Birthdays, Composers, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Happy 102nd Birthday Elliott Carter

Elliott Carter at Miller Theatre. Credit: Jon Simon
Boulez'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!

by Christian Carey
Competitions, Composers, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Enter Hayes Biggs

We’re pleased to announce that Hayes Biggs has agreed to be our third jury member for the Sequenza 21/MNMP Call for Scores. Hayes is currently a faculty member at the Manhattan School of Music. A composer, 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.

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical

Hey, Kids. It’s Ask a Conductor Day

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.

Here’s what’s shakin’ so far:

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical, Contests, File Under?, Minimalism

Indaba announces winners of 2×5 Remix Contest

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!

Below are the winners’ remixes. Enjoy!

by Christian Carey
Brooklyn, Contemporary Classical, Contests, File Under?

Mikel Rouse ticket giveaway

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!



Gravity Radio

Part of the 2010 Next Wave Festival

Dec 7 & 9—11, 2010, 7:30pm

NY Premiere

Conceived, written, and directed by Mikel Rouse


BAM Harvey Theater
60min, no intermission
Tickets: $25, 35, 45

Set design by Jeffery Sugg
Sound design by Christopher Ericson
Musical direction by Matthew Gandolfo

Commissioned by BAM for the 2010 Next Wave Festival.

by Christian Carey
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, New York

From “Quasi Una Fantasia” to “Our Basic Nature”

Here in New York we are on the cusp of another great week of concerts.  Check out as many of these as possible.

Sunday, December 5th – Two concerts at Galapagos:

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.

Monday, December 6th at Miller Theatre:

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!

Wednesday, December 8th at Zebulon:

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.

Thursday, December 9th on the Upper West Side:

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.

Friday, December 10th at WNYC’s Greene Space:

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.

by James Holt
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, New York

CDE Grooves

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.

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by Garrett Schumann
Contemporary Classical

The Guerilla Orchestra!

‘If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, Muhammad must go to the mountain’.

To rephrase less eloquently, if people won’t go to concert halls bring the concert hall to them. Here in a snowy UK The Guerilla Orchestra plan to do just that.

On Friday December the 10th at 6pm orchestras will spontaneously appear in London, Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Cardiff and Liverpool, perform Lalo Schifrin’s Mission Impossible, pack up and leave. The venues will be shopping centres, squares, high streets, parks, wherever.

The aim isn’t just to confront ordinary folk with something mysterious and unfamiliar (an orchestra) but to protest against wide ranging cuts in music education in the UK (the new Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government have targeted virtually every public expense in attempt to reduce our somewhat paunchy deficit).

Guerilla-in-chief Heather Bird, an orchestral musician and teacher, studied at the Royal Northern College of Music. She’s concerned about how future generations will be able to afford a music degree without the government subsidies she benefited from. If the planned cuts go ahead university tuition fees are expected to rise from around £3000 ($4700) to between £6000-9000 ($9450-$14,200) per year and many local arts organisations and music outreach projects will lose their funding.

“What the axing of all funding to higher education arts institutes says is that art is not important. What we do is not valid. That music plays no valuable part in this society. Of course this is ludicrous. There is no incentive for kids to practice, put in the hard work and dedication if they have no possibility of paying tens of thousands of pounds to go to somewhere like the RNCM.

I went to the RNCM and there’s no way I would have been able to go if I’d had to pay such fees. I had free double bass lessons as a kid and would not have been able to play or attend the heavily subsidised Cumbria Youth Orchestra courses if I’d have had to pay for them. So I would not have been doing what I love today, or teaching kids to do the same.”

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by Ed Lawes
Competitions, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, New York

Sequenza 21/MNMP Call for Scores

Call for Scores:

Deadline: January 31, 2011

The contemporary classical music website Sequenza 21 (https://www.sequenza21.com), in partnership with Manhattan New Music Project (http://www.mnmp.org/), is pleased to issue a call for scores. Composers of any age may submit a single work with the following instrumentation: violins (2), viola, cello, piano, and percussion. Works for smaller groupings (solos, duos, trios, etc.) that employ the above instruments are especially welcome.  In the interest of performing as many entries as possible, pieces that are shorter in duration may be preferred.

Several pieces will be selected from these entries for our 2011 concert in New York City (date/location TBA), performed by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble – ACME (http://acmemusic.org). The program committee will include Christian Carey (Sequenza 21), Clarice Jensen (ACME), and Hayes Biggs (Manhattan School of Music).

There is no entry fee. There is also no remuneration apart from the performance. Those composers selected for the concert will be responsible for their own travel and accommodations should they wish to attend the event.

Scores with CD recordings (if available) will be accepted at the address below until 5 PM on Monday, January 31, 2011. Please do not send parts at this time. Materials will be returned if accompanied by an SASE with appropriate postage.

Sequenza 21/MNMP 2011 concert

c/o

MNMP

243 West 30th Street,

Suite 500,

New York, NY 10001

Summary

Deadline: 5 PM on January 31, 2011 (receipt of materials; not postmark deadline)

Age limit: none

Entry fee: none

Limitations: only one (1) work per entrant will be considered.

Instrumentation: vlns (2), vla, clo, pno, perc

Prize: a New York performance by ACME, sponsored by Sequenza 21 and MNMP.

Return of materials: With SASE

Submitted works that do not conform to the above guidelines cannot be considered for inclusion on the program.

by Christian Carey
Awards, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

And the Grammy nominees are…

The 53rd Annual Grammy nominations have been announced (list of nominees in the Classical category here). Lots of contemporary classical represented, even in the more general categories.

Congratulations to Steve Mackey and Michael Daugherty: both are up for Best Classical Album. The ensembles that recorded their works, BMOP and the Nashville SO, respectively, are also up for Best Orchestral Performance.

Kaija Saariaho’s L’Amour de Loin was nominated in the Opera category, while Magnus Lindberg’s Graffiti and Arvo Pärt’s Symphony No. 4 were both nominated for Best Classical Contemporary Composition.

Also glad to see the Sherry Quartet’s recording of Schoenberg and the Parker Quartet’s Ligeti disc (both on Naxos) receiving nominations.

There’s much more. And, of course, there will always be omissions that dismay us. Particularly so in 2010: this was a good year for recordings!

by Christian Carey