Photo: Ryuhei Shindo A bit of cheering for the “home team,” as ACME played on our last Sequenza 21 concert. Last Friday, December 13, Symphony Space’s In the Salon Series celebrated Lutoslawski’s centenary with American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME) – for this concert comprised of Caleb Burhans and Caroline Shaw, violins, violist Nadia Sirota, and cellist Clarice Jensen – and Lutoslawski scholar and composer Steven Stucky. Symphony Space’s Artistic Director Laura Kaminsky was on hand for an onstage conversation about Lutoslawski with Stucky. As I mentioned in my Musical America review of In the Salon’s previous installment, a concert featuring
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Composers, Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Events, Experimental Music, Just Intonation, Los Angeles
On Tuesday December 3, 2013 the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group presented LA Now: Four New Angeleno Composers, the latest in the Green Umbrella series of new music concerts. Curated by no less an eminence than John Adams, works by Sean Friar, Julia Holter, Andrew McIntosh and Andrew Norman were performed for a mostly young and enthusiastic audience that filled three quarters of the Walt Disney Concert Hall. In the pre-concert panel discussion we learned that over 100 compositions were considered during the selection process and that Mr. Adams sought music that “speaks of Los Angeles” and displayed a
Read moreBefore JACK Quartet played Georg Friedrich Haas’ “In iij. Noct,” String Quartet No. 3 Tuesday night at the Lincoln Center White Light Festival, the stage crew turned the lights off in the Clark Studio Theater for a test run, so that everyone in the audience could gauge whether they could withstand the extended period of essentially total darknes. The lights were down for one minute, and once the last light went out I counted to myself, “one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand.” By the time I hit twenty, the lights were on their way back up. That is the profound power that darkness has,
Read moreHey Jerry. We would love your help getting the word out on the balance of our reading opportunities this year. What’s new is that we are now accepting them by email and also offering the ability to apply for both the Underwood New Music Readings and the New York Philharmonic EarShot Readings that will result in three of the six chosen having their works performed June 5-7 by the Phil either under Alan Gilbert or Matthias Pintscher. I’ll go ahead and say that I think this is pretty cool. Also, if you can post this opportunity on your site somewhere in addition
Read more“…Crazy is good, folks! So come on down to Crazy Marvin’s Modern Music Warehouse! We’re wheeling!! We’re dealing!! We’ll play play PLAY all day day DAY!!!…” OK, OK, maybe not quite that crazy… But once a year our good friend Marvin Rosen goes crazy in the best way over at Princeton’s radio station WPRB, (103.3 FM, or online at: www.wprb.com). For the last six years Marvin has offered up a one-man, 24-hour radio marathon of contemporary music. And by contemporary, I mean things from just the last year or two, and often recordings culled directly from the composers themselves. This year
Read moreOn Thursday November 7, Betalevel, that famously obscure underground venue in Chinatown, hosted a concert of microtonal music entitled The Things That Overpower Us. The program featured the music of Kraig Grady, in Los Angeles for the week and who brought his personal greetings from the metaphorical Island of Anaphoria. A standing-room only crowd of about 50 jammed into the small space to hear performances by Tangerine Music Lab and a string quartet consisting of Melinda Rice, Mona Tian, Andrew McIntosh and Ashley Walters. The concert began with an extended improvisation by Tangerine Music Labs that was loosely based on
Read moreWhen art promises to be revelatory, it may become something to fear. Such is the case of String Paths, the first conspectus of music by Dobrinka Tabakova. Fear, in this sense, is close to awe, for before hearing a single note one knows its details will seep into places to which few others have traveled. Fear, because the trust and intimacy required of such an act is what the composer’s life is all about: she fills staves with glyphs so that anyone with an open heart might encounter their fleeting interpretations and become part of their accretion. Indeed, many factors
Read moreOn Friday night, November 1st the Wulf in downtown Los Angeles presented a program by three outstanding improvisational musicians: Tim Feeney on percussion, Ken Ueno, vocals and Matt Ingalls, clarinet. A little over an hour of improvisational music was offered in the reclaimed second-story industrial loft that is the Wulf, and a small but dedicated group of listeners gathered comfortably in the informal space. On this occasion there were no overhead lights – just a single back light behind the performers – and this added to the unusual atmosphere. The three performers all have long experience playing experimental music using extended
Read more[youtube oTnwdQbN3vY] Some of the most timeless, gripping, modern and surprising music I hear consistently are the vocal works of Renaissance Italian composers and their associated circle – Monteverdi, Gesualdo, the great Madrigalist Luca Marenzio. Saturday night at Miller Theatre I heard music from composers who were new to me – Giovanni Maria Trabaci, Il Fasolo (not Giovanni Battista Fasolo) and Marco Marazzoli – in a revelatory and affecting concert from the great early music ensemble, Le Poème Harmonique, led by Vincent Dumestre. Why Renaissance music at Sequenza21? First, Miller is as important for their early music programming as they
Read moreMonday at the DiMenna Center, New York New Music Ensemble presents a program of works by Lukas Foss (1922-2009). Lukas (with whom I studied in the 90s when I was at BU) was a man of many musical talents with a near-omnivorous interest in a host of musical styles. Rather than try to present a comprehensive portrait of them all (a tall order in a single evening!), NYNME will focus on pieces from the mid-sixties through the mid-eighties, the period during which he was in his most experimental phase. In Echoi (1963), Foss made use of vast swaths of serial-inspired
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