The Original New Music Community
Maya Beiser, everyone’s favorite ex-Can Banging All Star downtown cellist, was an invited presenter at the March 2011 TED conference. The TED site recently released a high quality video of her lecture recital, and it’s already garnered over 80,000 views!
TED’s slogan: “Ideas worth spreading.” We’re glad that Maya’s getting the chance to spread the word about Steve Reich’s Cello Counterpoint and David Lang’s World to Come far and wide!
Like the New Music Bake Sale, there’s another great Brooklyn tradition beginning to happen. On Friday, July 8, 7:00 pm to midnight at the Invisible Dog Art Center, Dither will be hosting their second annual “Extravaganza.”
This year they will be featuring an array of experimental sounds, presented by composers and performers notorious for carving out unique musical niches.
In addition to Dither, the lineup includes renowned guitarist Marc Ribot, powerhouse quartet So Percussion, Ches Smith and These Arches (an all-star line-up including Mary Halvorson, Andrea Parkins, and Tim Berne), Ted Hearne and Philip White’s raucous noise group R We Who R We, Sound sculpting vocalist Lesley Flanigan, multi-instrumentalist Nathan Koci, and a multimedia work for suitcase radios by composer Paula Matthusen. Dither will perform works by Phill Niblock, Corey Dargel, Lisa R. Coons, Joshua Lopes, and Travis Just.
Dither’s Invisible Dog Extravaganza!
Friday July 8, 7:00 pm – Midnight
The Invisible Dog Art Center, 51 Bergen St.
F/G to Bergen, 2/3/4/5 to Borough Hall, A/C to Jay
$6 admission
Sponsored by The Brooklyn Arts Coucil and Brooklyn Brewery
www.theinvisibledog.org
www.ditherquartet.com
(and if any of you still can’t get enough of Dither, you can listen to my recent podcast episode with James Moore here. I’ve also recorded an interview with Taylor Levine which will be available later this summer. You can subscribe for free in iTunes if you’re afraid you’ll miss it.)
Summer’s here and the time is right for dancing in the streets. Or, making playlists. Or something. Some friends who just got themselves a screened-in porch for their house up in Willow asked me to come up with an iPod playlist for sitting around at dusk smoking cigars and sipping brandy. Mostly pop-stuff but offbeat. I decided to go all-female..well, okay, there is one boy-girl duet…because I like girl singers. But, I digress, I had so much fun putting the list together that I thought we ought to have a little playlist contest here. Any genre is ok. You can add to my list or, even better, make your own. Don’t know what the prize will be but I’ll think of something. So, da da, here’s my Woodstock Summer 2011 Mostly Girl Front Porch Chill Mix:
I might add that you can listen to any or all of these songs free at Grooveshark. I don’t know how they get away with it so don’t tell anyone.
My parents-in-law have a long tradition of enthusiastic photography. Greta the golden retriever is less than a year old, but she’s already an accomplished model.
To those readers in the United States, I’d like to wish you a safe and happy Independence Day. While there’s a lot of music played on this holiday that is arranged to be “broadly appealing,” Charles Ives was never one to compromise. “Fourth of July” (1904), from the Holidays Symphony, complexly layers a number of patriotic tunes, which move a different speeds and simultaneously appear in different keys.
No one will mistake this piece for John Philip Sousa anytime soon, but it’s Ives’ way of paying tribute to the complex and multifaceted portrait that he saw both as America in the modern age and as the epitome of the American dream. Michael Tilson Thomas leads the Chicago Symphony in the embedded video below.
On Thursday, I’m giving a talk about Milton Babbitt’s life and work to high school composers at Westminster Choir College’s Composition Camp. It seems only fitting to introduce them to Babbitt as part of the week’s activities. He lived near WCC’s campus, attended a number of events at the college, and until it closed some years back, could often be found at the Annex at lunchtime. Many of our students knew Milton best because they’d waited on him there!
Another reason that I want to share my interest in Milton’s music with them: he was the first composer that I met; when I was about the same age as many of the composers attending this week’s camp. And yes, I found his music to be baffling at first; but it made me want to learn more about contemporary music: how it’s made and what makes the composers of it tick. I’ve been at it ever since!
It’s difficult to sum up Milton’s work in an introductory lecture. I’ve limited myself to 12 slides (pun intended).
Milton Babbitt overview: Powerpoint presentation
An hour after my lecture on Babbitt, I’ve been asked to give a composer talk about my own work. I’ve set myself with a tough act to follow!
Update (July 5, 2011): The Villiers Quartet has revised its guidelines for its new music competition. The most notable change is the age restriction, which has been raised to 35. Good luck!
