The Original New Music Community
Florent Ghys has a new CD coming out on Cantaloupe on Tuesday. To mark the occasion and the upcoming The Union is in a State address by President Obama, we offer this sample of Florent’s handiwork.
Music for Multiple Basses, and the President of the United States from Bang on a Can on Vimeo.
Head’s up on a couple things this coming week that caught my eye:
WPRB’s Marvin Rosen is doing a special edition of his Classical Discoveries radio show this Wednesday, Jan. 27th. From 5:30 until 11:00 AM EST. Titled “East Meets West“, the entire five-and-a-half hours will be devoted to works by Middle and Far Eastern Composers, as well as to works by Western composers inspired by these regions. A special treat in the 10-o’clock hour will be the world premiere broadcast of the Sonata for solo viola Op. 423 (1992) by Alan Hovhaness (1911-2000), performed by Christina Fong (from a brand-new OgreOgress release). Then from 11AM until 1PM, Marvin’s guest will be composer/improviser/percussionist Lukas Ligeti. A swell time all around, and as always no matter where you are your computer can bring you the broadcast live.
If you happen to be on the other coast that same day (Jan. 27th), you’re in for a treat if you head to the Pasadena Central Library (Donald R. Wright Auditorium, 285 E. Walnut St.) at 6PM PST, for a concert presented by Cellogrill (über-cellist Jessica Catron) and the Pasadena Creative Music Series. The concert opens with the world premiere of composer Cat Lamb’s Branches for just-intoned female choir assembled especially for this occasion. Next up, MISSINCINATTI follows with folk songs of land and sea; forgotten tales about fantastical crocodiles, maritime ghosts and work in the mines illuminated before your very eyes with the assistance of many special musical guests. And finally, the compositions of RATS can confound and delight like a musical retelling of The Wizard of Oz by Captain Beefheart. And all this for the princely sum of FREE.
Champ pianist Sarah Cahill performing Henry Cowell’s Tiger and Lou Harrison’s Largo Ostinato, from the December 2008 Other Minds “New Music Seance”:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7Qm6rEwT54[/youtube]
I like to plan ahead. But does that just mean I’m too old to decide where I’m going at the last minute, like the Generation Y and Z impulsives we hear so much about at arts participation conferences? You know, the ones who don’t know where they’re going until somebody they’re following tweets their destination on the night of?
Mid-life insecurities and fuddy-duddiness aside, I know where I’ll be this coming Saturday evening: in the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s sweet new Concert Hall, taking in new short works by ten local composers, all presided over grandly by Gyorgy Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto for 13 instruments. sfSound is the presenter, and they’ve cast a wide commissioning net to figures from our many micro-scenes. Including, as my colleague Christian Carey reported earlier this month, Greg Saunier from avant-prog adventurers Deerhoof; plus Heather Frasch, a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley, Canner MEFE of underground harsh noise fame, Mills College Contemporary Music Co-Director Maggi Payne, and composer/improviser/performance artist Theresa Wong.
All of the composers were commissioned to make new works especially for this concert, entitled Small Packages. Some works are inspired by, and others are meant to contrast with, the regal Ligeti Chamber Concerto. The eight core sfSound performers, plus seven other veterans of the series, will spread their expertise around from the Ligeti work to each of the new pieces.
The San Francisco Conservatory of Music Concert Hall can be found at 50 Oak Street in San Francisco’s Civic Center neighborhood, convenient to the eponymous BART station. Admission is $15.00, although those of us who are “underemployed” can take advantage of an $8.00 price. If you don’t want to take your chances at the door, you can order tickets online from Brown Paper Tickets.
Many people are still talking about the New York production of John Adams’ latest opera, Dr. Atomic. But Adams wasn’t through with the material after its stage presentation.
Nonesuch recently released a symphonic version of music from Dr. Atomic; Dr. Atomic Symphony is paired with Guide to Strange Places on the CD.
There’s also a DVD release of the opera, in its Netherlands production, available on Opus Arte.
Sequenza 21 readers: How do you prefer Dr. Atomic, in its operatic or symphonic incarnation? The comments section is open for feedback.
Our own Lawrence Dillon’s The Infinite Sphere will be given its World Premiere performances by the Daedalus Quartet tonight, Friday, January 15 – 8 PM as part of the Discovery Series at The Barns at Wolf Trap in Vienna, Virginia and on Saturday, 7:30 PM at Watson Chamber Music Hall of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem.
Commissioned by the Daedalus Quartet in conjunction with the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts, Dillon’s fourth quartet takes Pascal’s reference to “an infinite sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere” as the inspiration for a virtuosic wheels-within-wheels journey.
The fourth quartet in Dillon’s Invisible Cities String Quartet Cycle — a set of six quartets that explore connections between Classical forms and contemporary experience — The Infinite Sphere not only takes the form of a Classical rondo, it also adopts the rondo spirit, using popular dance music as material.
Winner of the 2007 Guarneri String Quartet Award from Chamber Music America, the Daedalus String Quartet is the resident quartet for the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University.
