Contemporary Classical

Classical Music, Contemporary Classical

Will You Still Need Me, Will You Still Feed Me?

We’ve gotten a lot (actually, three) requests for a “media kit” from potential advertisers recently.  We don’t actually have such a thing because we don’t actively look for advertising (the Lincoln Center folks and a couple of record companies sometimes contact me when they want to promote something and I charge them a few bucks–if I remember to send an invoice).  Sequenza21 is my hobby, my love and–thanks to all you nice folks who create an enormous amount of entertaining content in your comments, posts and forums–it is a remarkably inexpensive and low maintenance undertaking.

It occurs to me, though, that if we were a little more active in looking for sponsors or advertisers we might be able to do a few more things as a community–more S21 concerts, for example, perhaps in other cities or maybe a commissioning fund.  Maybe we could team up with a performing group.  (How about the Sequenza21 All-Stars?) 

So, here’s our media kit.  We get about 30,000 unique visitors a month and 60,000 page views–nearly all of them musicians or composers. In terms of influence, we rank near the top (Alex Ross) in the Technorati “classical music” rankings.  We have an extremely loyal following–more than 70% of the people who come here are returning visitors. 

We charge $150 a month for up to 145×145 pixels ad and $250 a month for a 145×290 pixels ad in the right sidebar.

If you’d like to become a $1,000 a year sponsor, you can have a
permanent 145×145 pixel ad (which you can change as often as you like); $1,500 gets you a permanent 145×190 ad for 12 months.  $2,500 gets you that–plus a blog@sequenza21 that you get to write yourself.

Of course, if you’re a regular and have no funding I’m happy to help you promote your project free.  I owe you nice folks more than you know.

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

All Moms Love David Hanlon

This Mother’s Day, show her you care.  Nothing says “Thanks Mom” like a high-octane concert of Lachenmann, Ades, Nono, Alex Mincek, and Kyle Hillbrand.  And — just your luck — such a beast is roaring our way with David Hanlon’s Hold the Applause concert at Gallerie Icosahedron this Sunday at 5:30pm.  Of course, if you don’t love your Mom — or you live outside the Eastern timezone — your presence can be excused.  Otherwise, troops, forward march!  The various links will give you all the details you need.

by David Salvage
Click Picks, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music

Steve’s Click Picks #27, take two

Houston, we have a problem… We’re sweating like pigs in your fair city! …OK, OK, it’s not nearly so bad (yet), though the humidity definitely hangs in the air most of the time. But the sky’s blue, the city’s BIG, the food’s good. Things are a’building everywhere; other things are falling apart everywhere, and usually right next to each other. In places it’s hard to tell whether what I’m looking at is renaissance or apocalypse. But if apocalypse, it’s a pretty friendly one.

Just a quick link to honor our new home:

Susan Alcorn (b.1953 — US)

Susan Alcorn Susan plays a quintessential Texas instrument, the pedal steel guitar. She spent a lot of years paying her dues and perfecting her technique in Country bands, but some part of her always hankered after things more adventurous. I’ll let her pick up the story:

I was expected to know the entire song book of American country music from the mid-1940s onward, and I was expected to know the kick-offs and rides for all these songs by heart – from the old Bob Wills songs to Ernest Tubb, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Ray Price, and countless others. Learning this music note for note was a discipline that I am grateful for. However, at the same time I was attracted to other music which appealed to my deeper sensibilities — John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and 20th Century classical composers such as Olivier Messiaen, Kzyrztof Penderecki, and Astor Piazzolla, and I sought out other musicians who shared similar sensibilities. By the late 1980s, after performing straight-ahead jazz for ten years, I took the advice of Paul Bley, with whom I had been corresponding. He told me to throw away the Real Book and play out of tune. I began to develop my own approach to the instrument and to music in general – one that would incorporate the music and the sounds – all music and whatever sound – that affected me. I began incorporating jazz, minimalism, Gamelan Music, Indian Classical music, the folk music of Latin America, birds, wind, clouds, colors, emotions – whatever struck me on a visceral level.

Susan’s pretty sneaky about secreting her MP3s away on her site. I’ll give you this hint: In the pages “biography”, “performance notes” and “links”, in the text of each you’ll find a single highlighted letter, that will lead you to one of three different recordings. Each of the recordings are radically different stylistically, but made kissin’ cousins by way of the glorious sound of the steel, and Susan’s own sensibilities.

And if that seems too hard, or you just want to hear even more tracks, you can take the easy way out and visit her Myspace page.

by Steve Layton
Contemporary Classical

“I’ve got a secret…”

Okay, the person with the secret was John Cage. And, the title refers to the game show on CBS, broadcast in 1960. Yes, there was once a time when a figure like John Cage appeared on TV, on CBS, and performed one of his works. Outside of South Park and the Simpsons, when have you seen major composers on TV.?(Glass appears, as an animated character [not his voice] in South Park, and is mentioned a few times on the Simpsons.)

Anyway, back to Cage: you can see it here. Enjoy!

by Anthony Cornicello
Contemporary Classical

Boston Pops Smackdown!

