Conferences

Classical Music, Composers, Concert review, Concerts, Conferences, Contemporary Classical, Downtown, Electro-Acoustic, Events, Experimental Music, Festivals, Lectures, Media, Music Events, New York, Percussion, Performers, Sound Art, Strange, Twentieth Century Composer, Women composers

The New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (NYCEMF) takes Manhattan

Most New Yorkers are walking about, minding their own business, completely oblivious to the international sonic earthquake vibrating through their midst all week: The New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (NYCEMF). The first wave of the festival (seven concerts) took place as part of the New York Philharmonic’s Biennial at National Sawdust in Brooklyn last week. Yet the lion’s share of the festival is happening right now: 28 more concerts during June 13-19, at Abrons Arts Center on Grand St., for a total of 35 concerts. Yes you read that correctly: 35 concerts of electroacoustic music, including some 350 works,

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by Joshua Banks Mailman
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
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
Ambient, Conferences, Experimental Music, San Francisco

We return to Now, already in progress

I first heard about the Long Now Foundation a couple years ago from friend and former bandmate Daniel Magazin. I remember visiting their web site and thinking that San Francisco was the perfect place for such an entity.  “The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mind set and promote “slower/better” thinking,” the web site declares.  “We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.” Such a perspective seems custom-made to partner with the minimalist and conceptual streams of contemporary music.  UK-based artist, musician, and composer Jem Finer thought so too. He

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by Polly Moller
Composers, Concerts, Conferences, Contemporary Classical, Minimalism

Blängen the Schlingen with Charlemagne Palestine

Pwyll ap Siôn is a composer and Senior Lecturer in music at Bangor University in Wales (UK). His strong interest in Minimalism (he’s written a book on Michael Nyman) led to his co-hosting of the first International Conference on Minimalist Music in 2007. He also made his way across the ocean for the second iteration of the conference, held last September in Kansas City, MO.  Pwyll asked if S21 might like to print a few of his reactions and thoughts from the conference, and we said sure thing: At the Second International Conference on Minimalist Music last September, hosted by

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by Steve Layton
Composers, Concerts, Conferences, Contemporary Classical, Kansas City, Minimalism

Minimalism Conference: Final Report

When I finally struck out for the Kansas City airport on Sunday afternoon, Kyle Gann was about 45 minutes into a very chilled-out performance of his heroic four-and-a-half-hour transcription of Dennis Johnson‘s November–a piece which inspired La Monte Young’s The Well Tuned Piano and was the first minimalist piece to employ a diatonic scale, repetition, and to stretch for multiple hours.  November probably would have been lost to history had Kyle not undertaken the work of rescuing it.  Sarah Cahill was going to take over from him at some point that afternoon, and the final notes of that performance were

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by Galen H. Brown
Composers, Conferences, Contemporary Classical, Kansas City, Minimalism

Minimalism Conference, Day 4

Tonight’s performance by Charlemagne Palestine was, in short, one of the most extraordinary musical experiences of my life.  Palestine has developed a technique for playing the organ which involves the use of wooden shims to hold down keys so he can build up drones with many notes and still have his hands free to improvise melodies over top of it.  He starts with an open fifth and builds over the course of a couple hours to a dense roar that uses most of the available power of the instrument.  It was mesmerizing.  In truth, I wasn’t expecting to like it

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by Galen H. Brown
Conferences, Contemporary Classical, Kansas City, Minimalism, Piano

Minimalism Conference, Day 3

This summary has to be a short one, since I need to finish preparing for my paper presentation tomorrow morning, but today was another excellent conference day.  During the day, in addition to papers there was a concert of Tom Johnson‘s extremely minimal Organ and Silence performed by Neely Bruce.  At dinner time Robert Carl gave a plenary address about In C, a subject on which he has just published a book.  Then we all had some of the justly famous Kansas City barbecue.  In the evening Sarah Cahill, a great champion of contemporary music, gave a concert which included

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by Galen H. Brown
Conferences, Contemporary Classical, Kansas City, Minimalism

Minimalism Conference, Day 2

A day that starts at 9AM and ends after 11 at night, in which 15 different people give presentations, and which culminates in a two hour concert, is not a day that is easy to distill down to a single theme (except perhaps happy exhaustion).  We began with no fewer than six papers on Steve Reich, some of which were thematically linked but none of which was redundant.  Perhaps my favorite moment of those morning sessions was when Sumanth Gopinath compared a feature of Different Trains to the music from a classic 1980s IBM commercial.  In the afternoon we had

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by Galen H. Brown
Conferences, Contemporary Classical, Kansas City, Minimalism

Minimalism Conference Day 1

If good luck in travel is a harbinger of things to come, then the fact that my flight into Kansas City for the Second International Conference on Minimalist Music actually touched down twenty minutes early is surely a very good sign.  And so far today things have worked out that way. The conference got underway with two papers on Intertextuality in the music of Dutch composer Louis Andriessen and British composer (and the first journalist to use the word “minimalist” to describe music) Michael Nyman.  Apparently Nyman steals liberally from everybody, including himself.  I mean that in only the best

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by Galen H. Brown