Concerts

Cardew in Austin

I’m always excited to hear when something rad is happening in my hometown. Austin’s one of those special places where music, by both general consent and official decree, is a priority. It’s literally what the town has decided to Be About. But I’ve always had the sense that the wild/literate/overachiever/weirdo dimensions were under-represented — though, actually, I probably just wasn’t paying attention. I am now, and I’m kicking myself that I’ll have to miss this ark:

The intrepid Austin New Music Co-op have erected Cornelius Cardew’s masterpiece “The Great Learning.” It’s 5+ hours long, spanning two evenings, featuring more than 60 trained and untrained performers including chorus and pipe organ. Usually excerpted, this will be the first performance in the US of the work in it’s entirety, and the second night falls on what would have been Cardew’s 75th birthday. More about the concert and the Co-op.

Friday May 6th @ 7:00pm (Paragraphs 1, 2, 3 & 4)
Saturday May 7th @ 6:00pm (Paragraphs 5, 6 & 7)
Central Presbyterian Church
200 East 8th Street

Advance tickets available now at End of an Ear (http://endofanear.com)
$17 one night / $25 both nights
Student and advance tickets discounted to $15 one night / $20 both nights

In Austin? Going to the show? Leave a comment about your experience, or shoot me an email! I’m sorry to miss it.

by Elliot Cole
Contemporary Classical

Sounds of Fes, Morocco

I am currently visiting my brother who teaches English at a University in Fes, Morocco. One of his roommates is Chris Witulski, a doctoral candidate in ethnomusicology from the University of Florida currently researching indigenous Moroccan music. A big part of Chris’ work is devoted to transcribing performances of certain types of Moroccan folk music, and Monday he hosted a group of Gnawa musicians at the house to perform a series of songs.

As Chris and a few Moroccans told me, Gnawa is rooted in West African music and primarily uses pentatonic scales, although more Arabic-sounding melodies with half-steps and microtonal vocal intonations evolved once the tradition reached Morocco. Monday’s performance featured three musicians, two who played iron castanet-like instruments called krakebs and one who played a three-stringed bass-like instrument called the hajhuj. The hajhuj player led the group through the songs, which often featured call-and-response passages.

Although the raw materials of the Gnawa music I heard were very straightforward – repetitive rhythmic grooves supporting tunes rooted in a simple melodic language – I was struck by the unpredictable phrasing. Rarely were lines repeated in a cookie-cutter manner, and most of the time there was little sense of antecedent-consequent relationships in the songs’ melodic framework. The music simply moved along from one piece of text to another, stabilized by the rhythmic drone of the krakebs.

Of course, I am no expert on this music and I dislike describing this music to you after so little contact with it. So, below is a link to a video of an earlier performance by this same Gnawa group. Note Abd ar-Rzaq, the ma’alem, or leader and the dual function of the hajhuj as a melodic and rhythmic part of the ensemble. The animal skin wrapped around the main body of the instrument not only helps it resonate, but also acts as a drumhead, which he taps from time to time.

Enjoy!

Ma\’alem Abd ar-Rzaq, Gnawa معلم عبد الرزاق الگناوي

by Garrett Schumann
Contemporary Classical

Chat Live with Melinda Wagner Today at Noon

Spring for Music, an annual festival of concerts by North American symphony and chamber orchestras at Carnegie Hall, was created in part to start a conversation about repertoire, about audience expectations, and about orchestral programming in general. To help continue this conversation, the festival is hosting a series of online events allowing participants to interact with members of the team in an open dialogue.

The first of these chats is today (Monday) at noon with composer Melinda Wagner.  This is Melinda’s conversation starter:

“Composers do not work in a vacuum. Every kind of music we hear, old or new, ‘serious’, ‘popular’, colloquial or vernacular – every note is a part of our sound world, even those we don’t like very much. Embracing, even celebrating our influences while striving to create something personal- well, that is the challenge with every new piece. With something as incredible as Bach’s Brandenbergs, though, the challenges are much greater. I can we rid ourselves of any apprehension associated with ‘living up’ a composer of such great stature? How can we engage with the past without lapsing into parody and pastiche?”

