Festivals

Canada, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, Experimental Music, Festivals, Music Events

Copyright/Copyleft, Vancouver B.C.

For a lot of you Vancouver, British Columbia is one of those “way out there” places.  But coming from its U.S. “way out there” sister Seattle, I know that the art and music scenes are anything but moribund (though the Canadian government seems well on its way to getting in line with the venerable U.S. tradition of “screw the arts, let them find their own damn money!”).

One of the things keeping it hopping is Vancouver New Music, whose 2009-10 season is underway. As part of said season, VNM is presenting a fairly mind-stretching festival, the 21st through 24th of October, titled “Copyright/Copyleft.”  The four-day festival will rely heavily (but not only!) on electronic musicians, many of whom appropriate and transform existing music, video and audio material into their own work.

The line-up is adventurous: Andrew O’Connor‘s large analog tape-loop soundscapes; Jackson 2Bears‘ remix and re-narrative of American Native cultures; grandaddy of “Plunderphonics” John Oswald, Eric Hedekar‘s; Jake Hardy‘s and Aja Rose Bond‘s extended-DJ techniques; Percussion/improv/thinking-man legend Chris Cutler; People Like Us (aka Vicki Bennett‘s) disjunct enviroments; Sonarchy‘s “miserabilism”; Scanner‘s highly influential electronica; David Shea‘s unique mix of electro and acoustic; Mark Hosler‘s (Negativland) film, presentation and critique of mass media and culture; and Uri Caine‘s phenomenal reworking of the music of composers such as Bach, Beethoven and Mahler.

The VNM Festival website will give you all the details about dates, locations, times, tickets, as well as info on and preview sounds from each artist.  While you’re over there, do check out the rest of Vancouver New Music’ great season, too.  Maybe you’ll be able to find some time come and visit the excellent stuff that happens “way out there.”

by Steve Layton
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Events, Festivals

All Points Bulletin

A few great concerts you might be able to catch, or might be missing:

Carlsbad, CA:  (25-27 Sept.) Sure, everybody goes here, about midway between LA and San Diego,  just for Legoland California… But for the next few days, everyone should forget Legoland and instead head to the sixth annual Carlsbad Music Festival. The Calder Quartet and California EAR Unit will be playing all kinds of new music, including pieces by John Luther Adams, Daniel Wohl, Keeril Makan, Matt McBane, Ryan Brown, and Yannis Kyriakides. Premieres abound! And the weekend is given over to these ensembles supporting their special guest, guitarist extraordinaire Fred Frith. All that and a nice stretch of beach to boot! Full details on schedules, prices and directions are there on the website.

Columbia, SC: (Friday, 02 October at 7:30PM, the Univ. of SC School of Music Recital Hall, 813 Assembly Street, Columbia, SC) The award-winning Southern Exposure New Music Series presents a performance (and world premiere) by the dynamic ensemble Real Quiet. Composed of percussionist David Cossin, cellist Felix Fan, and pianist Andrew Russo, Real Quiet is dedicated to hard-edge acoustic and electric music that often blurs the borders between genres.

The concert will feature the music of Marc Mellits, with the composer in attendance. Also on the bill are the world premiere of Jacob ter Veldhuis’ Things Like That, a work that weaves together both live performance and fragments of recordings by jazz legend Anita O’Day); Annie Gosfield’s Wild Pitch, inspired by the 2004 World Series; Phil Kline’s Last Buffalo, a tribute to Hunter S. Thompson; and Lou Harrison’s Varied Trio, a piece influenced by music from Indonesia, India, and the European pre-Baroque.

United Kingdom:  (25 Sept- 12 Oct) Guitarist Simon Thacker and his group The Nava Rasa Ensemble (Carnatic violin virtuoso Jyotsna Srikanth, Birmingham-based tabla master Sarvar Sabri, Scotland’s string quartet the Edinburgh Quartet, Brazilian bassist Mario Caribé and multi-percussionist Iain Sandilands) will be touring their concert titled “Inner Octaves”. Their website will give you full information on all the dates, times and venues.

The concert includes Terry Riley (b.1935, USA): Cantos Desiertos (1996); Tabla solo by Mr. Sabri; Nigel Osborne (b.1948, UK): Chamber concerto, (new commission); Tan Dun (b.1957, China): Eight Colors for string quartet (1988); Shirish Korde (b.1945, India/Uganda): Chamber concerto (new commission).

