Benjamin Lees died of heart failure on Monday, May 31 at North Shore Long Island Jewish Hospital in Glen Cove, New York at the age of 86. Lees’s work rose to prominence in 1954 when the NBC Orchestra performed his Profile for Orchestra in a national broadcast. He was later awarded Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, allowing him to live in Europe for seven years and present his works throughout the continent. Upon his return to the United States in 1962, Lees was appointed Professor of Composition at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, where he served until 1964. He later taught
Read more[Polly writes about great events happening in the Bay Area, here. And, I’ll have a few cool things happening in Seattle soon. In the meantime here are some interesting performances coming up in NYC ] It looks like the first couple weeks of June are going to be full of tough choices. Like, on Saturday, June 5th will I check-out, a) The JACK Quartet on the opening night of the Tribeca New Music Festival, b) Wet Ink meets Yarn/Wire at Roulette, or c) Feldman performed by Flux Quartet and Evan Ziporyn? Here’s what’s coming up, choose wisely: June 2: Da
Read more2010 celebrates 35 years of the new music festival June in Buffalo and the 25th year that it has been under the direction of composer David Felder. Based at the University of Buffalo, the festival has brought many leading composers and performers together since Morton Feldman started it in 1975 (a wonderful online exhibit on June in Buffalo has been put together by the UB Library and can be found here). This year’s festival kicked off last night with performances of Steve Reich’s Sextet and Double Sextet by the chamber ensemble Signal, who have quickly become a major force in
Read moreThe beginning of June has taken on a certain meaning to the San Francisco Bay Area new music community, and every single one of us would erase that meaning if we could. It’s once again time for the Matthew Sperry Memorial Festival, held every year around this time in memory of one of our own, lost to us in a tragic accident on June 5, 2003. The eighth annual festival happens this week, and the theme is “Homegrown”, since organizers are taking a break from the out-of-town headliners who’ve graced the event each year up till now. First up, on
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Choral Music, Commissions, Conductors, Contemporary Classical, Grammy, San Francisco, Women composers
A year ago at this time, Susan McMane, Artistic Director of the San Francisco Girls Chorus, had no idea what a hot-button issue immigration would be in June 2010. For her, the works of immigrant composers formed a compelling programmatic mix for her five-time Grammy-winning ensemble’s concert series, which she’d entitled A New Land, A New Song. Now, in the midst of nonstop political debate and a deployment of additional National Guard troops to the border, SFGC will celebrate the contributions of immigrant composers to the choral music oeuvre. Composers come literally from all over the map, from Russia with
Read moreBrooklynite singer/songwriter Elizabeth Ziman is probably best known for her work with the indie pop band Elizabeth and the Catapult. But Ziman, a trained pianist who studied film scoring, was recently involved in composing music for a crossover “art song” project. The commission was premiered last Thursday at New Sounds Live, a concert hosted by John Schaefer at Merkin Hall in New York City. Elizabeth and the Catapult, Gabriel Kahane, and Ed Pastorini all appeared, performing new works that demonstrated their own particular takes on the ‘art song’ concept. After the gig, Elizabeth was kind enough to share some thoughts
Read moreFor our friends in Southern California… Soprano Susan Narucki (Professor of Music at UC San Diego) and her new ensemble, Kallisti, will debut this week with the West Coast premiere of Pascal Dusapin’s chamber opera To Be Sung (text by Gertrude Stein). Check out To Be Sung on May 26, 27 and 28 at 7 p.m. in the Black Box Theater at the Conrad Prebys Music Center on the UC San Diego campus. General tickets are $25, but get this: $1 student rush tickets available one hour before the concert. Did you see that? $1 student rush tickets!
Read more[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4SW9Zvtd9E[/youtube]
Read moreWhile a fair amount of attention has been given to the American Composers Orchestra Underwood New Music Readings (namely here, here, here, here annnnd…here) which took place this past Saturday, Miller Theatre wasn’t the only place where new orchestral works were getting read & performed. Saturday was also the culmination of both the Albany Symphony‘s first annual Composer to Center Stage Festival Reading Session and their American Music Festival at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. As the spring semester at SUNY Fredonia was so kind to have come to an end, I decided
Read moreThe National Symphony Orchestra has been hosting composer John Adams over the past two weeks in presentations of his own works as well as works of the 20th century American, Russian and English repertoires. Last week he presented works by Copland, Barber, and Elgar as well as his own The Wound Dresser. This week, Adams and the NSO were joined by violinist Leila Josefowicz for a performance that included Adams’ electric violin “concerto,” The Dharma at Big Sur, and the Washington premiere of the Dr. Atomic Symphony. The program began with Benjamin Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes” from his
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