Contemporary Classical

Click Picks, Contemporary Classical, Uncategorized

Steve’s click picks #10

Our weekly listen 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 (This will be the last click-picks for December; Xmas, New Years, etc., you know how it goes… back with more in January):

Aaron Gervais (b.1980 — CA / US)

Born in Edmonton, Canada, Gervais is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in composition at UC San Diego. Aaron is also a graduate (with honours) from the University of Toronto, where he studied under Professor Chan Ka Nin. He’s also studied jazz and composition at Grant MacEwan College, composition at the University of Alberta, and Cuban percussion in Havana. He’ll tell you:

Over time, my music has gradually taken on more and more aspects of my particular musical background. I grew up playing jazz and rock drums in addition to classical percussion, and this influence has become increasingly clear in my pieces, although not always in terms of direct appropriation. What is more common is an interest in the cultural elements of hearing: why we hear things in certain ways, what it is we listen for in particular genres, and so forth. In addition, my recent pieces have taken a particularly critical slant on these questions. I tend not to trust statements or ideas that people take as axiomatic, so I have focused on writing music that deconstructs these “givens” in order to find out exactly how axiomatic they really are—challenge for the sake of challenge, in other words. […] Over the past few pieces, I have been interested in writing music that is fast-paced, rhythmic, and light in texture. I’ve definitely written a lot of slow dark music, but it seems to me that there is a preponderance of that kind of thing in the new music community and I want to see how far I can push the other direction. Composers like Jacob ter Veldhuis and Richard Ayres have been particular inspirations in that regard, though I am just as likely if not more to look at popular music for this.

Aaron’s clean and clear site will tell you more, and under “Works” you’ll find plenty of quality listening, along with program notes and score excerpts.

Pamelia Kurstin (b. 1976 — US / AT)

For all its low-tech, archaic and arcane qualities, the theremin (that curious electric box that you play by moving your hands/fingers through the space around two antennae) has had a fairly healty resurgence in the last ten years. In fact, I’d venture to guess that the number of people playing (or at least playing with) the theremin is higher right now than at any time since its invention in the 1920s. Of all these, one of the most musical and ambitious has to be Pamelia Kurstin. Hailing from Michigan, time spent in NYC, but now in Vienna, Austria, Pamelia has a real affinity for coaxing beautiful music out of what can be an real beast of an instrument. Besides appearing on many other artist’s recordings, she’s long been rumored to eventually have a solo CD appearing on John Zorn’s Tzadik label. In the meantime, this will take you to her Myspace page, where you can hear four intriguing selections. She does have a “real” website here; no sound and it’s a jumbly mess, but between the two you’ll get a pretty good idea of her restless and cheeky-smart character.

Hakoneko (JP)

Hakoneko’s real name? I’m not sure we’ll ever know. The only biographical line we have is this: “I started making music with PC while cherishing my sweet cat in my room.”…. Released about a year-and-a-half ago on the excellent Portuguese netlabel Mimi, Hakoneko’s Umi no drone (Drones of the Sea) is one of the most ravishing examples of so-called “ambient” or “drone” music I’ve ever heard — and I’ve heard a lot! This kind of music is all about color and volume, something that palpably fills the listening space and makes its own atmosphere (in an almost literal sense). There are many excellent, high-profile artists in this style, but that they can be in every way equalled, even bested, by a kid sitting in their bedroom in Japan is why it pays to always keep the ears open and let the music, not just the official hype, do the talking. …And to marvel at this web, which can cut out all the business-wonk and connect a bedroom half-a-world away directly to my living room.

by Steve Layton
Bang on a Can, Classical Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Music Events

The Bang On A Can All Stars at Zankel Hall

December 5, 2006 — One of the great things about the internet is that several of the pieces on this concert were available for preview on the Bang On A Can website, and in fact you can still hear those previews to get a flavor of what I’m talking about.  New music concerts are so hit-or-miss, it’s a shame more organizations don’t offer this service to help potential audience members pre-screen their events.  If you’re listening to that preview, you will already have figured out that this concert was one of the good ones. (more…)

by Galen H. Brown
Classical Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Music Events

The Case of Martin Bresnick

Martin Bresnick turned 60 last month and he’s celebrating the event with two events at Zankel Hall this week.  One piece will be on the Bang on the Can All-Stars program on Tuesday night and, on Saturday, the Yale School of Music will devote an entire evening to Bresnick’s music, including choral songs, a concerto for two marimbas, and a multimedia piece for solo pianist.