Providence, RI:  (24 Sept- 11 Oct) Rhode Island’s FirstWorks Festival hosts Pixilerations [v.6], a series of new media arts installations, concert performances and film/video screenings. This Friday and Saturday there are two free concerts in the URI Shepard Auditorium (80 Washington St.): Friday at 8PM Matthew Peters-Warne plays a gourd-based digital controller to transform Portuguese and Umbundu languages into music; Todd Winkler makes an immersive audio/video  environment, Kristen Volness has a piece for laptop and string quartet; Peter Bussigel creates a “shivers-inducing audio journey”; Alex Dupuis works the guitar and electronics; bedtime stories (with video) from Lucky Leone; Alex Kruckman in an  audio-visual feedback loop; and Ed Osborn creates an “audio microworld” with  live electronics and table-top guitar.  Then on Saturday, also at 8pm, “In elements/response Aesthetic Evidence explores 600 spoken human voices through audio, visual and traditional percussion. The intersections continue with: computer-as-instrument with traditional Chinese string instrument (Jing Wang), percussionists with robots (David Bithell), and vocalist with computer musician (Christie Lee Gibson and Arvid Tomayko-Peters). Also performing equally mysterious work: asynchronous stochastic cloud structures from Shane Turner in Crash Test.”  There’s  plenty more good (including Pauline Oliveros next week), so give the website a good look.

Eganville, Ontario:  Those of you tired with the same old venues could do worse on Saturday the 26th, than strike out from Ottawa and find the Bonnechere Caves. Deep inside, at 5PM and again at 7PM, Katelyn Clark and Xenia Pestova will provide their consummate playing on toy pianos while Toronto composer Erik Ross provides the electroacoustic soundscape.

by Steve Layton
Composers, Conductors, Electro-Acoustic, Experimental Music, Festivals, Improv, Interviews, Music Events, Opera, San Francisco

Let’s ask Gino Robair

The San Francisco Electronic Music Festival celebrates its 10th anniversary this week.  On the final festival night, Saturday, September 19th, the program will include a special all-electronic performance of the opera I, Norton, by San Francisco Bay Area composer Gino Robair.

I, Norton is based on the proclamations of Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, who lived during the Gold Rush era in San Francisco. The concert begins at 8:00 p.m. at the Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th Street, San Francisco. Tickets are available online from Brown Paper Tickets.

Gino RobairGino Robair has created music for dance, theater, gamelan orchestra, radio, and television. His works have been performed throughout North America, Europe, and Japan. He was composer in residence with the California Shakespeare Festival for five years and served as music director for the CBS animated series The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat. His commercial work includes themes for the MTV and Comedy Central cable networks. Robair is also one of the “25 innovative percussionists” included in the book Percussion Profiles (SoundWorld, 2001). He has recorded with Tom Waits, Anthony Braxton, Terry Riley, Lou Harrison, John Butcher, Derek Bailey, Peter Kowald, Otomo Yoshihide, the ROVA Saxophone Quartet, and Eugene Chadbourne, among many others. He is a founding member of the Splatter Trio and the heavy metal band Pink Mountain. In addition, he runs Rastascan Records, a label devoted to creative music.

S21: His Imperial Majesty Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, is an “only in San Francisco” kind of personage.  What inspired you to make him into the central character of an opera?

GR: He’s the kind of complex character one needs for an opera. And I like the fact that he’s mythologized somewhat.

Although many people see him as this incoherent, homeless vagrant, I think the reality is that he was bright man who was determined to make a difference in a world that was hostile, confusing, and often out of control. We’re talking about the Old West, here!

Remember, he was a Jewish immigrant from South Africa. Try to imagine the culture shock he experienced arriving in mid-19th-century California during the Gold Rush. It makes total sense to me that he’d conclude that the only way to solve the problems in his new environment was to roll up his shirt sleeves and do the job himself.

(more…)

by Polly Moller
Composers, Electro-Acoustic, Experimental Music, Festivals, Interviews, Performers, San Francisco

Let’s ask Donald Swearingen

SFEMF

The San Francisco Electronic Music Festival (SFEMF) kicks off next week, and several of its original founders will be performing in celebration of the festival’s tenth anniversary.  One of them, Donald Swearingen, will take the stage on Thursday, September 17th along with Maria Chavez, Mark Trayle, and Mason Bates.  The show starts at 8 pm in the Brava Theater, 2781 24th Street, San Francisco. Tickets are available online or at the door.

It’s hard to coax Donald Swearingen away from his many projects, but I did manage to get him to share some background and a few hard-to-find details about his upcoming SFEMF performance.

S21: How has the SFEMF evolved since you helped found it in 1999?

