CDs, Competitions, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, New York, Piano

And the Winner of the David Lang Competition is….

Congratulations to pianist Peter Poston for winning the David Lang 2011 Competition.

Below is his award-winning entry, a performance of Wed, submitted via YouTube:

Poston will get to perform as part of an all Lang program at le poisson rouge in New York City on May 6, 2012 at 5pm. The concert at LPR includes Andrew Zolinsky performing selections from the CD, a new 4-hand piano work premiered by Zolinsky and Poston, a new 6-hand piano piece for the 3 runners-up – Catarina Domenici, Katherine Dowling, and Denise Fillion – and performances by guitar legend Derek Johnson and other special guests.

This Was Written by Hand

Piano Music by David Lang

Andrew Zolinsky, piano

Cantaloupe Music CD

Wed, the audition piece for the David Lang 2011 Competition, is featured on This Was Written By Hand, David Lang’s latest CD, a recital disc recorded for Cantaloupe by pianist Andrew Zolinksy. It is one of eight “Memory Pieces” included on the disc. This group serves as postminimal “Characterstucke,” an attractive and mercurial group of contrasting miniatures.

Then there is the touching title work. One of Lang’s most organically constructed pieces, it was, indeed, written by hand and intuitively constructed. A meditation on the ephemeral nature of life, it captures a similar poignancy to Lang’s recent vocal work “Little Matchgirl Passion,” but writ smaller, more intimately. To both this and the Memory Pieces, Zolinsky brings a fluid grace and subtlety that abets the spontaneous, almost improvisatory, character of the material.

by Christian Carey
Commissions, Competitions, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Contests, Hilary Hahn, Interviews, Violin

Hilary meets Gillian

Next up in Hilary Hahn‘s chats with the composers writing for her 27 Pieces: the Hilary Hahn Encores!, it’s New Zealand composer Gillian Whitehead.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J7OdgRJegs[/youtube]

And composers, don’t forget that the 27th encore slot is still open until March 15th, and it could be you!  So tusches off seats, fire up your Finale & Adobe, but get cracking!

by Steve Layton
Choral Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, New York

C4 at a Loss for Words

New York-based C4 Ensemble is a choir that specializes in new music. Most of its members are composers or conductors, or both!

On Thursday March 1 and Saturday March 3, the group is performing a program entitled “A Loss for Words: An Evening of New Choral Music on Alternative Texts” (info and tickets here). Since I’m away this weekend at a conference in Dayton, C4 was kind enough to let me sit in on one of their recent rehearsals.

The group’s dynamic is a lesson in exceeding expectations. The member’s take turns leading warmups and rehearsing pieces, allowing for several conductors to direct works on each concert. I was impressed that, despite the occasional oneupmanship that’s inevitable to find when having that many conductors in a room, they do quite a good job of sharing and passing authority from one person to the next. Indeed I’m so glad that C4 is around: They seem to revel in the challenges that other choirs avoid like the plague. One person to a part in polytonal divisi? No problem. Finding your pitch out of nowhere after clouds of clusters? Sure! Singing in three different meters at once? What else you got?

For music without conventional texts, these pieces have a lot to say. The program features guest soloist Toby Twining, performing with the choir in a beautiful piece of his from the late 80s, “Hee oo oom ha,” a multicultural essay featuring Twining’s flexible countertenor scatting, African polyrhythms, and sepulchral shamanic incantations from bass Hayes Biggs. A new piece by Tim Brown juxtaposes spoken word clips from adverts and news headlines that overwhelm a chorus resembling a Sondheim waltz, seeking desperately to blot out the chatter.

“The Blue of Distance,” by Zibuokle Martinaityle, is a beautiful and intricately woven score with many divisi humming lush polychords, set against keening ostinatos. I was quite taken with Martha Sullivan’swork on the program, which features earthy melismas and folk music references.In addition, C4 will be singing John Cage, Huang Ro, Thomas Stumpf, Jaako Mantyjarvi, David Harris, and Karen Siegel. If you’re in town, this promises to be an exciting and varied concert program.

