Contemporary Classical

Bang on a Can, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, New York

Having a MoCA at Banglewood

If you thought there couldn’t possibly be any more we could tell you about Bang on a Can events the past couple months, you’re so so wrong!  Starting today and running to the end of the month, The “Banglewood” summer festival at Mass MoCA is underway in North Adams, Massachusetts. (Mass MoCA is the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art there, and the fest’s co-sponser.)  Head on up to find public performances, workshops for participants in everything from Balinese music to improvisation, master classes, music business seminars, and more.

Festival events open to the public this year include daily gallery recitals at 1:30pm and 4:30pm, free with museum admission; the perennially popular Kids Can Too event (July 18, 11:30am); an afternoon conversation with the big guy — Steve Reich — about Sol LeWitt (July 25, 3pm); a performance by Bang on a Can artists of Reich’s seminal work, Music for 18 Musicians (July 25, 8pm); and what BoaC event would be complete without a Marathon – six hours of non-stop new music featuring more than thirty composers and performers (August 1, 4-10pm). There are also two recitals daily in the galleries at 1:30 and 4:30 from July 16-July 31.  The Marathon will include a performance of George Anthiel’s 1924 classic Ballet Mećanique, John Adams’ Shaker Loops – heard here in its version for seven solo strings, David Lang’s Pierced, Julia Wolfe’s Dark Full Ride, Michael Gordon’s Potassium, music by Meredith Monk, Frederick Rzewski, and more. In between these events, come and hear music by Todd Reynolds, Eric Chasalow, Daniel Wohl, Walter Zimmerman, Olivier Messiaen, Art Jarvinen, Aaron Jay Kernis, Steve Mackey, Jeff Stanek, Louis Andriessen, Gregg August, Derek Johnson, Brad Lubman, Sarah Kirkland Snider and Morton Feldman.

This year’s Festival faculty members include Gregg August (bass), David Cossin (percussion), Katie Geissinger (voice), Michael Gordon (composition), David Lang (composition), Brad Lubman (conducting), Nicholas Photinos (cello), Vicki Ray (piano), Todd Reynolds (violin), Derek Johnson (guitar), Ken Thomson (clarinet, saxophone), and Julia Wolfe (composition). The Festival will be attended by 10 composers and 24 performers  from across the US, as well as from Russia, South Korea, New Zealand, Scotland, Spain, The Netherlands, Canada, Australia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Yeah, it’s not totally free (but not bank-breaking, either) and you’d better bring bug spray, but other than that what’s not to love?

by Steve Layton
Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, Experimental Music, Improv, Music Events, San Francisco

Outsound New Music Summit kicks off on Sunday

San Francisco’s Mission District, home of so much that is cool, is a natural neighborhood for the arts.  The San Francisco Community Music Center located at 544 Capp Street is the the Bay Area’s oldest community arts organization and San Francisco’s largest provider of low-cost, high quality music education.  In 2008, 2,300 students of all ages, ethnicities and income levels enrolled in Music Center programs and over 16,000 people enjoyed musical performances at no or low cost.

Starting this Sunday, the SFCMC will host the eighth annual Outsound New Music Summit, a festival which for all its success and longevity has somehow stayed the Bay Area’s best-kept secret.  Sunday night’s “Touch the Gear” expo is free and open to the public, featuring 20 individual artists and ensembles and their homemade, customized, and startling instruments and electronic rigs.  All of them will be set up and ready to show you, the audient, how to make music and noise like they do.

Four concert nights follow on the subsequent Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday night. Artist Q & A sessions at 7:15 p.m. each evening set you up for performances starting at 8:00 p.m., starring:

  • Alicia Mangan & Spirit,  ROVA Saxophone Quartet, and Vinny Golia (solo and with locals in a mixed ensemble) in “Free Improvision/Free Composition”
  • Forms of Things Unknown, Peter Kolovos, Conure, Hans Fjellestad, and Thomas Dimuzio in “Industrial Soundscapes”
  • Jess Rowland & The Dreamland Puppet Theater, Kathleen Quillian & Gilbert Guererro, and Bonfire Madigan in “InterMedia”
  • Natto, Ghost In the House featuring Waterphone inventor Richard Waters, and Left Coast Improv Group in “Deep Listening and Introspection”

Full scheduling details and performer bios can be found in the online schedule. Tickets are available in advance from Brown Paper Tickets, or for $10.00 at the door.

by Polly Moller
Broadcast, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Proms

Proms 2009, !

proms_guide09

Yes, it’s Proms season again here in the UK/GB (see link for the differences.) The “worlds greatest music festival” kicks off on Friday and I thought I would put together a vaguely ‘contemporary’ programme for those so inclined.