Now in its 10th year, the child has definitely come of age. It’s grown into larger (and progressively more comfortable) venues, and from embracing primarily Bay Area artists, to an impressive roster of local, national, and international talents, both obscure and well-known. All this is a result of the dedication and ongoing efforts of the steering and curatorial committees, whose vision and energy have been the essential ingredients in the success of the festival. I should mention that I personally have not been directly involved in these activities in recent years, serving only to offer a comment here or there. But I’m amazed at the amount of effort (and it indeed takes lots of effort) that goes into the planning and execution from year to year. (more…)

by Polly Moller
Contemporary Classical, Festivals, London, Proms

Schnittke, Shostakovich and Nyman at the Proms

The Prom concert on August 24, by the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Valery Gergiev, opened with Nagasaki by Alfred Schnittke, his graduation piece from the Moscow Conservatory. In this piece for chorus, solo mezzo-soprano, and large orchestra (including a theremin), Schnittke set texts reflecting on the devastation of the Japanese city by the atomic bomb at the end of the Second World War by Anatoly Sofronov, described in Calum MacDonald’s program notes as “the official Soviet propaganda poet”, along with poems by two Japanese poets, Eisaku Yoneda and Shimazaki Tōson.

Although the piece was accepted by the Moscow Conservatory, its finale was considered by the Soviet Composers Union as not optimistic enough (probably only a Soviet bureaucrat could demand from a piece about the aftermath of a nuclear attack); Schnittke was accused of having succumbed to”Expressionism” and “forgetting the principles of Realism in music.” Schnittke rewrote the finale, using additional text by his friend Gerogy Fere, and it was approved for performance, which is received in 1959. It was not performed again in Schnittke’s lifetime.

Since it is basically a student piece and from the 50’s, it is probably not surprising that Nagasaki has none of the extreme modernist and post-modernist“funny business” which one thinks about as being characteristic of Schnittke’s music. It’s a rather straight-forward, very strong, very accomplished, very effective piece, showing the influence of Shostakovich. The first movement, which seems a little as though it might be the beginning of the St. Matthew Passion as arranged by Shostakovich, lingers strongly in this listener’s memory.

The second half of the concert was the Eighth Symphony of Dimitri Shostakovich. It is so easy to think about Shostakovich only in terms of his being some kind of political football, that it is often a surprise to come in contact with a piece that, due to an absence of a sexy back story and simply by its sheer quality, makes you realize just what a good composer he was–especially what a brilliant orchestrator. It’s full of striking material and endlessly inventive orchestration, but also very sure in its construction, with a very tight dramatic trajectory. The quieter philosophical last movement and particularly the long gentle coda, with its very light texture featuring a series of instrumental solos accompanied with strikingly unexpected combinations of instruments, is especially memorable. Its hard to imagine either of these pieces receiving better performances than Gergiev and the LSO gave them. (more…)

by Rodney Lister
Chamber Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Festivals

Way up North

The Barracuda is swimming a little farther afield now, so I think it’s safe for all you liberal arty types to venture up… to Alaska!  It’s time once again for the minor miracle that is the CrossSound Festival (28 Aug – 6 Sep). Alaska native, Harvard grad and Asian zither performer extraordinaire Jocelyn Clark is the driving force behind this truly unique yearly series; concerts that not only bring living contemporary music into this far corner, but as well building bridges between Eastern, European and American musics and performers. This is the festival’s 10th year — no mean feat and worth big kudos to all involved.

The 2009 edition goes by the moniker “Refugium” (def: “a small, isolated area that has escaped the extreme changes undergone by the surrounding area“), and Jocelyn and crew have put together a really nice mix:

CrossSound’s 2009 project Refugium demarcates and prepares the ground on which two string ensembles historically separated by geography and culture meet. IIIZ+ (“three zee plus”), a plucked zither ensemble founded by Jocelyn Clark, and UnitedBerlin, a string quartet out of Germany, through interplay of the instruments and traditions of East and West, promise to grow new musical forms on Alaska’s isolated soil, where musicians from around the world are free to try new things. The project features two world premiers, in addition to reprising two earlier CrossSound and UnitedBerlin commissions for reconsideration by Alaskan audiences.

The world premieres are Hwang-Long Pan‘s (b.1945, Taiwan) East—West V for zheng and string quartet, and Stefan Hakenberg‘s (b. 1960, Germany) Moments in Human Life: Perching, Soaking for 2 violins, viola, cello, koto, kayagûm, percussion and zheng. This main concert also includes works by Yunkyung Lee (Korea), Il-Ryun Chung (Germany), Shiaw-Wen Chuang (Taiwan) and Matthew Burtner (Alaska), and will be given twice in Juneau (3 & 4 Sept.) and once in Sitka (5 Sept.)