Thursday, March 1, 2012 @ 8pm Church of St Luke in the Fields 487 Hudson Street (south of Christopher St.)
Saturday, March 3, 2012 @ 8pm Tenri Cultural Institute 43A West 13th Street (bet. 5th & 6th Aves)


by Christian Carey
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Los Angeles, Opera

Behind the Green Umbrella: Lust, Sado-Masochism, and Incest in Andriessen’s “Anais Nin”

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwZ9uPQw33E&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]

Two American premieres of important new works by Louis Andriessen at the LA Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella concert tomorrow evening (Feb. 28), 8 pm. Get there at 7 pm for the preconcert talk with Andriessen and conductor Reinbert de Leeuw.

Much more is revealed in my preview here. 

by Christian Hertzog
Composers, Contemporary Classical, Events, Experimental Music, Festivals, Los Angeles, Recordings, Twentieth Century Composer

John Cage events in Los Angeles

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcHnL7aS64Y[/youtube]

We had just seen John Cage recite his mesostic/theater work, James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet. My composition teacher, a tenured faculty member who had won many awards including a Pulitzer Prize, told us, “Everyone should see John Cage once.”

And then, as if to underscore the idea that one only needed to see Cage once, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer added, “But of course, his ideas are much more important than his music.” At that time (the early 1980s), there weren’t many recordings of Cage’s music available, and I rarely encountered any performances of his music, so my professor’s utterance was a reasonable statement for many.

Three decades later, there are 279 recordings featuring one or more works by John Cage available on arkivmusic.com; my old teacher has under 30 listed. It isn’t just that Cage is the most-recorded member of the postwar avant-garde—he has more recordings than plenty of conservative composers. Here’s a list of the top 10 recorded composers born in the 20th century at arkivmusic.com

1. Shostakovich 1449
2. Britten 958
3. Bernstein 632
4. Barber 541
5. Rodrigo 461 (and 103 of those are the Concierto de Aranjuez)
6. Messiaen 431
7. Walton 413
8. Khachaturian 357 (138 of those are the Sabre Dance)
9. Cage 279
10. Arvo Part 239

Clearly, Cage’s compositions, as well as his ideas, are very important in the classical music industry. This year you’ll be hearing a lot of his music, as various cities and organizations celebrate the 100th anniversary of John Cage’s birth. The John Cage trust is a useful web site to learn about upcoming performances, but if you live in Southern California, you’ll want to consult this list I compiled for the LA Weekly of Cage events this year.

by Christian Hertzog
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Dance, Experimental Music, Festivals, File Under?, New York

Curation by Subtraction

Many of us love to see musical works created to accompany choreography performed with dancers involved. But this weekend finds musicians approaching these pieces from another vantage point. Ne(x)tworks, Greenwich Music House’s ensemble-in-residence, presents “Music Without Dance,”  a festival of works originally written for dance that are abstracted from movement and performed as absolute music.

What’s revealed about these pieces by listening to them while imagining (or even avoiding thinking about) the dances to which they were originally attached? Curation by subtraction: I like it!

Ne(x)tworks Presents the “Music Without Dance” Festival

Saturday, February 25th: 7:30PM concert

Sunday, February 26th: 6:00PM free panel discussion, 7:30PM concert

at Greenwich House Music School

(46 Barrow Street at Bedford, 212-242-4770)

Concert tickets: $15 at door, Students/Seniors $10 (no advance sales)

Event Link

“Music Without Dance” Program:

Saturday, Feb. 25, 7:30PM

Concert program:

Moving Spaces (2002)  by Christian Wolff

Migrations (2008) by Miguel Frasconi

Future Sight (2010) by Shelley Burgon

Relative Calm (1981) by Jon Gibson

Sunday, Feb. 26, 6:00PM

FREE panel discussion on the relationship between music and dance.

With choreographers Yoshiko Chuma, Katherine Beyar, Nai-Ni Chen, Erica Essner,

and composers Joan La Barbara, Miguel Frasconi, John King, Annea Lockwood.

Sunday, Feb. 26, 7:30PM

Concert program:

Stuplimity No. 3 (2007) by Christopher McIntyre

Desert Myths (2006) by Joan La Barbara

Jitterbug (2007) by Annea Lockwood

DELTA (dreamdeepdown) (2002) by John King

Ne(x)tworks is: Joan La Barbara (voice), Shelley Burgon (harp & electronics), Yves Dharamraj (cello), Miguel Frasconi (glass instruments & electronics, Director), Ariana Kim (violin), Christopher McIntyre (trombone), and special guest Jenny Lin (piano). Learn more on the Ne(x)tworks website  www.nextworksmusic.net.

by Christian Carey
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Festivals, File Under?, New York, Percussion

So Percussion Goes Maverick, Gets Remixed, Celebrates Cage!




