Just got a note from Andrew Cyr inviting Sequenza21 readers (and maybe some other less distinguished people) to a free party at Le Possion Rouge tomorrow night to celebrate the Metropolis Ensemble’s Grammy nomination for its Naxos recording of Avner Dorman’s Mandolin Concerto (Avi Avital (soloist) and Andrew Cyr (conductor) with Metropolis Ensemble). Avi, Andrew and the Metropolis crew will perform a few sets during the evening, including the Mandolin Concerto and, maybe, Andrew says, even “a Balkan music jam.” Not only is admission free but the first two drinks are on the house. The party start @7 and lasts until everyone goes home. What’s not to like?
The Red Possum (as I like to call it) is located at 158 Bleecker Street (a sacred place for those of us old to have caught Thelonious Monk on stage there in a different lifetime.)
And, speaking of parties, the funniest classical CD review I have ever read is on page one of our sister ship today.
Hidden within the typical drive-to-cadence activities that closed the 2010 Fall semester here at the University of Michigan were three special performances showcasing the creativity and boldness of student composers David Biedenbender, Roger Zare and William Zuckerman. The premieres of their works – Three Rilke Poems, Janus, and By the way: Music in Pluralism, respectively – demonstrated the profits of well executed collaborations with all of the following: a third-party ensemble, a soloist, and other forms of media. I am proud to report the largely unqualified success of these endeavors and suspect these works are part of a more general movement in the new music community to work closely with performers and performance groups on large-scale projects.
First, I will talk about David Biedenbender’s Three Rilke Poems, on which he worked closely with the University of Michigan Chamber Choir under the direction of Maestro Jerry Blackstone. For two reasons, this chamber choir collaboration was the most traditional out of the three works I’m discussing: it is not at all uncommon to work with choral ensembles, and Mr. Biedenbender’s music was fairly straightforward in terms of content. However, these realities should not diminish the absolutely overwhelming poignancy of his composition.
Three Rilke Poems had an overall structure of slow-faster-slow, though the two slow movements possessed highly contrasting materials and were not connected. The faster middle movement, Herbst, had a very elegant opening where Mr. Biedenbender layered opposing ostinati, creating a crackling bed of additive rhythms upon which he introduced the primary melodies for the piece. The practicalities of choir performance often obligate a composer to use more a more traditional harmonic language when writing a choral composition. While this was true about Three Rilke Poems, Mr. Biedenbender found many ways to undermine the order of his tertian or modal systems, such as the layered rhythms at the beginning of Herbst. Consequently, though Three Rilke Poems relied heavily on triads and diatonic dissonances, it was a clearly modern composition.
The American Modern Ensemble performs Pieces of Eight, a program of sextets at Galapagos in Brooklyn on Monday, December 13, 2010. Among the eight under-40 composers featured on the concert is Sequenza 21’s own Contributing Editor Armando Bayolo.
I recently caught up with AME’s Artistic Director Robert Paterson and asked him for some details about the show. Here’s what he had to say.
“Pieces of Eight consists of works by composers from all over the United States, including Xi Wang from Texas, Armando Bayolo from Washington, DC and David Ludwig from Philadelphia. I chose these particular works because they are wonderfully stylistically different from each other, and help to demonstrate how diverse American composers are today, particularly with regard to the subset of composers under forty.”
“Action Figure by Armando Bayolo has a strong pulse and hyper-kinetic kind of energy, and encapsulates the image of an action figure—like you would play with as a child—but through sound.” “the resonance after… by Christopher Chandler is the winner of AME’s Fifth Annual Composition Competition. Christopher writes achingly beautiful music, and this is one of those “chills up your spine” pieces—a piece of music that really makes you feel something emotional. The title perfectly encapsulates what you hear, and the musical landscape he creates is simply beautiful.”
“Adolescent Psychology by Shawn Crouch sounds like the state of a child’s mind, at least to me, especially with the rapid changes of emotion, slower introspective sections and frenetic scalar runs. Shawn has written a number of works for voice and choir, so this is a wonderful glimpse into his chamber music world.”
“Among the many intriguing qualities of Hannah Lash’s music is how she uses and explores extended techniques. In A Matter of Truth, she asks the violinist and cellist to detune their instruments way below the normal range, effectively turning each instrument into a much lower version of itself.”
“David Ludwig’s Haiku Catharsis consists of a set of short movements that are inspired by poems, and what I love about David’s work is that even though there is a numerological importance to how he constructed this piece, it never sounds technically “on your sleeve” or academic. The whole works sounds organic and lovely, and is timbrally rich and colorful.”
“OK Feel Good by Jonathan Newman is probably the most “Downtown” sounding piece on the program, and has a kind of happy “feel good” sound quality. The piece joyfully carries you along with its bouncy rhythms and Major scale harmonies and melodies.”
“Three Images by Xi Wang is the longest piece on the program, and one of the saddest. It wonderfully contrasts some of the other works on the program that are more emotionally uplifting.”
“A criminal running scared from the police on old Route 66 inspires my own Sextet. It starts with the scream of police whistles and ends with a band; it even incorporates a chase scene. AME is releasing its brand new CD of my music at this concert, and my Sextet is on the CD, beautifully performed by our wonderful ensemble.”
Elliott Carter at Miller Theatre. Credit: Jon SimonBoulez's 85th celebrated - a bit late - at Miller. Photo: Jon Simon
Elliott Carter turns 102 today! He was at Miller Theatre this past Monday night at the all Pierre Boulez concert put on by the Talea Ensemble. This was the last of many concerts celebrating Boulez’s 85th birthday (which occurred back in March).