Yes, you read that right.  Two men got into a fistfight at the Boston Pops, which apparently knocked over chairs left one of them shirtless.  With the obvious caviat that we should use our words to resolve our differences and that violence is generally bad, this is great news for the classical world.  I wish it had been a regular BSO concert.

Conductor Kieth Lockhard apparently took the fracas in stride.  According to one audience member “he just stood there, you know, quiet.”

by Galen H. Brown
Composers, Contemporary Classical, Just Intonation

Underrated: Ben Johnston

Ben JohnstonFor the first subject of this column I’ve picked Ben Johnston, someone who has gotten some coverage on this site but remains criminally neglected. Born in Georgia in 1926, Johnston was variously taught by Harry Partch, Darius Milhaud, and John Cage. All three composers had an obvious effect on his music, but he quickly developed his own distinct voice. Best known for expanding on Partch’s experiments with just intonation, Johnston has contributed not only as a composer, but as a theorist and writer as well.

Johnston has written for orchestra, voice, and chamber ensembles, but his most important works as a composer have been his ten string quartets. Due to the intonational flexibility of the instruments, he has been able to fully explore his ideas concerning pitch and form. His quartets are arguably (and it’s an argument I’m willing to make) the most important works by an American composer in that medium. In his earliest works with non-tempered scales (Sonata for Microtonal Piano, String Quartets 2 and 3), Johnston pulled off the nifty trick of using a basic triad based tuning (5-limit JI) with pitch choices based on serial rows. The results are fascinating, but the cognitive dissonance of such an approach didn’t last long. A major change in Johnston’s thinking was heralded in 1972 by his fourth and most popular (and populist) string quartet, a set of variations on Amazing Grace. His latest works have explored the question of how European music would have developed unconstrained by temperament.

The University of Illinois Press recently released Johnston’s compiled writings on his musical theories and philosophies (and some other miscellany), Maximum Clarity, for which NewMusicBox conducted an interview with Johnston and published an excerpt.

While many of his works are unavailable, a sizeable portion have been recorded. The most significant Johnston recording is the disc of string quartets 2, 3, 4 and 9, put out by the Kepler Quartet last year (it deservedly made Jerry’s top 10 list for 2006). Kepler intends to record all 10 string quartets when funding allows. Head over to their website to see how you can support this important project… or just buy the recording on iTunes. Also, a CD of Johnston’s chamber works is available on New World, and Philip Bush has recorded his piano works for Koch. Those wonderful people at Counterstream Radio have put most of these recordings into their regular rotation.

For those of you who can’t possibly wait to hear any of Ben’s music, the Avant Garde Project is hosting two now out-of-print CRI LPs, containing Johnston’s fantastic 6th string quartet and two very different choral works.

I imagine that many of the readers of this site have at least a passing familiarity with the tuning concepts talked about above. To anyone who isn’t as familiar, Ben’s work is a wonderful starting place for acquainting your ears with these intervals, both because of the extent of which he employs them, as well as the general accessibility of his music. For those who have further interest, I encourage them to check out Kyle Gann’s page “Just Intonation Explained”. Jim Altieri has also designed some free software for calculating and hearing any of these intervals, available at his website.

by Trevor Hunter
Chamber Music, Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, New York

It’s Very Fancy on Old Delancey

Here’s something to put in your calendar.  Our friends at the Metropolis Ensemble, led by Artistic Director Andrew Cyr, have a fabulous program called “There and Back Again” lined up for May 24 at the Angel Orensanz Foundation Center for the Arts, highlighted by the U.S. Premiere of Avner Dorman’s Mandolin Concerto.  Mandolin virtuoso Avi Avital (for whom the work was written) and the Metropolis Ensemble Strings will do the honors.  

“The concerto’s main conflicts are between sound and silence and between motion and stasis,’ Dorman says. “One of the things that inspired me to deal with these opposites is the Mandolin’s most basic technique – the tremolo, which is the rapid repetition of notes. The tremolo embodies both motion and stasis. The rapid movement provides momentum, while the pitches stay the same.”

Dorman says the piece draws from the mandolin’s vast repertoire, including Baroque, Russian folk music, Bluegrass, Indian music, Brazilian jazz and Avant-Garde.  

“When Avi approached me to write a concerto for him, my acquaintance with the mandolin was fairly limited,” he says.  “I had used it in chamber pieces only twice before, and did not know most of the repertoire for the instrument. As I got to know the instrument better, I discovered its diverse sonic and expressive possibilities.”

Also featured will be Osvaldo Golijov’s The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind for string quartet and clarinets, with clarinet soloist Tibi Cziger in collaboration with the Metropolis Ensemble Chamber Players, Arnaud Sussmann and Lily Francis, violins, Eric Nowlin, viola, Michal Korman, cello. The program will round out with Shostakovich’s masterpiece Chamber Symphony op. 110a and Bartók’s Rumanian Folk Dances.

That’s Thursday, May 24, 2007 (7:30pm) at the Angel Orensanz Foundation Center for the Arts, (172 Norfolk St, between Houston and Delancey).