London’s Villiers Quartet is seeking new works by composers under 35. If you’re an emerging composer looking for an international performance opportunity, check out the guidelines to have your work premiered next season by this exciting, young ensemble. I’ll let the ensemble’s first violinist, James Dickenson, explain: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ9bzsWGJEQ[/youtube]
And here are their guidelines, which can also be found at the Villiers Quartet’s web site.
The 2012 Villiers Quartet New Works Competition
The Villiers Quartet seeks new compositions from young composers as part of its 2011-2012 concert season at St Andrew’s Church, Fulham Fields, London, UK. The concert season, which already consists of string quartets by Haydn, Mendelssohn, Delius, and Beethoven, will feature a competition open to an international field of new and upcoming composers.
Three finalists will be chosen via online voting and have their works performed in London by the Villiers Quartet on April 29th, 2012. The winner will be determined at the concert by audience vote. The winner will receive a prize of £500 and a studio recording of their piece, plus inclusion of their work into the Villiers Quartet repertoire for upcoming seasons.
Competition Requirements:
This competition is open to composers aged 35 and under as of January 5th, 2012.
All composition entries must be original and unpublished works written for string quartet instrumentation: 2 violins, 1 viola, 1 cello.
Compositions must be no longer than 20 minutes in length. You may write whatever form you want, and there is no limit to the number of movements. For instance, you might be inspired to write a one movement rhapsodic interlude. You might write a 20 movement work where each movement lasts one minute. Or you might follow the classical four-movement form as laid out by Haydn. The floor is wide open.
Deadline for submissions is January 5th, 2012. Submissions can be sent electronically, or by post. Applications sent by post must be postmarked no later than January 5th, 2012. Applications received or postmarked after this date may not be considered.
We encourage you to be creative and experimental. Most of all, we want to hear your music. For more information on competition guidelines, visit www.villiersquartet.com/2012competition.
If you’re in the LA area this Sunday, and can spare 4 hours and then some (4 hours for the concert, then some for the commute and parking), 3 young musicians attending the Music Department at University of California, San Diego will perform Morton Feldman’s For Philip Guston.
While Feldman performances at UCSD are common enough, the sheer scale of For Philip Guston makes any production a rare event: 4 hours of late Feldman. Rachel Beetz will play flute (can you imagine playing a wind instrument for 4 hours with no breaks outside of the rests the composer gave you?), Dustin Donahue will play percussion (he has to stand for 4 hours), and Martin Hiendl will be the pianist (doubling on celesta). You can read an essay by Petr Kotik on the difficulties in performing this composition here.
I don’t know much about The Wulf, but readers will perceive it to be on the right track as a venue, presenting some of the far-out works on Michael Pisaro’s Dogstar Orchestra series this year.
Feldman always credited visual artists as having the biggest influence on his music: Rothko, Rauschenberg, Johns, and Guston. Guston’s daughter remembered Feldman thus:
Morty Feldman was a tall, heavyset man with a thick shock of almost black hair over an absent forehead, and eyes that were obscured by glasses with lenses like the bottom of a bottle… His morose, sardonic demeanor concealed a quick and biting critical intelligence. He was a man whose appetites more than rivaled my father’s They both loved to eat and drink and smoke, and they loved doing it together. The two men prowled the city for movies and good cheap restaurants. My memories of Morty have him stretched out and snoring on our wicker chaise, following some feast the two friends had shared.
Read more by Guston’s daughter, Musa Mayer, about Feldman and her father, here.
Philip Guston’s portrait of Morton Feldman may be viewed here.
Barriers between various musical genres continue to be gleefully destroyed by insightful musicians and collectives. One such divide that has been crumbling over the last few years has been any distinction between “bands” and “chamber groups.” Beyond the ensembles made up of visually traditional combinations (“string quartets” such as Kronos and Ethel) are more unusual outfits like Clogs, a bassoon-viola-guitar-percussion quartet.
The final, June 10th concert of the 2011 Tribeca New Music Festival featured SWARMIUS, a band from San Diego with an intriguing quartet configuration of violin, saxophone, percussion and laptop/electronics. Led by composer Joseph Waters (whose nom de band is Jozefius V. Rattus), SWARMIUS succeeds in producing some of the most dynamic, original, and compellingly infectious new music today. This is testament not only to Waters’ brilliant compositions, but to the formidable prowess of the three instrumentalists: violinist Fiddlus el Gato (aka Felix Olschofka), Saximus (saxophonist Todd Rewoldt) and percussionist Crotalius Redfoot (Joel Bluestone).
Taking place in the intimate confines of The Cell Theatre in Chelsea, the concert opened with Cali Karsimala, which took the rhythms and scales of a Gypsy couple’s dance as a departure point for an extended virtuoso expedition. The piece is highly evocative of its Eastern European and Persian models, but also moves beyond them to suggest energetic dance music of some new, imagined culture. Olschokfa and Rewoldt managed Waters’ sinewy and rhythmically tricky lines with verve and aplomb, and the timbral aspects of the piece (managed by Waters’ in real time from his laptop) were highly distinctive and memorable.