Prior to this main concert, each of the performer groups will have their own solo concert in Juneau, too: 28 Aug. the wonderful zheng player Lai Yi-Chieh will give a solo recital of both traditional and contemporary works; 29 Aug. the Quartet United Berlin puts on a show featuring music of Terry Riley (Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector), Astor Piazzolla, and George Crumb (Black Angels); 30 Aug. Ensemble IIIZ+ (Jocelyn Clark, kayagûm; Lai Yi-Chieh, zheng, Naoko Kikuchi, koto; Il-Ryun Chung, Korean percussion) essay a number of pieces written for them.

Last but not least, 6 Sept. has Anchorage playing host to “Rebound”, a concert of chamber music, sound, and video art with Jaunelle Celaire (soprano), Morris Palter (percussion), and Matthew Burtner (metasax), featuring all new music by Alaskan/Northwestern composers: Burtner (Anchorage), John Luther Adams (Fairbanks) and Owen Underhill (Vancouver, B.C.).

The website has tons of information on each of the pieces, composers and performers, so take some time to check it all out. And if you can’t be there this year, maybe start planning next year’s little Great North getaway.

by Steve Layton
Concerts, Conferences, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, Kansas City, Minimalism, Music Events, Post Modern

Word2-3-4, Word2-3-4-5-6, Word2-3-4-5-6-7-8

Here’s your heads-up that the Second International Conference on Minimalism is fast approaching! It runs Sept. 2-6 and Kansas City gets the honors this time out.

Papers and presentations abound, as do a string of wonderful concerts. Of course there’s talk on Glass, Reich and Adams; but also Phill Niblock, Julius Eastman, La Monte Young, Tom Johnson, Mikel Rouse, Dennis Johnson and more. Concerts not only include one by prodigal legend Charlemagne Palestine, but a closing that puts none other than our old pal Kyle Gann at the keyboard with Sarah Cahill! (I’m sure Kyle’s practicing and sweating bullets at this very moment…)  S21’s own resident minimalist, Galen Brown, is giving a spiel on Saturday, and hopes to post here throughout the shindig.

So head to the website for all the info and updates, then book early & book often. The first week in September the ol’ K.C. is the place to be!

by Steve Layton
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, London, Proms

Philip Glass and Unsuk Chin at the Proms

In Live From Golgotha by Gore Vidal, St. Timothy — who is an old man, and by that time the keeper of the story of the early church — is visited by time travelers from the future who try to persuade him to change his story. When he refuses, they simply travel further back in time and change the events. At one point Timothy is perplexed because he thinks he remembers what happened but he isn’t sure, which isn’t surprising since the actually events and, consequentially, events after those events, have been changed. His past — what he remembers — is different from what is now the actual past, and the present is also changing as the time travelers from the future continue to change the past. At least that’s how I remember it, but the specific details are not so important.

When I read the book I was struck by the fact that such a complex time situation was not problematic in what was essentially popular fiction, whereas some similar complexity of the perception of time in a piece of music would probably mark it as being a hopelessly esoteric and certainly inaccessible. I’m not sure why it is that that’s the case, but it came to mind during the late night Prom concert of music by Philip Glass. Richard Taruskin points out, in The Oxford History of Music that one of the main purposes of the early minimalists was to make sure that there was no hidden form in their music, that everything was audible and perceptible on the surface. This obviously gets a ways from a certain sort of pretentiousness and from some arcane justification of music that isn’t very much fun to listen to, or just plain doesn’t make sense, but it can also give works written that way a certain kind of flatness, and give the sense that the continuity of a piece is, in the words of one of the characters in The History Boys, “just one fucking thing after another.”

The program for the August 12 Proms, presented by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, with Gidon Kremer as soloist, consisted of two works of Philip Glass: his Violin Concerto and his 7th Symphony (“A Toltec Symphony”) . The Violin Concerto, written in 1987 for Paul Zukofsky, is one of Glass’s most popular pieces. It has three movements, fast, slow, fast, with a slower coda. Although Glass was quoted in the program notes as saying that he was trying to write a piece that his father, who loved all the major violin concertos, would like, it is, in the manner of Glass’s music, not melodic or thematic but rather based on shorts riffs which are developed, mainly through repetition. The second, in fact, is a baroque-y ground piece, with a clear line (melody, if you like) which is repeated many times. It is impossible to miss the masterly quality of the work or to be impressed by it. Its orchestration is striking and masterly; the violin is never covered by the orchestra. The first movement especially is haunting and its ending is very beautiful. I found myself before it was over wishing that there was a little more to listen to. One shouldn’t judge a piece by criteria that are not operative for its language and methodology, but it’s hard to imagine by what standards the second movement wouldn’t be too long. (more…)

by Rodney Lister
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Downtown, Festivals, Just Intonation, Music Events, New York

