A delightful interview with the about-to-be-nanagenerian composer Thea Musgrave. Don’t miss her 90th birthday concert by the New York Virtuoso Singers, the American Brass Quintet, and various soloists at The Church of St. Mary the Virgin (off Times Square) at 8pm on May 27 in a concert of choral, solo, and operatic works. The concert features the premiere of La Vida es Sueño and the American premieres of The Voices of Our Ancestors and Dawn. Get your tickets here.
Read moreCold Blue Music presented an evening of solos as the latest in the Soundwaves series of new music concerts held at the Santa Monica Public Library. Music by Daniel Lentz and Michael Byron was performed, with the composers in attendance. Pianist Vicki Ray and harpist Tasha Smith Godínez were on hand as soloists along with a nice crowd arriving on a perfect spring evening. River of 1,000 Streams (2016) by Daniel Lentz was first up, featuring Ms. Ray at the piano and accompanied by a prerecorded track of fragments of the piece that were played through two large speakers on
Read moreNEW YORK – On February 10th, 2018, Architek Percussion and TAK ensemble presented five US premieres in the DiMenna Center for Classical Music’s Benzaquen Hall. The program, charmingly titled ArchiTAK, was composed entirely of new music by New York and Montreal composers. Walking into the hall expecting some sort of configuration to accommodate five percussionists, a flautist, clarinetist, violinist, and vocalist, I was instead greeted by nine chairs in a tight, even row behind nine microphones. I heard members of TAK ensemble behind me discussing the location of “the knives.” I was ready to expect the unexpected as the program
Read moreOn Cinco de Mayo, Art Share in Los Angeles was the venue for Music for Art Galleries, a concert of music by composer Nick Norton. The occasion was the completion of Norton’s Doctoral studies at the UC, Santa Barbara and a large crowd gathered to hear a program of no fewer than ten pieces of his music. A dozen of the top musicians in the Los Angeles new music scene were on hand to perform what proved to be an intriguing variety of original works. The program opened with Mix Bus 09, an electronic piece that filled Art Share with
Read moreAll of us at Sequenza 21 are saddened to learn of the passing of Matt Marks. A musical polymath, he was a composer, new music advocate, provocative Twitter presence, co-founder and key organizer of New Music Gathering, and a versatile performer, both a vocalist-actor in various projects and a founding member of the ensemble Alarm Will Sound, in which he played French horn and for which he did imaginative arrangements. I met Marks on several occasions, but will allow his close friends and family to share reminiscences of a more personal nature. Among all those who knew and encountered him,
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Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Just Intonation, Microtonalism, Music Instruments, Seattle, viola
This year’s Harry Partch Festival has kicked off at the University of Washington, where the original Partch instruments have been housed since 2014 under the capable direction of Charles Corey. On hand for the first evening concert on May 12, 2018 was composer-violist and Arditti Quartet alum Garth Knox who premiered his Crystal Paths, a concertino for viola d’amore and six Partch instruments. The work is basically a series of duets between Knox and, in succession, Partch’s Crychord, Bass Marimba, Surrogate Kithara, Chromelodeon and Harmonic Canon. An interesting twist is that once each duet has been underway for a minute or so, the
Read more(Photo credit: Ismael Lorenzo) In the presence of Thomas Demenga, there’s no such thing as a solo concert, for one considers not only the unrepeatable coincidence of performer and instrument but also the composers whose creations bond them. Such fullness of vision was already evident in 1987, when the Swiss cellist began pairing J. S. Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites with contemporary counterparts in a flight of albums for ECM New Series. The first of these viewed the Suite No. 4 through a lens crafted of Heinz Holliger’s chamber pieces, thus setting precedent for a compelling traversal of deciduous and coniferous
Read moreOn Friday the 13th, April 2018 Pauline Gloss, the Los Angeles-based literary sound-artist, appeared at the newly renovated Human Resources venue in Chinatown to present a program titled Lullabies for the Psychotic and other Recent Works. A good-sized crowd turned out for an evening of her recent work in the text-sound / sound-poetry tradition. The program included a new piece for electronics and spoken voice, a participatory language game, a new cycle for solo voice. The program began with a new piece for electronics and spoken voice. The hall was darkened and empty allowing the audience to move about. Ms.
Read moreHeads up, New Music fanboys and fangirls. There’s a good looking concert at Roulette on Thursday night called French/American Music in Dialogue that brings together the Boston-based new music ensemble ECCE with its Paris-based counterpart Court Circuit, which is currently on tour with dates in Buffalo, Pittsburgh and Worcester. Founded by composer John Aylward, Clark University Professor, 2017-18 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and winner of the 2018 Walter Hindrichsen Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ECCE’s mission is to deliver its energetic performances of new music in multiple forms and collaborations with creative artists and thinkers across disciplines.
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CD Review, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, File Under?, New York, Orchestras, Philadelphia Orchestra, Twentieth Century Composer
New York Premiere of Van Der Aa Violin Concerto The Philadelphia Orchestra Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Music Director and Conductor Janine Jansen, Violin March 13, 2018 Carnegie Hall Published on Sequenza21.com By Christian Carey NEW YORK – Dutch composer Michel Van der Aa (b. 1970) is best known for his imaginative and formidably-constructed multimedia works that incorporate both film and electronics. Notable among these are the operas Blank Out (2016) and Sunken Garden (2012), as well as a music theater work based on Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (2008). Even pieces for acoustic ensembles, such as the
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