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

Dispatches from Around Town (Part 2 of 2)

Thursday, May 3rd: CUNY Composers Alliance. It’s more than collegial loyalty that compels me to mention last week’s student composers’ concert at the CUNY Graduate Center. We presented a great program of ambitious works ranging from a pocket violin concerto in the Romantic tradition, to a multi-media electronic sound-scape, to an insouciantly postmodern large-ensemble work, to gritty European modernism, and beyond. (There was also some tinkly, diatonic piano improvisation.) Programs do not get more pluralistic than this, and the performances were solid.

Friday, May 4th: Serge Prokofiev, Romeo and Juliet, NYC Ballet. Ballet, take two. Certainly the more accessible of the two recent ballet visits, Peter Martins’s new choreography to Prokofiev’s standby struck me as beautiful and enjoyable, though not so imaginative as Ballanchine’s work from the week before. But I still wish I understood the semiotics of ballet better. I was on firmer ground evaluating the risotto at Café Fiorello’s afterwards: not bad, but overpriced and salty.

Saturday May 5th: TALEA Ensemble at Juilliard. A potent new music ensemble/collective of composers and performers, TALEA’s debut program of works by Jonathan Harvey, Salvatore Sciarrino, Gérard Grisey, Anthony Cheung and Alexandre Lunsqui was serious business. Cheung’s “Ebbing Flow” (clarinet, violin, cello, and piano) avoided the sustained soupiness that seems to be the typical pitfall of spectralist (and spectralist-inspired) composers. Flautist Daria Binkowski was awe-inspiring in Harvey’s “Nataraja” and Sciarrino’s “L’orizonte luminoso Di Aton,” the latter requiring the flautist to inhale through the instrument. Grisey’s “Talea” closed the concert, and, while the piece is fierce and incredible, it struck me, surprisingly, as too short and unbalanced formally. Conductor Vince Lee kept the larger pieces under admirable control.

Sunday May 6th: Tom Cipullo, Glory Denied. Brooklyn College Opera Theater. BC hosted the world premiere of Cipullo’s opera based on the wartime and post-wartime ordeals of Vietnam veteran Col. Jim Thompson, the longest-held US prisoner of the war. Cipullo’s music can veer into syrupy Lydian-land, but the first act holds up relatively well. The second act unfortunately sacrifices musical and dramatic continuity for applause-nabbing solo arias, and the show ends up lacking impact despite its loaded subject matter. As Thompson’s unfaithful wife Alyce, soprano Gretchen Mundinger, a Masters student, clearly showed she’s ready already for a bigger stage.

by David Salvage
Contemporary Classical, Odd

Dental Emergency Monday

A bridge I’ve had since before most of you were born has popped out so I’m off to the dentist.  Somebody write something provocative or amusing for this space.

(There must some amusing stories about musicians or singers who’ve encountered medical/dental/psychiatric emergencies in the middle of performances.)

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

Dispatches from Around Town (Part 1 of 2)

It’s starting to look like the end of the season, and there are even more concerts than usual here in the Center to Universe to feel bad about missing. My own concert-going tends to come in unpredictable binges, the most recent of which began last weekend, resumed last Wednesday, and ended this afternoon (and continues this coming weekend). It’s not all new music, but I thought I’d chime in anyhow to share some highlights.

Saturday, April 28th: Doug Wright, Scot Frankel, Michael Korie, Grey Gardens. So The Mom was in town, we couldn’t get tickets to the Met, and we settled for a musical. I figured Grey Gardens, based partly on the 1975 documentary, would be the easiest thing to stomach. And, indeed, it is a fine show. Of course, this being a musical, there are too many moments whose raison d’etre is purely to press this or that emotional button, but this rendition of the dilapidated lives of some cousins of Jackie O’s is dramatically sound, has some very deft lyrics, and ingratiating music. Chirstine Ebersole in a duel role – she’s the mother in the first half, the daughter in the second half – should be the favorite for the Best Actress Tony.

Saturday, April 28th (evening): Stravinsky: Apollo, Agon; Bizet, Symphony in C. NYC Ballet. Anyone else out there utterly lost by ballet? I’ve resolved to stretch my artistic horizons and get with the program. This season, the NYC Ballet is celebrating the 100th birthday of its co-founder, Lincoln Kirstein. This trio of Ballanchine ballets was enjoyable, though Apollo, with its breathtaking evocations of chariots and flight, left the greatest impact on me. The whole house released a loving sigh when the curtain rose on the Bizet to reveal a stage of white-tutued ballerinas – evidently the ballet version of instant gratification.

Wednesday, May 2nd: Jeff Nichols, Le trombe d’oro della solaritá (trumpet, horn, trombone, percussion, and double bass). Nichols is a professor of music at Queens College, and his fluid, chromatically saturated music deserves to be better known. At the end of the Eugenio Montale poem on which the piece is loosely based, rays of sunlight strike the speaker’s eyes. Over the course of the twenty-minute piece, Nichols musically prepares this image by slowly transforming harmonies comprised of stacked semitones into harmonies of stacked perfect fifths. The process is neither pedantically foregrounded nor academically obscured, and careful listeners will not find the dense musical language disorienting. A marimba cadenza at the end leaves the ears refreshed after much brass-heavy music.

by David Salvage