Experimental Music

Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, Experimental Music, File Under?, New York

Nono Muchmore Warp(ed)

Some festivals have a curatorial vision that takes pages and pages of press releases and program notes to explain. Other curators, like Glenn Cornett, revel in the whimsy of amusing composers’ names. Why organize a one-night Nono, Muchmore, and Warp(ed) mini-marathon? The names sounded fun together and the players are the bee’s knees. The evening will feature music by Italian modernist master Luigi Nono, New York cellist/composer and Anti Social Music member Pat Muchmore, and San Francisco based composer/sound designer Richard Warp. With a 7 PM start time, the show is three and a half hours long, and is full

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by Christian Carey
Concert review, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, Experimental Music, Festivals, Improv, San Francisco

10th Annual Bay Area Outsound New Music Summit

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUO0_8D1yg0[/youtube] San Francisco Community Music Center, July 20 – 23, 2011  The first sound of the festival’s Wednesday night show was, perhaps appropriately, nothing. Theresa Wong started offstage, down front, with just a microphone. She circled it in front of her face, no sound coming out of her pursed lips. Fluid looping gestures, but no vocal to be heard for perhaps two minutes. Then, a “Woo.” Silence, the mic passing back and forth. “Hoo,” silence, then another and another. Hoots and cuckoos, then a low-flutter “Wo – wo – wo – wo” for thirty seconds, then putting the mic to

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by Tom Djll
Bass, Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Festivals, Improv, Interviews, Piano, Premieres, San Francisco, Women composers

Let’s Ask Kanoko Nishi

San Francisco Bay Area composer/performer  Kanoko Nishi wraps up our series of interviews with composers who are premiering new works at the 10th Annual Outsound New Music Summit in San Francisco on Friday, July 22nd.  The Friday night concert, entitled The Art of Composition, starts at 8 pm at the Community Music Center, 544 Capp Street, San Francisco. Tickets are available online from Brown Paper Tickets, and you can also buy them at the door.  Listeners who don’t want to wait that long can get up close and personal with the composers, and learn about their creative process, at a free Monday night panel discussion at 7 pm on July 18th. Kanoko

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by Polly Moller
Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, Experimental Music, Festivals, Improv, Interviews, Premieres, San Francisco, Sound Art, Women composers

Let’s Ask Krys Bobrowski

Krys Bobrowski is up next in our series of interviews with composers who are premiering new works at the 10th Annual Outsound New Music Summit in San Francisco on Friday, July 22nd.  The Friday night concert, entitled The Art of Composition, starts at 8 pm at the Community Music Center, 544 Capp Street, San Francisco. Tickets are available online from Brown Paper Tickets, and you can also buy them at the door.  Listeners who don’t want to wait that long can get up close and personal with the composers, and learn about their creative process, at a free Monday night panel discussion at 7 pm on

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by Polly Moller
Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Festivals, Performers, Premieres

San Diego New Music’s soundON Festival: Evening 1

Full disclosure: I co-founded San Diego New Music in 1994, served as its first Executive Director, and have been a board member since 2000. This isn’t a review or a comprehensive report so much as some of my impressions and observations about what’s going on at The Athenaeum in La Jolla, California, this weekend. If you think I overlooked anything, please feel free to contribute more in the comments section below. After core members of NOISE, the resident ensemble of San Diego New Music, dispersed across the continent (flutist/director Lisa Cella to Baltimore; percussionist Morris Palter to Fairbanks), it became

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by Christian Hertzog
CDs, Chamber Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Festivals, File Under?, Philadelphia, Strings, Twentieth Century Composer

It’s a Short Six Hours

Tomorrow from 2-8 PM in Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral, FLUX Quartet plays Morton Feldman’s String Quartet No. 2. The concert is the last event in American Sublime, a two week long series that has spotlighted Feldman’s late music. FLUX has been performing the piece since 1999, and their rendition runs around six hours. Feldman himself suggested that the piece could run anywhere from 3 1/2 to 5 hours. But one senses that FLUX’s more expansive time frame doesn’t contravene his intentions. String Quartet No. 2, like many of Feldman’s late works, is about breaking past the boundaries of form and instead shaping

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by Christian Carey
Brooklyn, Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, File Under?, New York

Thursday’s LLList: Locrian, Loadbang, and Lucier

As we gallop towards the end of the concert season proper (and towards the bevy of summer music festivals), it’s shaping up to be a busy time here in New York. Case in point, in the evening on Thursday June 2nd, there are two events that would suit many a new music aficionado’s fancy. Locrian Chamber Players are performing at Riverside Church at 8 PM. The program includes John Adams’ String Quartet (a work that also appears, with different performers, on the new Adams Nonesuch disc), a piece by Manhattan School of Music faculty member Reiko Füting and world premieres

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by Christian Carey
Birthdays, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music

Alvin at 80

Daniel Wolf’s appreciation is better than anything I need to muster, so I’ll just say Happy Birthday Alvin Lucier, wonderful milestone, and thanks for some of the most beautifully pure musical and sonic revelations ever conceived. Update: While I still don’t have much to add, I will point you to this wonderful discovery… In 1972-3, When (now long & well-established) experimental composer/performer Nicolas Collins was a fresh-faced freshman in college, he took Lucier’s Introduction to Electronic Music class. Good student he was, Collins also took copious notes on what Lucier taught them during those two semesters. Collins has gone ahead

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by Steve Layton
Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, Electro-Acoustic, Events, Experimental Music, Festivals, Improv, Music Events, News, Premieres, San Francisco, Sound Art, Women composers

2011 Outsound New Music Summit lineup announced

Once upon a time in 2000, there was a brand-new underground music collective in the San Francisco Bay Area, presenting a monthly concert series named “Static Illusion/Methodical Madness”.  The SIMM series is still going strong today, and its parent organization, Outsound Presents, now additionally puts on the weekly Luggage Store Gallery concert series and the Outsound New Music Summit. Outsound acquired a Board of Directors and incorporated its bad self in 2009.  Now with a 501(c)(3) IRS determination in hand, it’s a stalwart provider of experimental music, sound art, found sounds, improvisation, noise, musique concrete, minimalism, and any other kind of

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by Polly Moller