Steve Smith has a splendid profile of Bresnick in the Sunday New York Times which acknowledges the perhaps unfortunate fact that Bresnick is best-known for being the teacher of other composers who are more famous than he is.  On the other hand, it’s hard to feel too bad for a guy who is the coordinator of the composition department at Yale, where he has taught since 1976.

I can’t recall ever hearing any of Bresnick music (an oversight I hope to correct on Tuesday night) but I suspect many of you have and perhaps some of you have even been his students.  What do you think about him as a composer and as a teacher?

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Music Events

Dreams That Still Come True

Ben Ratliff has a great review (and photo) in today’s New York Times of our amigo Darcy James Argue’s Thursday gig with his big band at the Bowery Poetry Club.  Having your name mentioned in the same sentence as Charles Mingus and Bob Brookmeyer is a pretty damned inspiring head rush and we’re thrilled for Darcy and the gang.  Read his postmortem and listen to samples here.

The big news out of Second City this week is that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra will return to weekly radio broadcasts on WFMT-FM, 98.7 (probably in March 2007) and the CSO has founded its own record label.  Our informant, Marc Geelhoed, informs us that the label, known as CSO Resound, will issue compact discs and digital downloads of live CSO concerts available from iTunes and the CSO website. The first release will be Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 with principal conductor Bernard Haitink and mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung from last October. The recording will be available in early 2007, but the exact date and price of the release was not specified. BP’s gift of $3.4 million will fund the radio broadcasts, and the Boeing Company donated funds for CSO Resound.

This is the future of big time classical music.

by Jerry Bowles
Click Picks, Contemporary Classical, Uncategorized

Steve’s click picks #9

Our weekly listen and look at (mostly) living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, since it’s right there waiting online. (the “click picks” category at the bottom of the post isn’t working, but you can revisit all the previous “click picks” by visiting this link: https://www.sequenza21.com/index.php/?cat=29

Elizabeth Olivia Walling (b.1981 — UK)

Walling started out as a self-taught soprano and flautist. She began composing in 2001, and moved to formal composition and performance studies a year later. She’s been a member of New Music Brighton since 2003, and currently writes and performs with the recently-formed group Accident Ensemble. Her work bears a self-confessed “brazen” range of influences and styles which emerge from her long-standing interest in music of many periods: early liturgical and secular music, baroque, classical, modernist and avant garde, jazz and electronic. Recent experiments with electronics show a greater focus on using both modern and early electronic music technology in live performance.

Click on “Works”; you’ll find recordings of many pieces waiting (try Nani, nani, Cane Hill, or the Sanctus if you’re looking for a place to start). For someone who’s only been at composition for 4 or 5 years, there’s a real “voice” and a sophistication that usually doesn’t come so early.

Brian Kane (b.1973 — US, NYC)

Wonderful composer who also does double-duty as a fine jazz guitarist. California-born and trained, but dragged himself across the Rockies and Mississippi to be a post-doctorate Fellow at Columbia University for a while. And boy, does it show!… Besides lots of complete recordings of his work, the site also has quite a few interesting articles on all kinds of contemporary music topics. A nice touch: you can even get Brian’s music fed to you as a podcast, if that’s your thing.

Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1918-1970 — DE)

Ah, my first dead guy. And rather than a range of work, just one piece: Zimmermann’s fantastically fun Musique pour les soupers du Roi Ubu of 1968. From the notes there:

“I am presumably a mixture, typical of the Rheinland, of monk and Dionysus” — “… as the oldest of these young composers” : two self-revelatory sayings of Bernd Alois Zimmermann. In both of them there is not only a concentrated charge of psychological problems, of pessimistic estimation, of clear vision; two famous quotations of the composer who was regarded as being “difficult” in his lifetime, to whom success was denied — apart from his opera “The Soldiers” — who could be so ecstatically joyful and profoundly dejected; an all-round mind and, as many have put it, the last composer who was a master in every field. Perhaps Zimmermann is so popular with younger composers because they find in his works concrete material, comprehensible compositions, first-rate craftsmanship and well-formed material; a composer who, in spite of his basic philosophic tenet, never suppressed “inspiration” or a “flash of insight”, but encouraged spontaneity.

One of the best “pastiche” works I know, with quotes from all over the map (some are blindingly obvious, but see if you can catch the unusual, such as Stravinsky’s Symphony in C), masterfully squashed and skewed, and truly made his own. Every bit worthy of Jarry’s great Ubu Roi!

by Steve Layton
Chamber Music, Classical Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical

Argento at Symphony Space

Argento

On the Friday before Thanksgiving, the Argento Chamber Ensemble took the audience at Symphony Space on a little transatlantic trip with an evening featuring four contemporary French composers: Fabien Levy, Gérard Pesson, Tristan Murail, and Philippe Hurel.