You can join the conversation right here:

by Jerry Bowles
CDs, Cello, Contemporary Classical, Deaths, File Under?

Peter Lieberson: The Six Realms

Peter Lieberson’s record label, Bridge Records, has been kind enough to share some of his music with us: an excerpt from The Six Realms, for Cello and Orchestra (2000), one of his later and larger works and a piece that has an explicitly Buddhist programmatic element.

Here is movement 5, performed by cellist Michaela Fukacova, the Odense Symphony Orchestra, and conducted by Justin Brown. The recording is from Bridge 9178, The Music of Peter Lieberson.

The Six Realms:  V. The Human Realm

Program Note:

In addition to silk and other precious goods, the Silk Road helped disseminate Buddhism, one of its earliest, and most valuable, cultural exports. For almost thirty years, Peter Lieberson has been a devout Buddhist, having studied with the great Chogyam Trungpa, a Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhist master he met in 1974. Says Lieberson, “Buddhism’s appeal to me in the early 1970s was that it was not a religion in the conventional Western sense. Buddhism did not posit the existence of any external deity or savior or, for that matter, an individual personal ego…The basic message of the great Buddhist masters was: Be brave enough to experience existence without dogma or beliefs of any kind.” (more…)

by Christian Carey
Awards, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Deaths, File Under?, Songs

RIP Peter Lieberson (1946-2011)

We’re saddened to learn from David Starobin of the passing of composer Peter Lieberson in Israel, due to complications from Lymphoma. He had been battling the disease since 2006 and for a time it had been in remission. But in late 2010, Lieberson travelled to Israel to seek treatment for a recurrence of the cancer.

Alex Ross has posted a touching remembrance on The Rest is Noise.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJoqGx_F_1o[/youtube]

Lieberson’s music was an extraordinary mixture of disparate strands of influences. It encompassed  an intuitive post-tonal vocabulary, rooted in dodecaphonic training but also capable of lush verticals and, particularly in his vocal music, supple lyricism and sweeping melodies. In later years, his interest in meditation and Zen Buddhism contributed another layer of resonances and an intriguingly metaphysical counterweight to some of the modernist tendencies of his oeuvre.

Among the many honors he attained was the prestigious Grawemeyer Prize, which he won in 2008 for Neruda Songs. Although he was a finalist for the award on multiple occasions, the Pulitzer Prize eluded him. Back in 2004, I suggested that this injustice made him the “Pulitzer’s Susan Lucci.”

Of course, during this sad time, one can’t help but think of the passing of Lieberson’s late wife, the extraordinary mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, also of cancer. Lieberson wrote a number of memorable pieces for her, including the aforementioned Neruda Songs. If there’s a signature example to use when we advocate for our government to continue to fund medical research, I’d offer this one up: two brilliant creators in the prime of life laid low so cruelly. Both had so much yet to offer. It’s a tragedy that we’re bereft of their artistry and humanity far too soon.

by Christian Carey
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Stay tuned

Clarice Jensen

Yes, we’re still planning to have a Sequenza 21/MNMP concert in 2011 and it’s going to be excellent. We’re still finalizing the details, but should have an announcement soon.

Thanks for your continued patience (which is code for “entrants: stop calling and emailing us”).

Speaking of synthetists, how’s about Craig Wedren and ACME performing a song from On in Love (video below)?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SWCPDI4tKQ[/youtube]

by Christian Carey
Composers, Experimental Music, Festivals, Improv, Just Intonation, Microtonalism, Opportunities, San Francisco, Sound Art

Call for Proposals: Music for People and Thingamajigs, 2011

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 started it at Mills College in 1997, and it’s grown up to include a non-profit parent organization, Thingamajigs, and a profusion of programs including performances and arts education.

