Sequenza 21 mourns the loss of Mimi Parker, drummer and vocalist for the band Low. Parker had been diagnosed with cancer in 2020 and the band recently had to cancel performances as she was treated for her illness. Parker had an incomparable voice, well-matched to Low guitarist/vocalist Alan Sparhawk’s in harmony singing, and beautifully soaring in her lead vocals. As a drummer, Parker’s economical style became a signature of Low’s sound, and she was a role model for many female drummers who took up the sticks because of her example. Our condolences go out to Alan and all
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,
Read moreEnglish composer and conductor Peter Maxwell Davies died on Monday, March 14th 2016. At the age of 81, Davies passed away in his Orkney home. The cause of death was leukemia. In 2004, Davies was appointed Master of the Queen’s Music. Farewell to Stromness is one of Davies most popular works for solo piano. The piece is a piano interlude from his work The Yellow Cake Revue, a work he created for the campaign against the proposed uranium mine on the Oakley Isles. In this recording of his Symphony No. 7, Davies displays his skills as both composer and conductor
Read moreThe quiet, quirky, extremely inventive Californian composer Art Jarvinen (b.1956) has died. Always one to go his own way and not chase the typical composers “path to glory”, Art was still a strong influence on a lot of younger southern Californian minds. Both David Ocker and Kyle Gann have a little personal appreciation and what little info we know about Art’s passing, something that came far too quickly.
Read moreThere’s a lot of shock and sadness in the Mexican classical community just now: last week one of the finest violists in Mexico and the world, Omar Hernández-Hidalgo, was found dead in his hometown of Tijuana, four days after apparently being kidnapped. A principal violist by the age of 21, Grammy-nominated twice, the first violist in his country to recieve a PhD. (at Indiana University), praised by Pierre Boulez, Hernández-Hidalgo was a champion of contemporary music, especially the new and vital in his own country. While his technique was commanding and virtuosic, his own personality was warm, modest and endlessly generous. He was
Read moreGeorge Perle died this weekend, at the ripe old age of 93. Little-known and little heard by the general audience, Perle was a name virtually every composer of the last half century knows. His book Serial Composition and Atonality passed through most of our hands at one point or other in our study; it and his later Twelve-Tone Tonality caused a lot of us to seek out performances and recordings of his poised, extremely lucid and limpid works. Big-name appreciation is rare enough anymore for composers, as to almost seem a fluke. Given that, the place to pay attention to is who
Read moreOne of our greatest musical thinkers in these last fifty years, Leonard B. Meyer has passed away. His series of books from 1956 onwards are still avidly bought, read and discussed in 2007, and that’s no mean feat. Some of his work was pioneering, some spookily prescient, and a lot of it has stuck in this head since my earliest college days. Thanks for all the fish, Leonard.
Read morerecieved at the Canadian Eletroacoustic mail-list: PRESS RELEASE The composer Karlheinz Stockhausen passed away on December 5th 2007 at his home in Kuerten-Kettenberg and will be buried in the Waldfriedhof (forest cemetery) in Kuerten. He composed 362 individually performable works. The works which were composed until 1969 are published by Universal Edition in Vienna, and all works since then are published by the Stockhausen-Verlag. Numerous texts by Stockhausen and about his works have been published by the Stockhausen Foundation for Music. Suzanne Stephens and Kathinka Pasveer, who have performed many of his works and, together with him, have taken care of
Read moreMy father-in-law, Alfred Russell, died a few weeks ago. He was an amazing painter and a really eccentric person. He was one of the hottest Paris/New York abstractionist painters in the 40’s and 50’s. Ad Reinhardt was the best man at his wedding; he got Rothko his first teaching job; was friends/enemies with all the big names but because of his notorious provocateur spirit he never got rich while all of his equals sold their souls to the rich for millions of dollars. A famous article in October Magazine started the trend, when he lamented the ‘easy abstraction’ of the
Read moreOkay, he stayed too long at the fair. The idea of a 60-year-old, 400-pound man playing a starving artist failed to suspend disbelief. The three tenors crap was execrable. He probably inspired Andrea Bocelli. But, once upon a time, there was this voice: [youtube]_CC9U43BFio[/youtube] Alex Ross, Steve Smith, Marcus Maroney, Charles T. Downey, Tim Mangan, Marc Geelhoed, Opera Chic
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