Contemporary Classical

American Music Center, Composers, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Media, Orchestras, Women composers

NY Phil’s Curious Omissions

Yesterday, Alex Ross wrote a short essay on The Rest is Noise about next season’s offerings at the New York Philharmonic. After discussing several highlights, including Stockhausen’s Gruppen at the Park Avenue Armory, the NYPO’s first presentation of a piece by Philip Glass (!), and a new work by John Corigliano, he pointed out some curious omissions. Ross wrote,”The Contact! series will elicit new works from Alexandre Lunsqui, Yann Robin, and Michael Jarrell. The series has no American music this year, nor is there any music by women in the entire season.” Like Ross, I’m very excited by some of

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by Christian Carey
Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music

Live From Ann Arbor: Chapter 3

The first student composers’ concert of the new year at the University of Michigan took place last Monday, January 31st. Although brief, this evening of premieres and experiments was just as potent, moving and successful as the other student-run new music events I’ve shared with the Sequenza21. Offering a diverse menu of solo, chamber and electronic compositions, Monday’s concert made yet another statement toward the rich and vast musical community operating in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The evening opened in grand style with Wil Pertz’ The Drink of the Wise #25 Origins (Ti), an aleatoric piece for 16 players divided into

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by Garrett Schumann
Canada, Chamber Music, Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Film Music, Interviews, Orchestras, Portland, Twentieth Century Composer

Interview with composer Tom Myron

The job requirements of a working composer are elusive, perhaps especially for composition students enrolled in University degree programs that fail to provide graduates with the interpersonal and business skills necessary for survival outside the walls of academia. One student composer told me recently: “We are all being trained to teach.”Woody Allen famously said: “Those who can’t do, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach gym.” But those who compose and don’t teach do find ways to sustain themselves and their passion for music through a variety of collaborative and creative means, some perhaps less “traditional” than others. With this in

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by Chris Becker
Composers, Contemporary Classical, Deaths

Milton Babbitt, RIP

Composer Paul Lansky writes at his Facebook page: “I’m sorry to report that Milton Babbitt died this morning at age 94. He was a great and important composer, and a dear friend, colleague and teacher.” Whether as a pillar of strength, or a pillar to push in opposition to, Babbitt was one of the most dominant presences in American classical music these past 50 years. As news and appreciations pop up, we’ll try to give you links. Meantime, there’s this wonderfully human interview from just about 10 years ago, with NewMusicBox’s Frank J. Oteri.

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by Steve Layton
Chamber Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Festivals

February in Fredonia, pt.1: Jamie Jordan

While the Weather Channel might only associate our flyover community with snow & cold every year, here in western New York at SUNY Fredonia things are heating up with the onset of the yearly NewSound Festival sponsored by the student-driven Ethos New Music Society. Since I started teaching here in 2007, we’ve continued a 30+ year tradition of spectacular guest composers and performers, and this year looks to be our largest festival to date. Since Fredonia is in driving distance (3 hrs or less) of so many different arts centers, including Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Rochester, Syracuse & Toronto, it seemed

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by Rob Deemer
Contemporary Classical

Snow Twofers for Metropolis Tonight at LPR

Hi Jerry, Hope you are well, Happy New Year! Because of the snow, we’ve set up a 2 for 1 ticket code and private link for your readers to our concert tonight…please feel free to offer it up if you like: http://lepoissonrouge.inticketing.com/private/ The code is:  2for1 Tonight’s concert, Hallucinations, is at LPR at 8PM (7PM doors) featuring an electro-acoustic remix by Ricardo Romaneiro of John Corigliano’s Three Hallucinations based on his Academy Award-nominated film score to “Altered States,” paired with new works by Du Yun, Gity Razaz, Enrico Chapela, and Ricardo Romaneiro. John, Ricardo, and Enrico’s works are in surround sound (6.1!!!)

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by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

Finnissy in Boston

Over the last two weeks I’ve been intensely involved in the final stages of preparations for the annual New England Conservatory Preparatory School Contemporary Music Festival, other known as Today’s Youth Perform Today’s Music, which happens this coming Saturday and Sunday. My friend and colleague John Ziarko and I started the festival almost twenty years ago because we figured that the best way to get kids to like new music was to get them to play it, working on it in a serious way with people who understood and believed in it. I have to say that experience seems to

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by Rodney Lister
Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, Experimental Music, Festivals, Review

Dan Deacon & So Percussion, 1/20/11

Before any of the musical gadgetry could be used on night three of the Ecstatic Music Festival at Merkin concert hall, the audience rang the evening’s first notes by singing “Happy Birthday” to So Percussion member Jason Treuting, joyfully absent due to the birth of his child earlier in the day. In jeans and t-shirts, the present members (plus Jason’s skillful stand-in) then gathered around a large bass drum stage right and began the evening with a wonderful introduction to their music: chimes mixed with frenetic drumming rhythms I dare not describe. The young men were then joined onstage by

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by Will Roche
Contemporary Classical

Standing Room Only for ‘Crescendos”

2011 got off to a slow start in terms of new music in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Don’t get me wrong; there have been plenty of great individual and chamber recitals so far this semester, but the first concert solely programming 20th and 21st century music was Saturday afternoon’s performance by the University of Michigan Percussion Ensemble, dubbed ‘Crescendos’. With the oldest piece on the program a two-marimba arrangement of György Ligeti’s harpsichord solo, Continuum (1968; score above), I expected to see composers and new music enthusiasts filling the seats of the intimate McIntosh Theater located on the lower level of

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by Garrett Schumann