Of course for many readers, the phrase ‘contemporary French composers’ will evoke one word (especially with Murail being one of the composers in question) – spectralism. For those of you how aren’t familiar with the term, spectralism is an approach to composition that arises from the analysis of the partials of a particular sound or sounds (its spectrum). How this information relates to the music written naturally varies from composer to composer, but the results often have some relationship to the overtone series and often require the performers to navigate microtones and precise dynamic indications. Though spectral music has been around for 20+ years old in France now, it’s still making inroads with audiences in the United States. Indeed, the men and women of the Argento ensemble have helped pave many of these roads by featuring spectral music from both sides of the Atlantic in their concerts over the past six years.

On Friday night, however, the focus was squarely on the composers and their music rather than on the movement. Were it not for a few passing references in the program notes and the evening’s “Shades of Sound” title, listeners would’ve had little clue that the pieces presented belonged to a particular school. Even a listener acquainted with spectralism through its orchestral canon would have had reason to be surprised at what he heard. The only tendencies that the seven pieces on the bill overtly shared were attentiveness to detail and acute awareness of the sonic surface.

Hurel’s …à mesure opened the concert with a splash of tempered noise that periodically dissolved into octaves shared by the ensemble. Eventually the gyrations coalesced into a hocketed loop that then eerily settles into a conclusion.

Next came the U.S. premiere of Murail’s Les Ruines circulaires for clarinet and violin. Murail programmatically describes the piece as a mid-dream confrontation, and the image is apt. The music came to an intense gestural climax with the two instruments relentlessly climbing on top of one another only to tumble back down again and again.

The first half of the program wrapped up with the evening’s only electronic work, Levy’s Soliloque on Fabien, Tristan, Gérard and Philippe. This ‘meta-score’ (to use Levy’s terminology) takes samples of the other pieces with which it’s programmed and enmeshes them into a new purely electronic work (it also sticks the composers’ first names into the title – more info about it all here). It’s a neat idea, and it had some intriguing moments as its samples fluttered back and forth across the border of recognition. There was some nice spatialization too. Ultimately though, it suffered from sounding very Super Collider-y (perhaps an inevitable consequence since it was written entirely within the software).

The second half opened with my favorite work of the night. Tristan Murail is a composer of subtlety, and his C’est un jardin secret… for solo viola is a direct expression of that fact. Stephanie Griffin whispered her instrument into the piece by imperceptibly increasing the bow pressure. From that teasing opening, the piece enters into a sound world of timbre fused with melody. It’s gorgeous.

Pesson’s Rebus had the misfortune of following C’est, but it was the right piece to do so. The work is for flute, clarinet, violin, viola, and cello, and it takes Tavener’s In Nomine theme as its inspiration. In Rebus’s brief 2-minute span, the cantus firmus is spun into a series of bright, pleasant harmonies.

Swapping the viola for a trombone, Argento dug into Fabien Levy’s Risâla fî-l-hob wa fî’ilm al-handasa. The title is Arabic for “small treatise on love and geometry,” and the music is inspired by ornamentation in Islamic art. The first movement opened fiercely and then gave way to a second section that felt slow-motion-like in comparison. My favorite moments of the second moments arose from some interesting interplay between the bass clarinet and the trombone.

The night’s finale was Pesson’s Le Gel, par jeu, which the composer labels a danse macabre. The piece hops between some intense textures and scrounges through a few prominent quotes. Pesson cleverly replaces the traditional xylophone with a bass marimba that he uses to good effect. The whole thing loses a bit of steam about halfway through, but remains thoroughly listenable.

All in all, the concert was a testament to the diversity of the French new music scene and to Argento’s ability to show it off. Keep on eye out for the next Argento concert in January at Merkin.

Photo from Argentomusic.org

by Lanier
Classical Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Music Events

Concert Promotion Porn

The Can Banger All-Stars are playing Zankel Hall on Tuesday, December 5, beginning at 7:30 pm, in a program called American UnPop

What is American UnPop? This is how Evan Ziporyn, clarinetist for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, describes it:

“Vox populi, vox pop, the voice of the people, or rather the voices of many different peoples, filtered through radio, record companies, market testing and the iTunes…pop culture is today synonymous with corporate culture, but it doesn’t have to be that way.  The music industry may be a nightmare, but the sound of pop music, in the broader sense, is the sound of our dreams, the trigger of memories, the actual texture of our unconscious.  A good melting pot still retains the flavors of its ingredients, even when it reveals the personality of the chef.   

