Contemporary Classical

Ambient, Classical Music, Competitions, Composers, Contemporary Classical

‘Neath the Shade of the Old Walnut Tree

Back in July, nine students associated with AAIR, the independent radio station of London’s Architectural Association School of Architecture, spent several days recording natural and man-made sounds to create an extensive sonic map of Capri, the island, not the car or the pants.   The result is Radiocapri.

Now they’re inviting all of us to “remix” the sounds of the island in their cleverly named “International Remix Competition A.”  Here’s the best part:  the winning entry will be picked by Brian Eno, Arto Lindsay and Ryuichi Sakamoto.

The winner will get fame, fortune and more attractive lovers, plus a spot on an upcoming Radio Anacapri recording.  Deadline is January 31.  Details are here.

by Jerry Bowles
Awards, Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical

Musical Mashup or Composers Say the Darndest Things

From the CBC:

Toronto composer James Rolfe has won the $7,500 Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music for his contemporary work raW, the Canada Council for the Arts announced Thursday.

raW, written during the buildup to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, won the award designed to encourage the creation of new Canadian chamber music. It was chosen from a field of 115 new compositions.

The work “was written by filtering J. S. Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto through Bob Marley’s War (first movement), Burning Spear’s The Invasion (second movement), and John Philip Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever (third movement),” Rolfe said. 

Does anybody remember who I gave Lee Hyla’s latest CD to review?  Hope it wasn’t Evan since he’s wandered off somewhere until February. If it was somebody else, please review it because I promised.  

I have a bunch of new stuff lying around although some of you still owe me from last year.  How about this one:  John Cage’s Postcard from Heaven for 1-20 harps?

 

by Jerry Bowles
Click Picks, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Minimalism

Steve’s click picks #11

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, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online:

Hanne Darboven (b. 1941 — DE)

Hanne Darboven, 2005

What better way to mark a new year than with something that is only and utterly about time, history and the march of events (or their stubborn recurrence)!

Only one piece to listen to, but it’s a full hour-plus. Darboven’s Opus17a for solo double bass was composed in 1996 for her massive artwork “Kulturgeschichte 1880–1983”, shown at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York. Played here with almost superhuman concentration and doggedness by Robert Black, it’s a piece guaranteed to either absolutely fascinate, repel or bore you to tears, depending on who you are.

The artist Hanne Darboven was born in Munich. Following a brief episode as a pianist, she studied painting in Hamburg. Between 1966 and 1969 she lived intermittently in New York City, then returned to her family home in Hamburg, where she continues to live and work.

Why and how does a visual artist turn to musical composition? The progression makes perfect sense as described in the essay by Lynne Cooke:

…[Darboven’s] work has been informed by Conceptual art practices. Based by the late 1960s on various forms of numerical writing, her systematic work securely occupied the realm of abstraction and universality.

“I only use numbers because it is a way of writing without describing. . . . It has nothing to do with mathematics. Nothing! I choose numbers because they are so constant, confined, and artistic. Numbers are probably the only real discovery of mankind. A number of something (two chairs, or whatever) is something else. It’s not pure number and has other meanings.”

Time has become the focus of Darboven’s art. For her, Annelie Pohlen argues, time constitutes the primary and essential structure of human life — it is “a basically intangible measure for the totality of the indices determining being; it is the content of consciousness; it exists beyond human comprehension.” The calendar, which subsequently formed the foundation of Darboven’s art practice, again offered a universal orientation, embodying a given, prefabricated, ready-made temporal system. Calibrated in her work in many ways over almost three decades, it has provided the basis of an arbitrary artistic system that has the appearance of objectivity. Conjoining a rigorous numerical process with free-associative roots, and tight rational thought with intellectual freedom, Darboven’s capricious sense of time has resulted in diverse monumental works that may span a month, a year, even a century, all recorded day by day.

In the early 1970s Darboven introduced a kind of writing into her work that took the form of an even cursive script. Although executed by hand, this script was standardized and regulated, systematic and abstract. […] In 1973 she began to incorporate texts—transcribed directly because, she has claimed, they could not be bettered— from various writers, initially Heinrich Heine and Jean-Paul Sartre. These texts spoke both to her recognition of the failure of the grand narratives of Enlightenment thought to provide convincing, encompassing interpretations and, equally, to her fundamentally romantic existentialist position. Then, in 1978, she introduced visual documentation alongside her numbers and looping texts, primarily in the form of found and rephotographed images, which allowed her to address specific historical issues for the first time. Shortly thereafter, she invented a system of musical notation, based on her system of numbering dates, which she has used since 1979 to compose scores for organ, double bass, string quartet, and chamber orchestra. Darboven sees her music as she does her “mathematical writing,” a highly abstract language functioning in an entirely self-referential manner; it thus serves as an abstract correlative to the concrete, visual nature of her artwork.

by Steve Layton
CDs, Chamber Music, Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music

Marvin’s Friday Feldmanathon

Our friend Marvin Rosen will be airing the entire 6 hour seven minute version of Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2, by the Flux Quartet, beginning at 11 am, EST on Friday, December 29, as part of a special 9 hour Classical Discoveries program devoted to American contemporary music. 