So Percussion recently released remixes of tracks from Amid the Noise, their recording of music by Jason Treuting. You can grab it for free via their Bandcamp site (embed below).

Treuting recently released sheet music for Amid the Noise, which can be purchased at Good Child Music.





This year, a great number of artists and ensembles are celebrating John Cage’s centenary – even Jessye Norman and Meredith Monk are getting in on the act as part of Michael Tilson Thomas’s revival of the American Mavericks series with the San Francisco Symphony. While it will be fascinating to see that some of these “out of the box” Cage performances will be happening, it’s also nice to hear that groups like So Percussion, who have a long track record performing Cage’s music, are celebrating the centenary in style. On 3/26, they are taking part in the American Mavericks series at Carnegie Hall (details here).

The concert will be the culmination of a tour by the group featuring Cage’s Third Construction as the centerpiece of Cage-themed program entitled We Are All Going in Different Directions.

There’s an equally imaginative recorded component So’s feting of the maestro of indeterminacy. On 3/27, Cantaloupe will release So Percussion’s “John Cage Bootleg Series.” The release includes a blank LP (the better with which to perform 4’33”!), a CD sampler, and a card with download codes that will enable listeners to obtain all of the group’s Cage bootlegs online. And the audio artifact lover in me delights in the handsome homemade feel of its handsome packaging. Top to bottom, Cage’s aesthetic is well manifested in So Percussion’s activities this Spring!


We Are All Going in Different Directions: So Percussion Celebrates Cage
Feb 28: Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee (Cage’s Third Construction)

March 2: The Royal Conservatory, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

March 6 + 7: The McCullough Theatre, University of Texas, Austin

March 10: Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin (Cage’s Third Construction)

March 26: Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall, NYC

Program

John Cage: Credo in US (1942)

Sō Percussion / Matmos: Needles (w/ Matmos) (2010)

John Cage: Imaginary Landscape #1 (1939)

John Cage: Quartet for Percussion, from She is Asleep (1943)

Cenk Ergün: Use (w/ Cenk Ergün & Beth Meyers) (2009)

Dan Deacon: “Bottles” from Ghostbuster Cook: The Origin of the Riddler (2011)

John Cage: 18’12”, a simultaneous performance of Cage works

-Inlets (Improvisation II) (1977)
–0’00” (4’33” No.2) (1962)
–Duet for Cymbal (1960)
–45’ for a speaker (1954)

Jason Trueting: 24 x 24 (w/ special guests) (2011)

John Cage: Third Construction (1941)

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical

My Annual Off-Topic Oscar Prognostigation Post

It was not a great year for movies, in my humble opinion.  But like they say in the most obnoxious Bud commercials yet:  here we go.

The Top Ten Movies I Saw in 2011

The Trip – Two prominent English comics eat and impersonate their way through the Lake District in a film that is barely a film at all but manages to be both hysterically funny and oddly touching.

Submarine – Young Oliver gets laid. A coming of age film that will make you forget that you ever saw one of those before. Memo to Woody Allen: This is how to write funny.

Bullhead (Rundskop) – Cattle  doping and simmering French-Flemish violence create a brutal backdrop to a horrifying and unforgettable tale of revenge.

A Separation – Educated, secular Iranian couple war over the soul and approval of their daughter as they approach divorce. Could have been filmed in Shaker Heights without changing a word of dialogue.

Another Earth – Overlooked gem that address the question of whether we can ever undo—on this earth or another—the damage that we do to each other.

Take Shelter – Another neglected small masterpiece about a construction worker with premonitions of impending disaster.

Drive – Great performances by Ryan Gosling, Albert Brooks and supporting cast in a stylized tale  whose roots run from Jean-Pierre Melville to Walter Hill to Nicholas Refn. (I watched Refn’s earlier Danish-language Pusher Trilogy this year, too, and found the three films astounding.)

