It doesn’t seem all that long ago that I heard the world premiere of Blind Leaving the Blind. (Read about it here: S21 Review.) It was quite a night @ Zankel, St. Patrick’s Day 2007. Chris Thile has since recorded the work with the Punch Brothers, and made a duo album with Edgar Meyer. Now Thile is about to embark on another journey – a mandolin concerto, Ad astra per alas porci. This week he plays with The Colorado Symphony (September 17, 19, and 20, 2009; with Jeffrey Kahane), then six more chances to hear it, with the Oregon Symphony
Read moreAzica Records’ recording of the San Francisco Symphony playing Jerod ‘Impichchaachaaha’ Tate’s Tracing Mississippi, a four movement concerto for flute and orchestra, and Iholba’ for solo flute, orchestra, and chorus, (reviewed here by Jay Batzner) has been nominated for a NAMMY Award (Native American Music Award). This is the 11th year for the Awards which will be announced on October 3 in Niagara Falls. Here’s an interesting interview with Tate from YouTube:
Read moreWhen 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
Read moreCan an absolute beginner, someone who has never played the piano before or read a note of music, learn to play Debussy’s masterpiece “Clair de lune” completely from scratch? Our amigo Hugh Sung thinks so and he’s posting daily 5-9 minute video lessons and responding to feedback from participants via YouTube’s comment and video response features, as well as the Adult Beginners discussion forum at PianoWorld.com. Details about the project here.
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Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, Film Music, Opera, Premieres, San Francisco
San Francisco-based composer, conductor, writer, educator, and filmmaker Jack Curtis Dubowsky is a very busy man. This Wednesday night, September 9th at 7:30 p.m., he’ll take the stage along with the Jack Curtis Dubowsky Ensemble in San Francisco’s Meridian Gallery, located at 535 Powell Street, convenient to Powell Street BART. Next month, he has a new opera premiering. But fortunately, he wasn’t too busy to talk to me. S21: How does it feel to be leading off the Meridian Gallery’s 11th season of Composers in Performance? JCD: It’s an honor to be selected to be a part of the Meridian
Read moreWell, 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
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