimento with the Schönberg Ensemble & Reinbert de Leeuw at the 2006 Donaueschinger Musiktage are intercut with footage of Kagel and a number of his earlier works from the 60s and 70s. There’s plenty of Kagel’s love of theater and the absurd, careful fascination with all kinds of sound and action in music, and just plain play on show in this one.
Read moreLast.fm is a social-network/music site out of London, whose visitors play a huge part in creating their vast database on musicians, their recordings, their popularity, and music of related interest. Users contribute by providing hard information, photos, opinions, and even “tags” that end up linking like-to-like across the spectrum. But many also download a bit of software as well, that keeps track of what they listen to on their computer. This information is used to build a profile of a listener’s likes, and lets Last.fm steer them towards other new music they’re likely to enjoy. If you’re a musician with recordings out there
Read moreHonest, I swear this is Sequenza21, not the obituaries. But this is otherwise (and unfairly) likely to pass unnoticed in our usual music-blog land: Henri Chopin, one of the pioneering figures in sound poetry, passed away in France on January 3rd. Born in 1922, he was one of the great explorers of a poetry that favored supremacy of the voice — in all its manifestations — over the “tyranny” of the word. An early adopter of tape recorders and the same electronic studios European composers were at work in, and for many years an active publisher of magazines that disseminated many of the
Read moreOur regular listen to and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, with so much good listening online: 2005 Snapshot: Music at Northwestern University Obviously a picture from a warmer season… Northwestern has a killer location, right on Lake Michigan, just a bit north of downtown Chicago. I’ll be heading that way for a week in late January (tagging along for my wife’s special management class), and in honor of the visit I thought I’d share the site linked above, full of streaming
Read moreOur regular listen to and look at living, breathing musicians that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online: Julie Harting (b. 1957 — US, NYC) The talk is always “Oh that Schoenberg, making this artificial system that nobody really gets or feels!”… Except there are a few people like Julie: When I was 7 or 8, I found a miniature violin in my father’s closet, because he played violin when he was a kid. I also found a book called
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