Two members of Flux–Tom Chiu and Dave Eggar–will join Marvin to discuss the work after the performance.

I believe it is safe to say that Marvin is the only broadcaster in America who both can and would undertake such a mission.

Classical Discoveries is broadcast via WPRB 103.3 FM in Princeton, NJ. and over the internet here. 

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical, Deaths

Galina Ustvolskaya, 1919-2006

The Russian composer Galina Ustvoskaya died yesterday. Alex Ross has the details and the (appropriately) terse, German notice from her publisher, Sikorski.

I don’t have time now to write much about Ustvolskaya’s music, but my encounter with it was one of the determining events of my own musical evolution, and I still can’t quite believe that I performed all six of her piano sonatas spaced out during an all-night new music marathon concert as an undergraduate. (By the time I got to the last of them, round about 4 AM, I was pretty spaced out myself.)

If you don’t have this disc, correct that about yourself. This is the music Shostakovich could have written but didn’t.

Update: WordPress is eating my links for breakfast. Go over to http://www.therestisnoise.com for more details, and the CD you are to buy is Frank Denyer’s recording of the complete piano sonatas on Conifer.(I haven’t heard Oleg Malov’s on Megadisc, a label that has also released several other discs of Ustvolskaya’s hieratic chamber music.)

by Evan
Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, Critics

Promoting Modern Music by Stealth

Tom Jackson over at Modernclassical writes:

Donald Rosenberg, the classical music critic and correspondent for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, gets the cover of the arts section Sunday with a primer on classical music, an article about the “beloved staples” which form the foundation of classical music. The headline graphic lists the usual suspects — Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach.

The big shock is when you turn the page and see a huge graphic accompanying the article listing Rosenberg’s picks for a representative sampling of the repertoire. Rosenberg lists just three works from the Baroque period and only four from the Classical period. The Romantic period lists 19 works, but for the 20th Century, Rosenberg lists 35 separate composers and works, including Ligeti, Lutoslawski, and Messiaen. It is a really impressive effort on Rosenberg’s part to educate readers about modern music. Subversive, almost.

by Steve Layton
Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Music Events

Oh, It Doesn’t Look at All Like Christmas

You wouldn’t know it from the freakish weather (60 degrees today) here in the Center of the Universe but it’s Christmas time and that means it’s time for Phil Kline to lead a massive chorus of boomboxes through the streets of Greenwich Village in the 15th annual holiday presentation of his legendary UNSILENT NIGHT.   

The fun starts this Saturday, December 16 at 7:00 pm, at the arch in Washington Square Park.  You know the drill:  Kline puts the different parts of his composition on cassettes, and distributes them to those who show up at Washington Square.  At the given signal, everyone simultaneously pressses  PLAY.  When the cassettes start rolling, “they blossom into a marvelously crafted symphony” (Time Out New York) and the crowd begins to snake eastward, following a pre-determined route until the piece ends in Tompkins Square Park less than an hour and a mile later. 

Since its debut in 1992, UNSILENT NIGHT has become a cult holiday tradition in NY and around the world, drawing crowds of up to 1,500 participants.  This year will see (actually some of them have already happened) repeat presentations in San Francisco, Philadelphia, San Diego, Vancouver BC, Middlesbrough (England), and Sydney, Australia, as well as the first ever performances in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Baltimore, Charleston, Rochester, Asheville, Milledgeville (Georgia), Banff (Alberta, Canada), and the Yukon Territory.  This past February, a new version of UNSILENT NIGHT was presented at the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, as part of a sound art festival in the Alps.

You’re strongly encouraged to bring your own boomboxes, for which Kline will provide tapes.  Which raises an interesting question:  where do you find boomboxes these days.  Haven’t they gone the way of the 8-track?

Yeah, so get with it Phil.  Let’s have the silent UNSILENT NIGHT with a bunch of people wandering around the Village with their ears stuffed with iPod ear thingies.  Positively Fourth Street Cageian.

Our friend Brian Sacawa led the first-ever Baltimore version of UNSILENT NIGHT on Friday night and has video to prove it. 

 

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, S21 Concert

Making a List, Checking it Twice

It’s the time of year again when everybody makes “best of” lists.  So what’s yours?  CDs?  Concerts?  Meals?  Books?

The concert of the year for me, of course, was the Sequenza21 event which, I believe, exceeded everyone’s expectations in terms of attendance and quality of performances.   I’ll be making my list of best CDs soon.

Who’s got something? 

by Jerry Bowles