Composers

Chamber Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Interviews, San Francisco, Violin, Women composers

Let’s Ask Christina Stanley

Christina Stanley a violinist and vocalist who received her MFA in Music Performance and Literature from Mills College, and her Bachelor of Music degree from San Francisco State University where she received a full performance scholarship and studied violin with Daniel Kobialka, Jassen Toderov and the  Alexander String Quartet. She is an active performing violinist, working as as a soloist as well as an ensemble.   The composer along with the other members of the Skadi Quartet will perform two new graphic scores to open The Composer’s Muse, the second night of the11th Annual Outsound New Music Summit.  Both scores are 40 x 40 oil

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by Polly Moller
Classical Music, Composers, Concert review, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, New York, Percussion, Performers

Unlocking The Cage with Iktus Percussion and Friends

Le Poisson Rouge is a striking place. This venue was the location of this past Sunday’s concert featuring Iktus Percussion (Cory Bracken, Chris Graham, Nicholas Woodbury, and Steve Sehman), pianist Taka Kigawa, and toy pianist Phyllis Chen. According to Iktus member Cory Bracken, one of the missions of the evening (focused entirely around composer John Cage) was to take some of his pieces that are almost exclusively performed in academic settings, and begin to inject them into the public concert repertoire. What the audience encountered, therefore, was a healthy mix of both often and not-so-often performed pieces by John Cage.

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by Jonathan Lakeland
Composers, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Improv, Interviews, Premieres, San Francisco

Let’s Ask John Shiurba

John Shiurba is a composer and guitarist based in Oakland, California whose artistry embraces improvisation, art-rock, composition and noise.  In his composer capacity, he’s headlining the second night of the 11th Annual Outsound New Music Summit, an evening entitled The Composer’s Muse.  The concert will take place on Thursday, July 19th at 8:00 p.m. at the San Francisco Community Music Center, 544 Capp Street, San Francisco.  Tickets are available at the door, or online through Brown Paper Tickets. Shiurba’s world premiere work for large ensemble, 9:9, is a suite of nine pieces written to be interpreted by nine players with a conductor.

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by Polly Moller
Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, New York, Video

Tonight: Carter premiere at Contact!

103 year old Elliott Carter has written a new work, Two Controversies and a Conversation, which will be premiered tonight at the Met Museum as part of the New York Philharmonic’s Contact! series. The concert, conducted by David Robertson, also includes a newly commissioned work by Michael Jarrell and Pierre Boulez’s …explosante-fixe… Carter discusses the piece in the video below. The Contact! program will be repeated on Saturday at Symphony Space.

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by Christian Carey
Composers, Contemporary Classical, Sound Art

Think fast!

Composers and sound artists have only got a few days – until May 31st – to answer the annual Vox Novus call for 60-second recorded works for the 60×60 Project.  What started as a gleam in the eye of composer and impresario Robert Voisey is now celebrating its tenth season of providing international exposure and multiple performances to composers of any nationality, age, or career stage. 60×60 was designed to showcase the diversity of the contemporary music scene by getting as many composers as possible before the largest possible audience.  And it’s succeeded — 2000 composers have had their works

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by Polly Moller
Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, New York

This Weekend: Babbitt and Collide-O-Scope

To many, Memorial Day weekend means the kickoff of the summer season: getaways, barbecues, traffic, and more traffic … But the New York new music scene doesn’t seem to be on holiday from its Spring season yet. indeed, we’ll be talking a number of events in coming weeks, extending well into June. Performers and, one hopes, audiences, aren’t even taking the weekend off. Tonight is an all Milton Babbitt concert at CUNY Grad Center. It features several pieces done by the performers who’ve made them part of their core repertoires. But any chance to hear Judith Bettina sing Philomel again

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by Christian Carey
Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, Conferences, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, Music Events, News

MCTS 2012 Post-Conference Report

Report by Tyran Grillo (between sound and space) Photos by Evan Cortens Music: Cognition, Technology, Society set a formidable intellectual task before participants of the selfsame conference at semester’s end on the quieting campus of Cornell University. Under the attentive care of organizers Caroline Waight, Evan Cortens, Taylan Cihan, and Eric Nathan, what might have been an overwhelming conceptual storm proved smooth sailing through a series of back-to-back panels. The lack of overlap meant that everyone in attendance could take in the full thematic breadth and draw connections that might otherwise have been missed in the three-ring circus of a

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by Tyran Grillo
Big Band, Chamber Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Events, Experimental Music, Festivals, Improv, jazz, Piano, Premieres, San Francisco, Saxophone, Sound Art, Women composers

2012 Outsound Summit lineup revealed

The San Francisco Bay Area’s underground music scene will come together this coming July in an annual celebration of its tremendous range of styles, its love of improvisation, and its collective obsession with new and unusual timbres and techniques.  It’s the 11th Annual Outsound New Music Summit!  All events will take place at the San Francisco Community Music Center at 544 Capp Street near 20th Street in the Mission District, and tickets can be ordered online from Brown Paper Tickets or purchased at the door. The ever-popular Touch the Gear Expo kicks off the Summit on Sunday July 15, 7-10

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by Polly Moller
Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, Conferences, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, Music Events, News

Music: Cognition, Technology, Society

“How can music ‘speak’ and how do we have knowledge of it? What is its potential to express, represent, and communicate? How has changing expertise concerning sonic and musical knowledge shaped these questions across time and space?” These are the questions that inspired the interdisciplinary conference entitled “Music: Cognition, Technology, Society” that will take place at Cornell University this weekend, May 11 – 13. The conference will spotlight Tod Machover (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in a dual-role as guest composer and keynote speaker. Other keynote speakers include Eric Clarke (University of Oxford), Ichiro Fujinaga (McGill University) and Robert Gjerdingen (Northwestern

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by Eric Nathan