For articles on every one of the contemporary composers pictured above, and more, click on Overgrown Path’s People of the Year for 2006.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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…)
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?
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.