 

Conlon Nancarrow taking boogie woogie bass lines and the covert rhythmic subversion embedded in blues and jazz; Martin Bresnick finding the common thread between holy minimalism, Franz Kafka, and the harmonies of Steely Dan; and Fred Frith finding the peril in an old children’s game, searching for the Court of the Crimson King while riding on the O’Jays Love Train.

 

There are ghosts in this machine, eminences to be evoked: Don Byron using the ancestral memories of the All-stars to distill Bernstein and soul jazz; Thurston Moore and Julia Wolfe stirring the pot, raising a cloud of guitar dissonance, through which we may or may not hear Appalachian dulcimers, Moondog’s bass drum, and Cecil Taylor.  

 

If this sounds like an average day on your iPod, well, join the club.  But the iPod shuffle only changes tracks after every song: you travel light, but the border guards are still on duty.  At American unPop, we’ve torn down the walls.”

Does anybody besides me need a cold shower after that?

by Jerry Bowles
Bass, Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, Los Angeles

Last Night in L.A.: Concerto for Bass

The International Society of Bassists wanted a new concerto for their favorite instrument, and they wanted orchestras to play the work rather than merely filing its name in the list of new works that they might think about some future year.  With help of their members they formed a consortium of 15 orchestras to back the work, enabling each participating orchestra to list themselves as a co-commissioner, giving each a “premiere” (even if merely a local one) at a bargain price.

John Harbison was commissioned to write the concerto, and yesterday the Los Angeles Philharmonic performed his “Concerto for Bass Viol and Orchestra” (2005), performed by our principal of 30-some years, Dennis Trembly.  This is a fairly short concerto; its three movements require a little less than 20 minutes.  Harbison used a slightly reduced orchestra, and in Disney Hall Trembly’s bass was audible throughout the work’s range of pitch and technique.  The work was particularly successful in having the bass become a singer, with several long, lyric melodies.  Less successful was exploration of the top notes.  The work could have used more fire, perhaps, or more emotion to add some force to the pleasant sounds.  The work didn’t have a single consistent musical style, having elements from a wide range of musical history, so it did have color and interest.  It was played as the center work between Janacek’s “Vixen” suite and the Dvorak 7th, and the Harbison worked with its companions.  Salonen is away all month and we’ve had a series of bland concerts with a series of guest conductors, but yesterday’s conductor, Carlos Kalmar, was a pleasant surprise.

by JerryZ
Click Picks, Contemporary Classical

Steve’s click picks #8

Our weekly listen 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. (The “click picks” category at the bottom of this post isn’t working, but you can revisit all the previous “click picks” by clicking this link: https://www.sequenza21.com/index.php/?cat=29)

Soteria Bell (AU)

From Australia’s Time Off newspaper: If you’ve seen the latest Ray Lawrence flick Jindabyne, no doubt you’ve been entranced by the ethereal soundtrack. Written by Paul Kelly and Dan Luscombe, Kelly hand picked the Melbourne duo Soteria Bell, featuring Mia Shaw and Linda Laasi, to join him in creating the unnerving atmosphere the film’s score creates. “We had seen the film without music before the sessions began and in some cases Paul [Kelly] would remind us of a scene in the film, and then it was a matter of remembering that scene and trying to convey the emotion that was felt during it with our voices,” Mia Shaw says. “It was challenging, and a fantastic experience.” After collaborating on highly-acclaimed harmonic throat singer Dean Frenkel’s album Cosmosis, the duo are currently working on their debut 44 Sunsets, with first single ‘Dragma’ released soon. “The album is coming along really well,” she says. “We are working with great, creative people [and] we have a lot of special guests such as Frenkel on the album. “The album is varied, with an instrumental track, purely vocal layered tracks, and everything in between — we have had no boundaries for it! Also [we had] no real pre-conceived idea of what it should sound like. “It is definitely an exploration of the voice and what the voice is capable of, both organically and in some cases having been processed a little and played around with by our co-producer Simon Bailey.” And after the record is finished? “Once the album is done, we’ll be concentrating on live shows. How [we’ll] translate it all over from the studio to stage will be interesting, and we are very much looking forward to it!”

