Beauty Will Be Amnesiac Or Will Not Be At All Immediata (Digital) On Beauty Will be Amnesiac Or Will Not Be At All, composer/pianist Anthony Pateras and composer/sound artist Jérôme Noetinger join forces to create an hourlong work for Synergy Percussion and improvised electronics. Its conceit is a clever one: the piece is of similar scope to Iannis Xenakis’ work Pleïades and utilizes a similarly gargantuan battery of percussion instruments, over 100, notably Xenakis’ 17-pitch microtonal metallophones, the Sixxen. These are used to particularly fine effect in the accumulating washes of sound in the piece’s first movement. Pateras’s notated music and Noetinger’s electronics blend well together, with an emphasis on merging
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Brooklyn, Composers, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Interviews, Microtonalism, New York, Opera
At National Sawdust on Friday April 7th at 7 PM, Opera Cabal presents the premiere of Ken Ueno’s new opera Aeolus. Joined by vocalist Majel Connery and Flux Quartet, Ueno performs throughout the opera. His fascinating blend of vocal techniques includes microtonal inflections, megaphone-amplified directives, and throat-singing. Electronics, video projections, and an architecturally conceived set design converge to make Aeolus a potent multimedia concoction. I recently caught up with Ken as he was in the thick of preparations for the opera. Hi Ken. Thanks for taking the time to talk with Sequenza 21. Why are you calling this an opera instead of some other genre? As you well know, multimedia theater pieces
Read moreOn Sunday, January 22nd at 7pm at National Sawdust in Brooklyn (80 North 6th Street), composer and toy pianist David Smooke will celebrate the release of his New Focus CD Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Joined by album personnel loadbang, Karl Larson and Michael Parker Harley, Smooke will also perform and improvise on the toy piano. I recently caught up with him and discussed the new recording, compositional approaches, and some future plans. What attracts you to composing for and performing on the toy piano? The sound of the toy piano evokes an idealized childhood, the sort that no one I know actually enjoyed and yet many of us
Read moreOn Tuesday, June 28, 2016 at Monk Space in the Koreatown district of Los Angeles, the Microfest series concluded with Beyond 12, a concert devoted to the music of alternate tuning, present and past. A full house turned out to hear Aron Kallay and Andrew McIntosh perform seven varied works from six different composers. The first piece was Fugitive Objects (2007) by Kyle Gann, and this was performed by Aron Kallay at a keyboard that was programmed for pitch sets outside the conventional 12 tone equal temperament. Fugitive Objects opened calmly, with a series of solitary ascending notes, conventionally pitched.
Read moreOn Saturday, May 14, 2016 Microfest presented a concert of string quartet music at Boston Court in Pasadena. This is the latest in a series of concerts around Los Angeles featuring music created with alternate tuning. The Isaura String Quartet performed works by Kraig Grady, John Luther Adams, Gloria Coates and a world premiere by Andrew McIntosh. Chippewayan Echoes by Kraig Grady opened the program, and this began with a smooth melody that started in the violins and was passed around and down to the lower strings. New lines were started and similarly shared, the various instruments weaving the melodies
Read moreSaturday, July 25, 2015 at Boston Court, People Inside Electronics presented Man on a Wire, a concert of new music featuring pianist Aron Kallay. A capacity crowd filled the Branson performance space to hear eight pieces incorporating electronics, piano, keyboards and acoustic instruments. The first piece was Four Roses (1997) by Annie Gosfield and this was written for cello and de-tuned keyboard. Aron Kallay played the electronic keyboard and Maggie Parkins, cello. According to the program notes “Three of the cello strings are tuned conventionally, and the ‘A’ string is tuned 80 cents flat (just short of a semitone). This
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Composers, Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Festivals, Los Angeles, Microtonalism, Ojai, Premieres
The 69th annual Ojai Music Festival featured the West Coast premiere of Sila: The Breath of the World by John Luther Adams, staged outdoors in Libby Park as a free community event. Performers from ICE, red fish blue fish and Cal Arts – some 80 musicians in all – were placed in selected positions in the center of the park and the audience was invited to move around and among them as the piece progressed. Sila is an Inuit concept for the spirit that animates the world and marks the second outdoor piece by John Luther Adams at Libby Park.
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
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Composers, Experimental Music, Festivals, Improv, Just Intonation, Microtonalism, Opportunities, San Francisco, Sound Art
The San Francisco Bay Area is home to a sizable community of sound artists, instrument inventors, and intonation innovators who spend all their time developing original and never-before-heard ways of relating to music and sound. The local scene got a big national nod in 2008 when Walter Kitundu got the mysterious and exhilarating phone call and windfall that is the MacArthur Fellowship. With such a lively local pool of talent, it’s natural that it has its own festival — Music for People and Thingamajigs — celebrating its 14th year from September 22nd to 25th, 2011. Edward Schocker and Dylan Bolles
Read moreWe may have missed the first volleys of southern California’s MicroFest — concerts devoted to tunings other than our standard, boring old 12 steps to the octave — but there’s still plenty of time to get your octave-tweak on; events will be running all the way to the end of June. Composers represented include Cage, Harrison, Partch, Crumb, Lachenmann, Tenney, Alves, Corigliano, Gosfield, Haas, Ives, Wadle, Schweinitz, McIntosh, Kriege, etc. etc… Quite a constellation of stars. For all the details head over to their website. But I wanted to draw your attention to the MicroFest concert happening this weekend, since
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