It might be a small, unassuming, and verdantly appointed campus, but within lurks a strong new music contingent! The College of New Jersey is having a faculty composer recital next week. Peter Jarvis, director of the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble, will be performing the premiere of Carlton Wilkinson’s piece for drum set Jungle 5-7675, a work he commissioned, on the program this coming Thursday. Four other composers on faculty will also be featured. Music Faculty Composers Recital Featuring works by Robert Young McMahan, Teresa Nakra, Ralph Russell, William Trigg, and Carlton Wilkinson. Thursday, March 5, 2009 @ 8 PM Mildred
Read moreSome enterprising folks have put together an updatable master list of artists, musicians and bands on Twitter. (Yes, now you too can tell Jimmy Eat World what you had for breakfast). Why don’t one of you geeky types with some time on your hands rush over to Google Docs and create a spread sheet where Composers, Real Musicians (like the ones who read S21) and fellow travelers can add their Twitter addresses. We’ll do a link
Read moreIf you tend to enjoy “litterchur” as well as classical music, you also tend to become aware that authors such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Ezra Pound, and Paul Bowles were intermittently serious about composing music. One I did not know about, but was brought to our attention in an email received today, was Anthony Burgess. Always to be known best for his — by no means favorite — novel A Clockwork Orange, Burgess composed more than 175 works, as well as a few opera libretti. Which brings us to the Harry Ransom Center, an artistic and cultural archive at the University of Texas
Read moreOur always adventuresome friends at Starkland have outdone themselves this time with an ambitious 65-minute studio composition by Phil Kline commissioned specifically for high-resolution surround sound and DVD. Around the World in a Daze offers Kline’s trademark boombox choirs, as well as (it says here) “an ethereal Ethel string quartet, a weird madrigal, hyper-dense bells (hundreds of thousands at one point), richly mournful multi-tracked vocals, soaring violinistics from Todd Reynolds, and an immersive environment of 15,000 African gray parrots.” I’m a big fan of innovative packaging (this is one of my all-time favorite books) and Daze is an amazing example of cool presentation. The custom‑designed double
Read moreTwo of New York New Music Ensemble’s members, clarinetist Jean Kopperud and pianist Stephen Gosling, will be premiering six new pieces at Merkin Concert Hall on Monday, Feb. 23 at 8 PM. The pieces were composed for the duo by Eric Moe, Paolo Cavallone, Steve Ricks, David Felder, James Primosch, Jason Eckardt, and Harvey Sollberger. Apparently they’re calling this the Rated X Project, but we’re hoping everyone at Merkin keeps their clothes on. Really.
Read moreLast Wednesday, February 28, I had the pleasure of seeing two superb up-and-coming chamber ensembles on a double bill at Music On MacDougal in downtown Manhattan. The Moët Trio (Yuri Namkung, violin; Yves Dharamraj, cello; Michael Mizrahi, piano) had the first half of the program, and they opened with John Zorn’s Amour fou. The Zorn was a surprisingly modernist piece for a composer who is known as a pivotal figure in the downtown scene, and while I can’t say I liked it I definitly respected it. It was one of those pieces where every note was exactly the right
Read moreThe ‘reenvisioned’ Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center opens Sunday. I hope they haven’t moved the chairs closer together. It was the only concert hall in New York where you could walk across a row without stepping on a fellow patron’s feet. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaWYSvlCZH4[/youtube]
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ACO, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Downtown, Electro-Acoustic, File Under?, New York, Orchestral, Orchestras, Philadelphia, Uncategorized
While well-known for his writings about music, including books about Elliott Carter and George Gershwin, David Schiff is also a prolific and active composer. A professor at Reed College, he’s visiting New York this week to hear the American Composer’s Orchestra premiere a revamped version of Stomp, a piece that celebrates the music of James Brown. The concert, part of the Orchestra Underground series, also includes premieres by Margaret Brouwer and Kasumi, Rand Steiger, Fang Man, and Kati Agócs. Carey: Stomp was written in 1990 for Marin Alsop. How did you decide to write in homage to James Brown? Schiff:
Read moreA couple quick bits passed along by S21 compadres: Ed Lawes wants to remind every classical afficionado to take a gander at the Gramophone’s online archive. Literally every issue of the magazine is there, from 1923 (!) until today. If that doesn’t count as a fabulous resource, I don’t know what does. And our favorite crusty uncle, Seth Gordon, has word on a new-music Oscar tie-in that you may not be aware of: Yeah, yeah, we all know that the best score is headed to one of the semi-usual suspects: Alexandre Desplat, James Newton Howard, Danny Elfman, A.R. Rahman, Thomas Newman… But
Read moreBig Up to our familiar Lawrence Dillon whose Ravinia Festival winning composition The Better Angels of Our Nature will be performed on tour by the Lincoln Trio (ensemble in residence at the Music Institute of Chicago) and narrator Welz Kauffman (CEO of the Ravinia Festival) 33 times from February 11th to April 24th in cities throughout Illinois, including Chicago, Springfield, Champaign, Decatur, Urbana, Evanston, Lincoln and Bloomington. The work is one of three competition-winning compositions, the other two of which are James Crowley’s From the Earth and Eric Sawyer’s Lincoln’s Two Americas. All three works will be presented on the tour.
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