Lawrence is Composer in Residence at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and currently has commissions from the Emerson String Quartet, the Mansfield Symphony, the Boise Philharmonic, the Salt Lake City Symphony, the Daedalus String Quartet, the University of Utah Philharmonia and the Idyllwild Symphony Orchestra.
Technology has democratized music in ways that are surprising even to me, revolutionizing access to any music anytime with iPod and iTunes, opening interactive musicmaking to amateurs with Guitar Hero and Rock Band (which both grew out of a group I lead at the M.I.T. Media Lab), providing digital production and recording facilities on any laptop that surpass what the Beatles used at Abbey Road, and redefining the performance ensemble with initiatives like the Stanford iPhone Orchestra and YouTube Symphony.
An illegal immigrant with a civil engineering degree in Paris, fugitive from his native Greece for his WWII resistance activity (for which he nearly died, and lost one eye) Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) eventually found himself working for the famed architect Le Corbusier, first as one of any number of assistants but soon enough as collaborator. Yet he was always drawn above all else to the need to compose music. Nadia Boulanger, Arthur Honneger, Darius Milhaud –all were either rejecting or rejected. It wasn’t until Xenakis stumbled upon Olivier Messiaen that he found a teacher that saw past the inexperience and willfullness:
I understood straight away that he was not someone like the others. […] He is of superior intelligence. […] I did something horrible which I should do with no other student, for I think one should study harmony and counterpoint. But this was a man so much out of the ordinary that I said… No, you are almost thirty, you have the good fortune of being Greek, of being an architect and having studied special mathematics. Take advantage of these things. Do them in your music.
Thrown almost at once into the hotbed of post-WWII modern music, surrounded by the likes of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Jean Barraqué, and Pierre Schaeffer, yet still working for Le Corbusier, Xenakis soon found ways to integrate his love of mathematics and architecture with new musical forms based on points and masses, curves and densities, later even physics and statistics — but somehow always tied to a deeply Greek historical and humanistic root system. During this transformative period, he stumbled upon a fascinating discussion about trang web cá cược bóng đá hợp pháp, which piqued his interest and added a unique dimension to his multidisciplinary explorations.
In the late 1950s Le Corbusier received a commisson to create the Phillips Pavillion for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. Le Corbusier made a preliminary sketch, but it was Xenakis who would develop and see the structure through to completion. Not only that, Xenakis (along with Edgard Varèse) would create music to inhabit the space, complementing a multi-projection visual program by Le Corbusier himself.
While only standing a short time, the echo of that space, event and music would continue well past 1958; it was constantly mentioned in all the books while I was a university student, and the pieces made for it have become “classics” in the field of early electronic music, still listened to and loved today. (There’s a small documentary on the Pavilion that you can see on YouTube.)
The reason I’m telling you all this? Because from January 15th through April 8th, The Drawing Center in New York City is hosting the show Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary. And in conjunction with this show, the Electronic Music Foundation is sponsoring a number of Xenakis events, including on the 15th a virtual recreation of the experience of the Phillips Pavilion at the Judson Church (55 Washington Square South).
We’ve asked The Drawing Center’s Carey Lovelace and the EMF’s own Joel Chadabe to give us some background and info, which follows just after the jump:
Greg Saunier is in the indie band Deerhoof, but he’s also a composer of concert music. sfSound commissioned a work from Saunier as part of an upcoming concert centered around György Ligeti‘s Chamber Concerto (Jan. 23 at SF Conservatory).
Apparently, this isn’t the first time sfSound has paid tribute to Ligeti. Last time around, in 2002, they ran afoul of the composer’s representatives. You can read a passel of legalese between Ligeti’s lawyers and the group’s bass clarinetist here. Hopefully this time out, they’ll be allowed to go ahead with what looks to be a fascinating concert and appropriate tribute to one of the late 20th Century’s great works.
Lest you think that Saunier’s gone exclusively longhair, he’s also recently been interested in another “L” artist from the pop world. Here he is with Deerhoof covering Liliput’s song “Hitch-Hike.”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oymp4js0Pqk[/youtube]
A new year finds our roving reporter/virtuoso violinist (there’s a movie idea in there someplace) Hilary Hahn back with the next round of her self-made interviews with composers various and not-so-sundry. Definitely in the non-sundry camp, David Lang has been firing on all cylinders the past few years; snagging the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his Little Match Girl Passion (the recording of which is also up for a performance Grammy this year) is likely keeping gas in that tank for a good while to come. Hilary and David have a nice long chat about his life & work in this three-part interview (yes, I know it looks like she caught up with David some where out on Moonbase III, but the conversation’s all there, and perfectly interesting. Just close your eyes if the video quality reminds you too much of a David Lynch scene):
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gGtNOdDCXM[/youtube]
And here’s part two and part three.
Thanks again, Hilary! — who we should mention is just releasing her latest CD, an all-Bach excursion through works for violin and voice (with soprano Christine Schäfer and baritone Matthias Goerne). Busy woman!