Concerts

Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, Festivals, Improv, Interviews, Premieres, San Francisco, Saxophone

Let’s Ask Andrew Raffo Dewar

Here’s the first in a series of interviews with composers who are premiering new works at the 10th Annual Outsound New Music Summit in San Francisco on Friday, July 22nd.  The Friday night concert, entitled The Art of Composition, starts at 8 pm at the Community Music Center, 544 Capp Street, San Francisco. Tickets are available online from Brown Paper Tickets, and you can also buy them at the door.  Listeners who don’t want to wait that long can get up close and personal with the composers, and learn about their creative process, at a free Monday night panel discussion at

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by Polly Moller
Concert review, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, New York, Review

SWARMIUS in The Cell

Barriers between various musical genres continue to be gleefully destroyed by insightful musicians and collectives.  One such divide that has been crumbling over the last few years has been any distinction between “bands” and “chamber groups.”  Beyond the ensembles made up of visually traditional combinations (“string quartets” such as Kronos and Ethel) are more unusual outfits like Clogs, a bassoon-viola-guitar-percussion quartet. The final, June 10th concert of the 2011 Tribeca New Music Festival featured SWARMIUS, a band from San Diego with an intriguing quartet configuration of violin, saxophone, percussion and laptop/electronics.  Led by composer Joseph Waters (whose nom de band

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by Geoffrey Burleson
Bang on a Can, Concert review, Concerts, Contemporary Classical

Liveblogging the BOAC Marathon

So I happened to be in the city over the weekend and didn’t have any interviews or other meetings today, so I figured “Hey, I’ve got a laptop…why not liveblog the Bang on a Can Marathon over at the World Financial Center? One press pass and sweet front row seat later, and here I am. I’m not sure if I’l be insane enough to make it to midnight, but I’ll try to give y’all a sense of as much of the festivities as I can. Started in 1987 by David Lang, Julia Wolfe, and Michael Gordon, the Marathon has turned

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by Rob Deemer
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, New York, Orchestras

League of Composers at Miller Tonight

League of Composers/ISCM has their season finale tonight at Miller Theatre. Louis Karchin conducts a program of five recently composed works. True to form, the evening is chock-full of premieres, including the US debut of Elliott Carter’s Concertino for Bass Clarinet. How many concerts can boast a new orchestra piece written by a centenarian? The concertino features longtime Carter associate Virgil Blackwell as soloist. David Rakowski is also represented by a new concerto. His Talking Points, written at the behest of the League of Composers, features the estimable soloist Fred Sherry as its protagonist. Shulamit Ran’s Silent Voices, written for

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by Christian Carey
Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Festivals, Performers, Premieres

San Diego New Music’s soundON Festival: Evening 1

Full disclosure: I co-founded San Diego New Music in 1994, served as its first Executive Director, and have been a board member since 2000. This isn’t a review or a comprehensive report so much as some of my impressions and observations about what’s going on at The Athenaeum in La Jolla, California, this weekend. If you think I overlooked anything, please feel free to contribute more in the comments section below. After core members of NOISE, the resident ensemble of San Diego New Music, dispersed across the continent (flutist/director Lisa Cella to Baltimore; percussionist Morris Palter to Fairbanks), it became

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by Christian Hertzog
Brooklyn, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Opera

Smooke’s “nonopera” premieres in Brooklyn on Friday

This Spring, Baltimore-based composer David Smooke composed Criminal Element, a “nonopera” in a fabricated language, for Rhymes with Opera, a company devoted to presenting opera in nontraditional spaces. Alongside works by Martin Zimmerman, Ryan Jesperson, and George Lam, it premieres Friday, June 17th in Brooklyn at Cafe Orwell. The program, titled Criminal Intent (hopefully Dick Wolf won’t sue), will be repeated in Baltimore, Hartford, and Boston. As if it weren’t hard enough to compose an opera, non or otherwise, in the midst of a busy semester teaching at the Peabody Institute, where Smooke is a faculty member, the composer decided to

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by Christian Carey
CDs, Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, New York, Orchestras, Philadelphia, Recordings

Symphony Space Celebrates Andrew Rudin

Andrew Rudin is well known to the Philadelphia new music community, both as a composer and, for many years, as a professor at University of the Arts. One of his former students, Amanda Harberg, introduced me to Rudin some years back at a post-concert reception in New Jersey. I remember being struck by his piercing intellect and wide-ranging knowledge of music. I’ve greatly enjoyed interacting with him via Facebook in recent years. Although direct in his opinions, sometimes in irascible fashion, he’s a font of information about composers (particularly Ralph Shapey), opera, poets, and tasty baked goods. On Tuesday, Rudin’s

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by Christian Carey
CDs, Chamber Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Festivals, File Under?, Philadelphia, Strings, Twentieth Century Composer

It’s a Short Six Hours

Tomorrow from 2-8 PM in Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral, FLUX Quartet plays Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2. The concert is the last event in American Sublime, a two week long series that has spotlighted Feldman’s late music. FLUX has been performing the piece since 1999, and their rendition runs around six hours. Feldman himself suggested that the piece could run anywhere from 3 1/2 to 5 hours. But one senses that FLUX’s more expansive time frame doesn’t contravene his intentions. String Quartet No. 2, like many of Feldman’s late works, is about breaking past the boundaries of form and instead shaping

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by Christian Carey
ACO, Competitions, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, New York, Orchestras

20th Anniversary of ACO Readings

The American Composers Orchestra has been holding annual reading sessions for twenty years now: quite a milestone! This weekend will see composers of concert music hearing their works read by the ACO, conducted by George Manahan, with one of the composers being awarded a $15,000 commission. For the first time, there will also be sessions devoted to jazz composers. The New Music Readings’ (June 3 & 4) participating composers are Janet Jieru Chen, Mukai Kôhei, Michael Djupstrom, Narong Prangcharoen, Jordan Kuspa, and Kate Soper. The Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute Readings’ (June 5 & 6) participating composers are Harris Eisenstadt, Mark Helias,

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by Christian Carey
Brooklyn, Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, File Under?, New York

Thursday’s LLList: Locrian, Loadbang, and Lucier

As we gallop towards the end of the concert season proper (and towards the bevy of summer music festivals), it’s shaping up to be a busy time here in New York. Case in point, in the evening on Thursday June 2nd, there are two events that would suit many a new music aficionado’s fancy. Locrian Chamber Players are performing at Riverside Church at 8 PM. The program includes John Adams’ String Quartet (a work that also appears, with different performers, on the new Adams Nonesuch disc), a piece by Manhattan School of Music faculty member Reiko Füting and world premieres

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by Christian Carey