The group played the US premiere of the latest version of Dérive 2: a work composed in 1988 to celebrate Carter’s 80th birthday. 22 years later, Boulez, now 85 himself, has expanded the piece to well over double its original length!
Talea Ensemble at Miller. Photo credit: Jon Simon.
As Raymond Bisha wrote on the Naxos Blog, Elliott Carter is planning to spend his 102nd birthday in Toronto, at a concert comprised entirely of works he’s written in the past two years!
We’re pleased to announce that Hayes Biggs has agreed to be our third jury member for theSequenza 21/MNMP Call for Scores. Hayes is currently a faculty member at the Manhattan School of Music. Acomposer, vocalist, writer, copyist, and former Associate Editor at Peters, he brings a wealth of experience to our judges’ table. We’re thrilled he’ll be a part of planning the program.
That’s right. Anything you want to ask a famous (or maybe not so famous) conductor is now possible thanks to the miracle of Twitter. To participate, simply think of a question and pose it on Twitter. For more information or to ask a question, visit #askthemusician and choose a conductor; questions must be 140 characters or less and must include the hash tag #askaconductor and the conductor’s Twitter handle.
#askaconductor in 5 simple steps
Step 1: Think of a question
Step 2: Log in to Twitter
Step 3: Pose your question today. Just remember to stick to 140 characters or less and be sure to include the hash tag #askaconductor.
Step 4: Wait for the conductor to answer!
For a list of conductors who have signed up to participate so far, visit #askthemusicians.
Indaba Music has announced the winners of the Steve Reich 2×5 Remix Contest.
As one of the judges of the competition (along with Mr. Reich), let me offer my congratulations to the winner – Dominique Leone – and runners-up: Vakula and David Minnick.
I’d also like to congratulate the rest of the entrants. Selecting the winner was a very difficult process: the pool of remixes from which to choose was excellent!
Mikel Rouse’s song cycle Gravity Radio is given its New York premiere at Brooklyn Academy of Music on Tuesday and Thursday evening. The nice folks at BAM have offered for Sequenza 21 to give away four pairs of tickets to the event on the 7th or 9th. The first four folks to email me with the name of one of Rouse’s bands/ensembles will be our winners!
1) at 4:30 the Chiara Quartet will play Gorecki’s 2nd quartet, Quasi Una Fantasia, and will premiere a new piece by Huang Ruo, Calligraffiti, which features projected video art by Seattle-based video artist Juniper Shuey. 2) and at 7:00, American Opera Projects and Opera on Tap present a show titled Sex, Cigarettes and Psychopaths (a Night of Laughs). There will be scenes from Matt Marks’ serial killer song-cycle The Adventures of Albert Fish, Daniel Felsenfeld’s collection of comedic sex songs called La BoneMe, among other sex(y) scenes. More information about each of these shows here.
First the good news: The Talea Ensemble performs the music of Boulez for the Miller Theatre Composer Portrait concert at 8pm. Now the bad news: it’s sold out! However, if you weren’t lucky enough to get your Boulez tickets in time, you can check out the MIVOS quartet at 9:30 at The Tank. They’ll be performing Wolfgang Rihm and Carl Bettendorf, which is pretty cool, too!
The bagpipe master Matt Welch, and his group Blarvuster will release their self-titled CD at 8pm. This show is free, folks, so make sure you pick up the new disc while you’re there. More info here.
The Metropolis Ensemble (who were just nominated for a Grammy!) will be presenting an intimate performance called, It takes a long time to become a good composer, featuring Timo Andres on piano. You’ll want to get your tickets for this one early if you can; they’ve already added extra shows on the 10th and 11th and one night is already sold out. More information about the show here.
American Opera Projects presents a workshop performance of John Glover’s one-act monodrama opera, Our Basic Nature. Fans of WNYC’s Radiolab might recall an episode entitled “Lucy”; this opera was inspired by that show, and the libretto (by dramaturg Kelley Rourke) is taken from the memoir written by the scientist that raised a chimpanzee as his daughter. The music will be performed by Redshift, pianist Jocelyn Dueck, and baritone Andrew Wilkowske, with projections by Erik Pearson. More information about the show here.
Its not often I leave a new music concert and my ears are ringing, but Friday night’s performance of the University of Michigan Contemporary Directions Ensemble (CDE) pumped up the volume with works by Jefferson Friedman, Stephen Hartke and Bang-On-A-Can founders Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon.
The evening started off with Mr. Friedman’s 78 for pierrot ensemble, an upbeat mixed meter groove centering around a repetitive riff alternatively appearing in minor and major modes. As CDE conductor Christopher James Lees explained in his pre-concert remark, the program was designed to explore the “New York” sound, because the featured composers either live in New York now or grew up there. Maestro Lees noted the confluence of rock, jazz and contemporary music that surrounded these composers as they developed their mature sound. 78 clearly connected to these roots with its syncopated, pentatonic theme juxtaposed against the inside-the-piano techniques and extended tertian harmonies of a soft chorale. The work proved to be an excellent starting point for the concert because its successors carried these populist and eclectic tendencies to opposite extremes.
For example, Stephen Hartke’s violin duo Oh Them Rats Is Mean In My Kitchen amplified the allusion to jazz and other improvised music with a free-flowing structure and a textural dichotomy of solo-accompaniment or rhythmic/melodic unity. Oh Them Rats most elegant demonstrates the connection between these composers and the modernism of the 1970s and 60s with its balance between bluesy melodies and dissonant harmonies. The arc of the work, in fact, expressed a subtle emergence of the blues scale as a primary melodic source from beginning to end. Accordingly, the piece climaxed with a smeared blues-scale melody played by both violins but out of tune and asynchronously such that it sounded like shoddy overdubbing on an old Muddy Waters record.