David Fenech (b. 1969 — FR) / Ghedalia Tazartes (b. 1947 — FR) / Frank Pahl (b. 1958 — US) / Julia Holter (US)

Somewhere in the nether region between pop/folk and classical/tech, flying well under most folks’ radar, a genre has quietly developed around the world. Its means are often low-tech and lo-fi, its sound like something born out of “the people”. But which “people” makes all the difference… This music isn’t the simple borrowing and mixing of this or that pop/art thread into the other; the imaginings of these folk take their work past the merely Synthetic, to a genuinely new Authentic. So, a music of “the people”, but a people that that these musicians’ own inner necessity had to invent. Naive, simple and direct… but really smart, complex, and purposely ambiguous. In that is every bit as much art as any with “classical” composer working today.

There are so many places I could point you to hear stuff from all over, both pioneers and fresh faces. But screw the history lesson; just listen to a couple of my own faves to get the idea.

And what better place to start than with David Fenech and his Demosaurus website? I can give you three artists to hear, each born in a different decade, all gathered in one place. I’ll let David introduce himself:

“David Fenech has been an active composer, performer, and improviser for over ten years in France. His works include acoustic, electronic, tape, and digital media, including sound installations and film scores. After creating the musical collective peu importe in Grenoble in 1991 (free improvisation and songs – many gigs in Europe) his music has shifted to more personal and strange areas, mainly using voice as an instrument. In 2000 he released his first solo CD, called Grand Huit. As a soloist, David plays guitar and ukulele as well as small instruments such as melodica, cavaquinho, toy piano and xylophone. He recorded concrete music at la Muse en Circuit with Laurent Sellier, at the Coream studio with Claude Hermitte. He also wrote the score for Tant de chiens, a short movie by Stephane Ricard; they then worked together on an interactive installation called Eloise, based on the idea of a musical tamagotchi.”

From the Forced Exposure website: Ghedalia Tazartes is a nomad. He wanders through music from chant to rhythm, from one voice to another. He paves the way for the electric and the vocal paths, between the muezzin psalmody and the screaming of a rocker. He traces vague landscapes where the mitre of the white clown, the plumes of the sorcerer, the helmet of a cop and Parisian anhydride collide into polyphonic ceremonies…. The greatest trips are made in the deep end of the throat: the extra-European music opens the ear to Ghedalia’s intra-European exoticism. Where was music before music halls? Where was the voice before it learned how to speak? Ghedalia is the orchestra and a pop group all in one person…. The author and his doubles work without a net, freely connecting the sounds, the rhythms, his voice, his voices.

And back to David: “Frank Pahl is a fantastic musician…. a one man band, also known as a member of Only a Mother, playing a raw music on acoustic instruments (we can hear ukuleles, prepared piano, clarinets, euphonium). Beautiful melodies seem to come out from nowhere…. the unknown world of inventive folklore. With Brian Poole (Renaldo and the Loaf), Dennis Palmer (Shaking Ray Levi), Nick Didkovsky (Dr. Nerve , Fred Frith guitar quartet), Doug Gourlay, Tim Holmes and Eugene Chadbourne.”

About Julia Holter, I can tell you almost nothing, except: She’s pretty young, studies music (first in Michigan, now in California), has a penchant for giving small intimate concerts in her own home and likes to collaborate in all kinds of settings. Her open ears let all kinds of influences freely mingle, which are then shaped into wonderfully sensitive, naive-yet-waaay-smart miniatures. She doesn’t have an official website, only her Myspace page, and it only allows four tracks at any moment. But Julia changes the four out regularly, so drop by now and then to see what new treat has shown up. (I have ten great tracks now; be the first on *your* block to collect them all!)

by Steve Layton
Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, Piano, S21 Concert

If a Frog Had Wings He Wouldn’t Bump His Ass so Much

The brilliant and talented piano and TabletPC genuis Hugh Sung has a terrific post about the Sequenza21 concert where he was a star performer.  Hugh is also one of the nicest people alive.

Kyle Gann, who drove two hours down and two hours back to Bard for the concert, has some nice words about the concert here.  Kyle turned 37 yesterday.

Our congratulations to regular Darcy James Argue who is one of the 29 recipients of the latest round of the American Music Center’s Composer Assistance Program (CAP).  The complete list is here. 

Altman was one of the best.

Update:  Speaking of birthdays, today is Gunther Schuller’s 81st.  Richard Buell tells me that when Schuller was 16 and the first horn of the the Cincinnati Symphony, he auditioned for the Ellington band, playing Johnny Hodges’s charts.

by Jerry Bowles