The festival Call for Proposals just went out this week.  Artists and composers working with invented instruments and/or alternate tuning systems, and performing ensembles featuring either one or both, are invited to submit proposals.  The deadline is June 15, 2011, although proposals which come in on or before May 15, 2011 will be included in festival grant proposals “and will have a greater chance of receiving outside funding,” says founder Schocker.

Proposals should include a bio of the artist/performer/composer(s), a specific description of the work or performance to be considered, and documentation of the submitted work (CD or link to a website).  Thingamajigs prefers electronically submitted proposals, sent to people@thingamajigs.org, but will accept hard copies at  Thingamajigs.org, 5000 MarcArthur Blvd PMB 9826, Oakland, CA, 94613, USA.

by Polly Moller
Composers, Experimental Music, Festivals, File Under?, New York

Phat Beats from Princeton

De Rerum - Matisyahu eat your heart out

Some of you might know Elliot Cole as a composer of concert music, Contributing Editor here at Sequenza 21, or as a doctoral student at Princeton. But do you know Cole as a … rapper?

De Rerum, Elliot’s debut EP as a fast-talking MC, under the project moniker Oracle Hysterical, tackles lofty subject matter. According to Cole, “It’s a verse history of the world as I understand it (to c.2000BCE, after which, I discovered, history is mostly redundant), and also a general synthesis of, well, most every (nonfiction) book I’ve read in the last decade.”

The EP is available for free download via his website. If you enjoy this taste of Oracle Hysterical, you can check out their performance of a retelling of the Rake’s Progress alongside the Metropolis Ensemble at the MATA festival in NYC on May 12.

MP3:01 The Angle

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical, File Under?

On Brains, Babbitt, and the End of the Year

Last Saturday night I saw a concert that paired, more closely than any before, technology with the living composer. The debut performances of the MiND (Music in Neural Dimensions) Ensemble at the University of Michigan this weekend left its audience in awe as the performers used “advanced neurofeedback technology” in conjunction with live electronics to produce an evening of music controlled – literally – by their brain activity. Propelled by its uncharted level of novelty, the concert was a dramatic exploration of music’s relationship with our mind and spirit unified but a spirit of interactivity that extended beyond the neurofeedback to audience participation and elegant live electronics.

MiND is made up of graduate composers David Biedenbender, Suby Raman and Sam Richards along with Robert Alexander, Dan Charette, Laura Gaines and Annlie Huang. Unlike most contemporary music ensembles where composers often work behind the scenes, Mr. Biedenbender, Mr. Raman and Mr. Richards participated actively in the performance as instrumentalists and narrators. Given that their instrumental prowess was limited, the pure musical elements were simple and serene, if not a little cheesy at times. This trance-like character, however, did not detract from the evening’s overall affect, which used meditations led by local T’ai Chi Master Washentha Young to set a tone of connectedness between mind, body and spirit.

The performance’s zen-like mien was a wise creative choice because beating the audience over the head with the science of everything would have desiccated the performance like overcooked chicken. To be honest, it was not always clear how or what part of the music was being influenced by the neurofeedback at any given point. Though on multiple occasions the MiND musicians explained the types of brain data they were using to alter the music, it was not possible to completely discern how much of what we were hearing was live and pre-recorded.

This lack of transparency rested in the primitive quality of the neurofeedback devices, or “brain hats” as the MiND Ensemble members called them. In fact, Friday and Saturday’s performances were as important to the world of music as they were to the scientific research of the brain. I couldn’t resist relating the concert’s equitable significance to science and music drew me to Milton Babbitt’s famous article, Who Cares If You Listen? (I prefer his original title, The Composer as Specialist) wherein the late champion of total serialism compares the state of contemporary music – in 1958 – to the social standing advanced mathematics and science.

(more…)

by Garrett Schumann