The Original New Music Community
Conlon Nancarrow died 10 years ago today in Mexico City. Pliable has a nice writeup, and quotes György Ligeti praising Nancarrow as the most important composer of the second half of the twentieth century. I like Nancarrow but that strikes me as generous and raises the question–important to whom? To other composers? Maybe. To the small percentage of human beings who like contemporary classical music? No way.
UPDATE: Here’s the Kyle Gann link I was looking for.
“I had always heard by reputation of the high regard accorded the folk-ballad singer/songwriter Bob Dylan. But I was so engaged in developing my orchestral technique during the years when Dylan was heard by the rest of the world that I had never heard his songs. So I bought a collection of his texts.” John Corigliano, in program notes for his Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan
On the other hand, Dylan probably didn’t catch The Ghosts of Versailles either.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Fallto: New Release from Drifting In Silence
Chicago,IL – August 7, 2007 – Labile Records announces its latest release from recording artist Drifting In Silence.
The latest release, Fallto, is a continuation and further development of themes introduced in Truth, and Ladderdown, from 2005 and 2006, respectively, completing the cycle of this trilogy work.
Fallto has been described as shoegaze meets dancing shoes. Listeners familiar with previous work from Drifting In Silence will recognize the trademark prismatic tonalities and looping rhythms suspended in an ambient mix. Fallto brings these previous threads together, and makes its own statement with edgy timbres and hard driving beats that punch through their atmospheric setting in unexpected ways. If Truth and Ladderdown were explorations in clouds and shadows, Fallto is clouds and shadows moving at the speed of an express train.
Fallto further explores the use of voices and lyrics, rendered faithful to the mix by judicious but delightfully risky application of filters and vocoders. True to the established Drifting In Silence aesthetic, the voices in Fallto are part of the instrumentation. Standout tracks include “Texture” and “Unknowndivide,” which features Jess Hewitt of Drev. Also two separate remixes from Drev and 3l3tronic of the vocal-laced “Chameleon,” injecting industrial-quality breaks and a sick vocal filter, to make for a dance floor smash.
Debuting at #5 on the CMJ RPM most added report for issue 1019. Fallto is available now on
and wherever fine alternative music can be found.
I don’t ski. Asthma. And fear. Mostly fear.
I used to party a bit though and because many of my companions were ski buffs, I have socialized, but not skied, at some of the best places in the world. I have not skied Kitsbuehl and Chamonix and Lillehammer, for example. I have not skied Aspen and Telluride and Jackson Hole. Especially, I have not skied Verbier, the favorite hangout of some rowdy Norwegians of my acquaintance. We have been thrown out of the Feed Club, Verbier’s most lively nightspot, not once, but twice over the years, not a record I’m sure but respectable for middle-aged businessmen.
Alas, I have never attended the Verbier Festival, which has become one of the best music festivals in Europe in recent years. Fortuntately for all of us, they have a terrific web site when you can view all of the performances, including the August 1 premiere of our familiar Avner Dorman’s Spices, Perfumes and Toxins, under the direction of Zubin Mehta. For more Dorman, check out the Metropolis Ensemble’s performance last May of his Mandolin Concerto.
And, welcome back to the S21 blogging fold Judith Lang Zaimont.
Our regular listen to and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, with so much good listening online:
The British — reserved wet-blankets all, right? Ha! There’s an ecstatic light that burns in each of these composers’ work, though in very different ways:
The laser: Brian Ferneyhough (b. 1943)
“Brian Ferneyhough is a composer whose every work probes afresh and ex nihilo the extremes of the musically and technically feasible and stretches the limits of notation. His music is conceived as an ongoing process of transcendence, a constant crossing of boundaries. Each composition is a flight into a virgin land, into uncharted territory. And he is a musical thinker to whom art, rather than existing for its own sake, represents what he himself calls Erkenntnisform — a ‘vehicle of knowledge’.” — Dieter Borchmeyer
The mirror-ball: Jonathan Harvey (b. 1939)
“Jonathan Harvey’s music – ecstatic, inspired, filled now with contemplative rapture, then suddenly with exuberant, joyful dance, and always beautiful – has long stirred me. Among contemporary composers there is none except Stockhausen who can so regularly ‘with sweetness, through mine ear, dissolve me into extasies, and bring all Heav’n before mine eyes’.” — Andrew Porter
The soft translucent glow: Laurence Crane (b. 1961)
“In Laurence Crane’s music the material chosen is familiar; mostly consonant, often tonal, triads, elementary chords, old well-used intervals rescued from a previous unjust ignorant redundancy. The familiar sound or image is abstracted by being placed in a new, clean and often isolated context, like a museum glass case. Its innate value is respected by it remaining alone, unornamented and unaffected during the course of the piece by any development or transformation; the image staying as and where it is by being gently reiterated or prolonged so that it holds our full attention.” — Tim Parkinson
Some interesting fodder for conversation in this month’s Gramophone. Item #1, there are more than 4,000 one-handed piano pieces for the left hand but no more than 75 for the right. Jeremy Nichols reckons that it’s because when great pianists are injured it is invaribly their right arm. His evidence is purely anecdotal, but convincing.
Item #2 is related to this week’s big Focus on Death meme. We all know that cigarette smoking killed Webern but did you know that Enrique Granados died after the ship he was on was torpedoed by a U-boat and he jumped out of a lifeboat to try and save his wife who was in the water? Gramophone’s list is pretty well-known. How about some contemporary updates?
Anybody do Tanglewood? Give us a report.
Check out Frank J. Oteri’s great interview with Indie rockers Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger, aka The Fiery Furnaces, over at New Music Box. Thanks for the shout-out, dude.
Michelangelo Antonioni, 94, on Monday, same as Bergman.
Bergman and Antonioni. Contrast and compare.
Seems like only yesterday we reported that Matthew Cmiel, one of our favorite boy wonders, had put together a new band called Formerly Known as Classical. (Actually, it March 15, 2006, but let’s not quibble.) Looks like the group has done okay since last we checked in; on Sunday, August 5, they’re appearing in a concert at the Cabrillo Music Festival with Marin Alsop, the conductor and music director of the Baltimore Symphony and recent MacArthur Prize winner.
Matthew–now a sobering 18-years-old–will conduct the group in Osvaldo Golijov’s Last Round, an exciting piece of music which gets its title from a story about boxing by Julio Cortazar and is an homage to Astor Piazzolla the late master of neuvo tango.
Then, recent Juilliard graduate, cellist Drew Ford and San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra pianist Preben Antonsen will play Matthew’s piece Macho, Cool and Dangerous, which was inspired by the music of Golijov and Piazzolla.
The concert is Sunday, August 5 at 8:00 PM in the Sant Cruz Civic Auditorium, 307 Church Street, Santa Cruz. If you’re in the neighborhood, write us a review.
Hey, the Steve Layton Songbook is coming along nicely. Check out Prufrock (T.S. Eliot) 2007.
Frank Zappa has a street named after him in Berlin. Frank Zappa Strasse is in Marzahn, a district on the eastern fringe of the capital made up of communist-era housing blocks.
Can’t think of any connection to music except for famous interviews with John Lennon and Johnny Rotten but Tom Snyder was the man for whom talk radio and TV was invented. Nobody did it better except, perhaps, for Dan Aykroyd doing his impression of Tom Snyder.
Ingmar Bergman died at 89. There are lots of connections between Bergman and opera and classical music, both through productions he directed and the use of composers and musicians as characters in his films. That’s today’s topic.