I always walk around with a guilty conscience. My inbox gets loaded all the time with press releases and so forth, and I’m a bit stingy about passing on the goods. Let’s give this another try by way of redemption. SoCal’s S21 readers might want to check out RedBox, an experimental music series held the third Thursday of every month at the Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood. A bunch of groups with achingly hip names are performing this summer. Tickets are only $10. Here’s a composition competition in Finland. Dust off your small orchestra piece and see if you can

The last concert of the season for the Phil closed with roars of applause and approval for Esa-Pekka Salonen‘s Piano Concerto, given its premiere last year by the New York Philharmonic. Listening to the broadcast of that performance was only a weak preparation for what we heard and felt yesterday. It seemed as if the whole audience was, like me, swept up and carried away by the music. And what a performance it was! The concert was recorded by DG, for which we are grateful, and I’ll download it on release. Yefim Bronfman was the soloist, as he has been

Bang on a Can NYC Marathon May 31 – June 1, 2008 6:00pm World Financial Center Winter Garden, New York, NY This year’s Marathon will take place at the World Financial Center Winter Garden from 6pm on Saturday May 31st through 6am on Sunday June 1st. Here is a schedule of composers and performers: 6:00pm Alarm Will Sound performing Son of Chamber Symphony (3rd Movement) by John Adams Pamela Z performing Chalky Crystal Liquid Cave by Pamela Z Alarm Will Sound performing Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Petpetuum by Harrison Birtwistle Lisa Moore performing Lightning Slingers and Dead Ringers^^ by Annie Gosfield

Think you’re too cool for Facebook? Not any more you’re not. S21 has put the freeze on the Internet’s leading social networking site.  Get over there and join the Sequenza21 Facebook Group!   Members will get a taste of the awesome powers at hand to those on the inside of S21.  Oh yeah!  AWEsome powers. C’mon.  You know you wanna. (AWESOME!) All right, back to interval cycles and Kurtag.  Sigh.

We take so much for granted – the sun will go down , the sun will come up – that we never seem to realize that some day it won’t be there or we won’t be here to see it.  Same thing is true of friends you could always count on. So when I got an e-mail from my composer-conductor friend Gerhard Samuel’s companion, Achim Nicklis, that Gerhard had passed away a few weeks ago, I was shocked.  Sure, I sensed he wasn’t well – repeated e-mails saying he’d changed his address indicated as much. – but the sad fact remains.

Sequenza21 is pleased to scoop the rest of the world wide web and announce the most exciting news of the day in the world of new music. On December 4 and 5, the Lost Dog Ensemble, in residence with the Astoria Music Society, will be playing a concert of . . . works by Sequenza21 composers!! The December 4 concert will be in Astoria at the very hip Waltz-Astoria Café, and the following night we’ll be at the Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side (right by Lincoln Center –– an institution that will certainly be feeling a

Anthony Braxton has released a nine-CD anthology of his piano music on Leo Records. Performed by Geneviève Foccroulle, the boxed set includes all of the prolific composer’s piano music written from 1968-2000. The set includes detailed liner notes by Stuart Broomer, featuring an interview with Braxton, and a separate booklet with the libretto and performing directions for his Composition 171, a lengthy work for pianist, actors, prompters, and “constructed environment.” Ranging from Braxton’s Composition 1, a modernist offering in the post-Webernian vein, to Composition171’s complex narrative and theatricality, this is an excellent overview of Braxton’s evolving aesthetic and questing character, presented