Drum Ride was another ultra-rhythmic traversal exploiting diverse exotic scales, this time over an almost omnipresent quintuplet ostinato. Despite its similar stylistic ingredients to Cali Karsimala, it more than managed to distinguish itself as being quite different, with melodic, harmonic and timbral material not at all reminiscent of the previous work. The only general similarity was that it again suggested ingrained folk music from a culture that doesn’t exist.
The title of the next piece removes the responsibility of the reviewer for providing any descriptive prose. Moonlight Beach Chaconne (The Beach Boys, J.S. Bach and Stevie Wonder Take A Trip To Nigeria, Where They Encounter The Ghost Of Richard Wagner, Impersonating A Shaman) delivers exactly what is promised by the title. Brilliantly, the result is not a pastiche at all, but an exuberant, multi-layered and at times very affecting synthesis of the idioms referenced in the title. Chromatic baroque harmony is always in the mix throughout the piece. What the title doesn’t tell you is that the work is basically a violin concerto, played with both virtuoso mastery and moving lyrical expression by Olschofka.
Dragon was a paean to Japanese video game music. With many recognizable themes swirling in high-spirited counterpoint, the piece exhibited bounteous imagination and sly humor, bringing the audience to audible laughter at various junctures. Lucas, the Bringer of Light was a completely different venture—a long and highly variegated tone poem inspired by Waters’ 7 month-old grandson. Using samples of his grandson’s vocalizations, Waters produced not only a deeply affecting portrait exploring the perceptions and temporality of an infant’s world, but an exploration of the machine-like aspects of human beings. The timbral universe of Waters’ sounds in this composition were vast but still unified; the structure appropriately and compellingly organic.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXjfVohsHUo[/youtube]
The concert’s finale was Grand Larceny, an enthralling toccata inspired by the fast tempi, timbres and ultra-precision of speed metal. For this number, the audience was asked to blow police whistles which had been distributed at the beginning of the concert at a climactic juncture, an effect that was both cathartic and hilarious.
In sum, the compositions of Joseph Waters and the musicians SWARMIUS produced a vibrant, highly memorable, gripping and deeply persuasive musical evening at The Cell. Here’s hoping that they will return to New York with their unique sonic presence very soon.
So I happened to be in the city over the weekend and didn’t have any interviews or other meetings today, so I figured “Hey, I’ve got a laptop…why not liveblog the Bang on a Can Marathon over at the World Financial Center? One press pass and sweet front row seat later, and here I am. I’m not sure if I’l be insane enough to make it to midnight, but I’ll try to give y’all a sense of as much of the festivities as I can. Started in 1987 by David Lang, Julia Wolfe, and Michael Gordon, the Marathon has turned into one of the biggest new music events in the country. I’ve never liveblogged anything before, so this should be interesting! I’ll keep the rest of the posts under the break so as to not take up a huge amount of space – if you have time and in the NYC area, come on down – it’s free, you can come and go as you’d like, and I’ll be in the front on the corner if you want to say hi! (more…)
League of Composers/ISCM has their season finale tonight at Miller Theatre. Louis Karchin conducts a program of five recently composed works.
True to form, the evening is chock-full of premieres, including the US debut of Elliott Carter’s Concertino for Bass Clarinet. How many concerts can boast a new orchestra piece written by a centenarian? The concertino features longtime Carter associate Virgil Blackwell as soloist.
David Rakowski is also represented by a new concerto. His Talking Points, written at the behest of the League of Composers, features the estimable soloist Fred Sherry as its protagonist.
Shulamit Ran’s Silent Voices, written for the Israel Contemporary Players, receives its US premiere. The work includes an optional part for reader, who declaims “Draft of a Reparation Agreement,” a poem by Holocaust survivor Dan Pagis.
New Yorker Missy Mazzoli contributes Violent Violent Sea, her first orchestra piece in five years. Connecticut’s Arthur Krieger rounds out the show with Sound Merger, a new piece for orchestra and electronic sound. Krieger, in my opinion, is one of the most persuasive exponents of melding live instruments and electronics. I’m intrigued to hear this new piece for a larger cohort than this medium is often afforded.
As usual, WNYC’s Jon Schaefer is kind enough to serve as master of ceremonies. Brief onstage interviews of the featured composers will accompany the musical proceedings.
Going to the show? Live tweet with the hashtag #fileunder?: we’ll run these microreviews next week on the File Under ? blog.
Tickets are $20/$10 for students (details here).
