Well, that is if the time happens to be this Tuesday September 08 from 7:00pm EDT, ’till 7:00pm EDT Wednesday September 09, and you pin your ear to Princeton’s WPRB (103.3FM). I’m just reminding you of what Elodie Lauten has already so nicely plugged a little while back on her own blog: that it’s once again time for radio host Marvin Rosen to serve up his annual Classical Discoveries Marathon. And by “all new”, I don’t mean just the stock & standard 20th-century stuff; this year’s adventure is titled “Viva 21st Century – American Edition” — music by almost 100
Read moreTonight’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
Read moreIt’s not often that Sequenza 21 gets scooped by the likes of Rachel Maddow – but that’s a good thing for composer Melissa Dunphy and the group of 30 musicians that are all performing Dunphy’s The Gonzales Contata with text directly taken from former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ testimony before Congress. Written in a neo-Baroque style, Dunphy has inverted the genders of the primary characters in the story, with Gonzales and Sen. Specter, Leahy and Hatch sung by females and Sen. Diane Feinstein sung by a tenor. The work is being performed this weekend in Philiadelpha at the Rotunda (4014
Read moreThis 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
Read moreA 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
Read moreOur third “Hilary Hahn Interviews…” segment was actually the first recorded for S21; kind of like the first Star Wars was actually the third… or something… I brought Missy Mazzoli to your attention as far back as 2006, when she’d just finished getting her Masters degree. More recently, just a couple months ago we were telling you about the popularity of the alt/classical/something group she’s now part of, Victoire. Those very few years out of school have been kind, with all kinds of projects and praise coming her way. As well they should; Missy’s work overflows with offbeat and surprising
Read moreIf 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
Read moreUp and running for a few weeks now, The Cereal List blog/website attempts to goose the arse of the always-just-a-little-too-sacrosanct classical music world. Run by the shadowy “Milton Blabber”, “Randall Scandall” and “Miss Information”, the blog’s posts have their share of flats mixed with a few good sharps. Though some jabs have veered just this side of awful or even libel, when they get it right, with such gems as “Generate a New York Times Review of your Work“, they’re pretty spot on. My current fave though, has to be “How to Design a Classical Music CD Cover”: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoqcHAdyiN4[/youtube] Whoever
Read moreRonen Givony’s Wordless Music is back at Miller Theater this Sept. 9-12, doing it’s indie-rock/electronic/classical/new-music thing. The 9th brings back the 802 Tour (Nico Muhly, Sam Amidon and Doveman, w/ special guest Nadia Sirota); the 10th welcomes Do Make Say Think and DMST founder Charles Spearin’s “The Happiness Project”; the 11th features Tim Hecker, Grouper, and Julianna Barwick; and the 12th caps it off with Destroyer and Loscil performing a rare collaborative set of original music from each artist’s catalog, then the JACK Quartet. All shows start at 8pm, with tickets setting you back $15-$20. Columbia University’s Miller Theatre is
Read moreThe Prom concert on August 24, by the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Valery Gergiev, opened with Nagasaki by Alfred Schnittke, his graduation piece from the Moscow Conservatory. In this piece for chorus, solo mezzo-soprano, and large orchestra (including a theremin), Schnittke set texts reflecting on the devastation of the Japanese city by the atomic bomb at the end of the Second World War by Anatoly Sofronov, described in Calum MacDonald’s program notes as “the official Soviet propaganda poet”, along with poems by two Japanese poets, Eisaku Yoneda and Shimazaki Tōson. Although the piece was accepted by the
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