Martha, Marcy, May, Marlene – Girl escapes cult and Manson-like leader but cannot shake the fear of being stalked. Gripping, real.

We Need to Talk About Kevin – So your son is a serial killer? In a just world, Meryl Streep would be Tilda Swinton’s maid.

Cedar Rapids – An old-fashioned comedy that makes you laugh without resorting to gross out.

 

by Jerry Bowles
Composers, Contemporary Classical

Down the Rabbit Hole of “Sidereus”

Composer Osvaldo Golijov

Today marks a week since Tom Manoff and Brian McWhorter attended an infamous  performance of the Osvaldo Golijov’s Sidereus by the Eugene Symphony Orchestra in Eugene, Oregon. The duo’s story – that they recognized substantial sections of another piece, Michael Ward-Bergeman’s Barbeich, in Mr. Golijov’s work – has, by now, practically become legend in music circles. Nearly every outlet covering Classical Music in the country, from The New Yorker to various individuals’ twitter feeds, have focused heavily on the ethics of Mr. Golijov’s musical borrowing.

To me, the question of whether what Mr. Golijov did is right or wrong doesn’t matter. We know from Mr. Ward-Bergeman’s well-circulated statement that he and Mr. Golijov have a standing agreement allowing the Argentinean-born composer to use material from Barbeich as he sees fit. Additionally, Mr. Golijov admitted to using Mr. Ward-Bergeman’s melody in a promotional interview leading up to Sidereus‘ first performance by the Memphis Symphony Orchestra in October 2010. The discourse needs to shift its focus from Mr. Golijov’s culpability  and target the implications of this scenario – what does the Sidereus crisis  symbolize?

Superficially, one of the most inflammatory aspects of this story is the fact that Mr. Golijov is an incredibly famous composer and Mr. Ward-Bergeman is not well known. But, what is being overlooked is that the piece Mr. Golijov produced isn’t very good. In my opinion, Sidereus does not fulfill a level of imagination and perspicacity concomitant to the rest of Mr. Golijov’s output. People are saying the orchestras who commissioned Sidereus didn’t get what they paid for because Mr. Golijov borrowed from Mr. Ward-Bergeman. This isn’t true: the orchestras who commissioned Mr. Golijov didn’t get what they paid for because he didn’t write a good piece.

With this said, we shouldn’t dwell on why Sidereus misses the mark – Mr. Golijov is neither the first nor last great composer to put together a stinker. More important is examining the situation that led him to work at a level below his typical creativity. To this day, we know Mr. Golijov struggles with deadlines, and we also know he often juggles multiple projects at once. To my eyes, it is clear what happened: Mr. Golijov felt overwhelmed by his commitments and needed the help of Mr. Ward-Bergeman’s piece to fulfill an obligation.

Succumbing to pressure like this isn’t damnable – though, the disingenuous communications regarding Mr. Golijov’s lifting of Barbeich are quite problematic, as I will discuss later. However, other composers have done similar things with impunity, whether that means orchestrating one piece into another, or – in the case of Matthias Pintscher’s orchestra piece Toward Osiris – fulfilling one commission by throwing together sketches of a different, ongoing project. If we want to be constructive, instances like Sidereus should not indict the composers involved, but, instead, should operate as indicators of broader problems inherent to the system that produces these large commissions.

(more…)

by Garrett Schumann
Auction, Commissions, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Opera, Strange

Because Opera Directors Look for New Operas on Ebay

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oOj1EKSS6M[/youtube]

This has got to be a first. Luis Andrei Cobo is offering his services to compose a grand opera to the highest Ebay bidder. For $150,000 you can buy a grand opera over 2 hours in length.

Cobo estimates that he’ll need 2 years of full-time work to complete the project, so $75K/year will enable him to maintain the lifestyle to which he has become accustomed as a software programmer.

Don’t have $150K? That’s OK, he’s open to other offers. For as little as $32,000 he will write a half-hour long chamber opera for 3 to 5 singers.

The winning bidder will get to suggest subject matter for the opera, be able to produce the work royalty-free, and upon the composer’s death, the highest bidder or the heir(s) of the bidder will inherit the work.

Sounds like a deal. Then again, obtaining an actual staging of the finished work….

Complete information on this ebay item can be found here. Good luck on your bid!

by Christian Hertzog