The search is over; the Grail is here

Like Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham‘s fame will always be for his use of multiple electric guitars, often in non-standard tunings and often at just-about-ear-splitting volume. The slight shame is that the guitar stuff is only one part of Chatham’s long and restless musical exploration: there’s also all his work as a trumpeter, as well as works for everything from two gongs to just-tuned piano to wind ensemble to full orchestra.  And while the massed guitar resources may be similar to Branca, I’ve always felt that Chatham’s clang/clash/drone carried something almost ‘lyrical’, compared to Branca’s body blows.

A major force in the 70s-80s ‘downtown’ NYC scene, Chatham has spent the last 20 years as an ex-pat in Paris, where he’s continued ramping up the ambition of his musical visions.  One of those visions became reality in 2005, when the City of Paris commissioned Chatham to compose a piece for their all-night La Nuit Blanche Festival. The result, A Crimson Grail, gathered 400 guitarists (w/ bass and percussion) in a marathon, three-movement sonic assault focused on Paris’ largest church, Sacré-Coeur. 10,000 people watched live, and 100,000 more on national TV. A fuzzy audio snapshot of the performance has been released on CD, but this Grail was so much a spectacle of a specific moment that any future performance would likely be nearly impossible, and in any case would be a very different beast indeed.

Well, that ‘beast’ has arrived, and this time on our side of the Atlantic. Chatham has reworked A Crimson Grail, this time for a slightly more ‘modest’ 200 guitars (and 16 bass guitars), and is in town to present it (along with section leaders David Daniell, Seth Olinsky, John King, and Ned Sublette) this Saturday, August 8th, as part of Lincoln Center Out of Doors. The performance is from 7:30 to 10 pm, at Damrosch Park (Southwest corner of the Lincoln Center Plaza, 62nd Street near Amsterdam Avenue).

by Steve Layton
Bang on a Can, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, New York

Having a MoCA at Banglewood

If you thought there couldn’t possibly be any more we could tell you about Bang on a Can events the past couple months, you’re so so wrong!  Starting today and running to the end of the month, The “Banglewood” summer festival at Mass MoCA is underway in North Adams, Massachusetts. (Mass MoCA is the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art there, and the fest’s co-sponser.)  Head on up to find public performances, workshops for participants in everything from Balinese music to improvisation, master classes, music business seminars, and more.

Festival events open to the public this year include daily gallery recitals at 1:30pm and 4:30pm, free with museum admission; the perennially popular Kids Can Too event (July 18, 11:30am); an afternoon conversation with the big guy — Steve Reich — about Sol LeWitt (July 25, 3pm); a performance by Bang on a Can artists of Reich’s seminal work, Music for 18 Musicians (July 25, 8pm); and what BoaC event would be complete without a Marathon – six hours of non-stop new music featuring more than thirty composers and performers (August 1, 4-10pm). There are also two recitals daily in the galleries at 1:30 and 4:30 from July 16-July 31.  The Marathon will include a performance of George Anthiel’s 1924 classic Ballet Mećanique, John Adams’ Shaker Loops – heard here in its version for seven solo strings, David Lang’s Pierced, Julia Wolfe’s Dark Full Ride, Michael Gordon’s Potassium, music by Meredith Monk, Frederick Rzewski, and more. In between these events, come and hear music by Todd Reynolds, Eric Chasalow, Daniel Wohl, Walter Zimmerman, Olivier Messiaen, Art Jarvinen, Aaron Jay Kernis, Steve Mackey, Jeff Stanek, Louis Andriessen, Gregg August, Derek Johnson, Brad Lubman, Sarah Kirkland Snider and Morton Feldman.

This year’s Festival faculty members include Gregg August (bass), David Cossin (percussion), Katie Geissinger (voice), Michael Gordon (composition), David Lang (composition), Brad Lubman (conducting), Nicholas Photinos (cello), Vicki Ray (piano), Todd Reynolds (violin), Derek Johnson (guitar), Ken Thomson (clarinet, saxophone), and Julia Wolfe (composition). The Festival will be attended by 10 composers and 24 performers  from across the US, as well as from Russia, South Korea, New Zealand, Scotland, Spain, The Netherlands, Canada, Australia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Yeah, it’s not totally free (but not bank-breaking, either) and you’d better bring bug spray, but other than that what’s not to love?

by Steve Layton