Included are composers who are still alive regardless of ‘style’, and a few 20th century composers I thought relevant (excuse my subjective and rather fuzzy criteria; Stravinsky and Bartók are included for instance, Debussy, Ravel and Shostakovich are not; feel free to berate me in the comments section.)

All the concerts listed will be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and will be archived a week or so later on their website (for seven days only).  Also, the BBC normally broadcasts quite a few live on TV (usually on BBC 2); these will be archived on their ‘iPlayer‘ but unfortunately this is not accessible by those outside the UK (if you are not a native get your British friends to set their VCRs or whatever newfangled device people are using these days).

If you fancy making a personal appearance, most of the concerts will be on at the Royal Albert Hall in London with those from the ‘Proms Chamber Music’ series occurring at Cadogan Hall in Chelsea (listed below with the prefix ‘PCM’, Chelsea is also in London if you didn’t already know.) The festival runs from Friday the 17th of July to Saturday the 12th of September.

If you are visiting from outside the UK this might be a good year given how weak the pound is currently (against the US Dollar and the Euro at least.) To buy tickets and to check availability please visit the Royal Albert Hall’s tickets page.

Rather than list each Prom I thought composers in alphabetical order might be more helpful (taken from this page on the BBC site where you can access the full list, including Debussy, Ravel and Shostakovich et al), please click on the links to each piece to get more information about the specific concert.

A couple I am looking forward to are Prom 63 featuring two Xenakis pieces (Aïs and Nomos Gamma) and Prom 65 featuring Ligeti‘s Atmospheres and Schoenberg‘s Five Orchestral Pieces (in it’s 100th year) conducted by Jonathan Nott. Also it will interesting to see/hear some of the pieces by younger composers I have never heard anything from before such as Anna Meredith, whose piece Left Light is premiered at Prom 32 and Ben Foskett whose From Trumpet has its first outing at Prom 24.

Anyway, without further ado, here is the list… [EDIT: I’ve now added a link to a Google calendar with the dates and details of all the Proms in the list plus a few more I think, thanks very much to Jamie Bullock for putting it together.]

(more…)

by Ed Lawes
Contemporary Classical

Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble season begins with Pierre Jalbert world premiere

Kevin Noe conducting the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble
Kevin Noe conducting the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble

Summertime in the Steel City brings forth some pretty damn good concerts from the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, one of the best new music ensembles in the country, every year and this year isn’t any different. This summer PNME will be performing over twenty new works, including two commissioned world premieres by Houston’s Pierre Jalbert and Chicago’s Stacy Garrop, over the next four weekends under the direction of their executive artistic director, Kevin Noe.

They had their first concert last night, but you can still catch them this evening at the City Theatre (1300 Bingham St.) for an 8pm concert, and, in a sly bit of audience-building, if you attend a Friday show and want to see it again, they’ll let you in fo’ free with your Friday ticket stub – one could only wish other groups did something like that!

It should also be mentioned that there will be a CD release party tonight after the concert celebrating PNME’s newest release “Against the Emptiness” issued by New Dynamic Records featuring works by Jalbert, Kevin Puts, Russell Pinkston and Ryan Francis.

In case you’re curious about whose works they’re performing this summer – I got that right after the jump: (more…)

by Rob Deemer
Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Festivals

Get your Stockhausen on!

And you thought the master was gone?… Nooo no no, not that easy… His foundation and famous summer courses in Kürten continue — even stronger, if that’s possible. Starting today, July 10th, and continuing every day through July 26th, at 8pm there’s a concert featuring Stockhausen’s work (interspersed with course participants, which spiritually is very much the same thing). It’s a crazy insane compendium of S.’s music, spanning decades; there’s just too much to put on the main page, so I’ll list it all after the jump (and why the hell isn’t German Radio or the BBC camped out for this one?? This isn’t a ‘course’; this is more of a WoodStockhausen!). But before that I’ll quote the official press release:

Karlheinz Stockhausen is alive! His after-life is never ending and more comprehensive than ever: The Kürten Stockhausen Courses and Concerts were Stockhausen’s favourite project and have gained even larger dimensions after his death. The stream of students who want to interpret Stockhausen’s inheritance in a new way, and who for that reason pilgrim from all over the world to Stockhausen’s hometown in the “Bergische Land” every summer, is not ebbing – on the contrary. The same applies to listeners and music lovers. Many of them stay with host families in Kürten. The duration of the concert series has been extended from nine to 17 days. The programme includes electronic sounds, as well as piano, singing, violin, viola, piccolo, basset horn, English horn, tam-tam or percussion. The new version of PROZESSION for computers is brand new. The concerts presented are the highest level and are astoundingly full. And, they are augmented by special lectures: Renowned musicologists speak on Stockhausen’s life and work. (more…)

by Steve Layton
Bang on a Can, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Minimalism

Minimalism Nonstop

Last week the BBC reported that the seminal electronic act Kraftwerk wowed the crowd at the Manchester Velodrome, not just with their music but a live riding appearance by the British Olympic cycling team during their classic song “Tour de France”!  But also interesting was the opening act: Bang on a Can premiering Steve Reich‘s newest composition “2×5“.  Scored for two sets of five instruments (hence “2×5”), the 21-minute piece calls for a total of ten musicians: four electric guitars, two pianos, two bass guitars, and two drum sets.  And this from Reich:

“It took me until 2009 to finally hear their [Kraftwerk’s] music, although I knew of their existence and their name and that they looked like robots and were interested in electronics,” he explained. “When I heard Autobahn, it reminded me of the world I was living in, in the 1970’s. It was the beginning of people doing repetitive music and I guess in rock ‘n’ roll, Kraftwerk were an extreme example of that, very deadpan.”

As someone who spent the ’70s listening to both Kraftwerk and Reich in almost equal measure, I’ll offer from one Steve to another both a bravo and a “what took you so long?!?”

by Steve Layton
Contemporary Classical

Love and Rockets: San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra Plays Old First Church

We like to think that we live in the light, or as the current phrase goes — “it’s all good ” — when in reality everything really seems to happen in the dark where angels are wrestled with. This came forcibly to mind when I caught the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra’s Restless Dreams concert on the June 13th at San Francisco’s Old First Church. The program — 8 pieces by 8 composers–also bore out music director Mark Alburger’s from the stage quip that it was Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony in reverse — instruments were added instead of subtracted as it progressed. Restless Dreams also appeared to go from meditation to conflict, or light to dark.

Philip Freihofner’s Obelisk, which the composer wrote over a long period and “finalized” for this concert, could be described as meditative and/or minimalist in gesture. We tend to think that only loud pieces are powerful , but Freihofner’s soft one, which Rova Saxophone Quartet’s Steve Adams played, backed by a repeating figure on synth with passion and point, hit home. Lisa Scola Prosek’s Voodoo Storm, performed clarinettist Rachel Condry, trumpeter Eduard Prosek, cellist Juan Mejia, and pianist Scola Prosek was delicate and expressive, with subtle yet highly individualized part writing — Condry giving way to Eduard Prosek and vice versa — and it ended, in mid phrase, as so much in life does. (more…)

by Michael McDonagh
Composers, Contemporary Classical, Hilary Hahn, Interviews, New Amsterdam, Violin

Hilary Hahn’s enquiring mind wants to know

Hilary Hahn doesn’t need much introduction; as one of the leading violinists today, many of you have any number of her recordings or have been lucky enough to catch her in concert.

Usually we put our stars up on some pedestal, always with that remove of the stage between us. But Hilary herself has a different idea of what a star should be up to in between wowing folks at those concerts. She happens to love to talk to people, especially other musicians, and is genuinely interested in what makes them tick. And she loves to share what she hears with us, often using her own trusty laptop to record her interviews. As she says: “Through interviewing, I find out things about people which would never come up in casual conversation: how they work, what their creative processes are, how they view their artistic output, what they value in their professions, and so on. To me, those topics are fascinating.”

Hilary was especially interested in doing a whole series of interviews with contemporary composers; since that’s what s21’s all about we thought “why not hook up?” So here’s the deal: each month Hilary will be visiting with a different composer, posting the interview to her YouTube channel.  We’ll let you know as soon as each goes up, give you the first part here and guide you to the place to view the rest. We’re really happy to work with Hilary, and to bring a bit of “real people” to the sometimes too-serious perception of our “art”.

First up, Hilary paid a visit to Judd Greenstein, a composer who’s not only been getting a lot of acclaim for his music, but is also one of the founding forces behind the exciting, young and extremely buzz-worthy New Amsterdam recording label. Hilary and Judd discuss self-presenting, artist-driven labels and the indie classical scene:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rm42bhkvTEc[/youtube]

For the rest just head on over to Hilary’s YouTube channel.

by Steve Layton