I really enjoyed Q2’s broadcast tonight of New Sounds Live, a concert at Merkin Hall by the Bang on a Can All Stars that featured works by Nik Bartsch, Oscar Bettison, Christine Southworth, Michael Nyman, and David Longstreth. The first in a hopefully ongoing series of collaborations between Q2 and Merkin Hall, it was also a featured event in this week’s Composers Now festival. I particularly enjoyed the Bettison work, The Afflicted Girl, in part because it’s quite affecting; but it also helps that I was able to study in advance and follow along with a perusal score sent over by
Read moreSure, the recession has caused for cutbacks in the arts. But composers are a resilient bunch. This week, New York City will be the site for the first Composers Now festival. Coordinated by Symphony Space Associate Artistic Director Laura Kaminsky and composer Tania León, the festival involves a host of area venues and organizations. The activities start Monday morning with a panel discussion and a marathon concert from 12-6. Tonight alone, there are events at Symphony Space, the Schomburg Center, the Morgan Library, the Jazz Gallery, and the Flushing Branch of the Queens Library. Composers Now will run throughout the
Read moreThere was a fair amount of buzz a couple years ago (including here at s21), when composer Michael Hersch‘s enormous piano canvas The Vanishing Pavilions was released on CD. What the New York Times has written about Hersch’s work in general seems to apply quite well to this two-hour-plus piece: “If the symmetries and proportions of Mr. Hersch’s music evoke the grounded fixity of architecture, its dynamism and spontaneous evolution are those of the natural world. Its somber eloquence sings of truths that are personal yet not confessional… Within the sober palette, the expressive power and range are vast.” Turns
Read moreCourtesy of the John Cage Trust blog.
Read moreAlex Ross gives a rundown of upcoming seasons at both the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestras. There’s a fair amount of contemporary work on the bills from both coasts, though I can’t help feeling the “biggest” events have a somewhat buddy-buddy feel.
Read moreIn case you’ve been getting in the habit of just clicking on the main page, taking a quick stare and then waltzing off hither and yon… Judith Lang Zaimont tells us what it’s like to get a little too close to the wrong kind of news, and the positive power of music even then… In case you’ve missed it, Christian Carey‘s trouble with eighth blackbird’s $50 entry fee for some lucky composer to get a performance has been racking up the comments, both very yea and very nay… Lawrence Dillon asks if being an eclectic composer is such a sin,
Read moreThis weekend at U of Alabama Huntsville there was to have been a two-day symposium built around my second piano trio, ZONES. (The piece would be performed on Friday evening, paired with the Ravel Trio in a concert by Trio Appassionato.) But Friday afternoon, just as I was driving in from the airport, came the terrible murders on campus, shocking the city to its core. I was emotionally dumbstruck by this tragedy – and the campus was closed after an hour-long lockdown. What to do? … Concert organizer Dr. Royce Boyer and the performers decided to hold a truncated concert
Read moreMusic has always come from two basic sources, and served two quite different masters — thought and emotion. The Western tradition, especially in its modern and contemporary permutations, has given the upper hand to thought, as if it was superior to feeling, and therefore inescapably deep. Hence our worship of Bach’s “pure” architectural lines and use of forms, and Schoenberg and his Second Viennese School and their satellites’ obsession with 12-note sets, have driven the wedge between the two even deeper . And that’s why some composers have claimed that that their music is music better than it sounds because
Read moreI have the utmost respect for Eighth Blackbird as musicians and new music advocates. In fact one of my fondest dreams as a composer would be to have them perform my chamber Sextet. But I was very disappointed to learn that the ensemble’s new Call for Scores requires composers to pay a $50 application fee to have their scores considered. While, as one of my colleagues put it, this may convince composers to be ‘a bit self-selective’ in their submissions, it’s also a handy way to self-fund the commission of a new work for the ensemble. As much as I’d like to have
Read moreMy guitarist friend in Mexico, Alexandra Cárdenas, passes along a request received from a German accordionist Eva Zöllner: Dear friends, I need your help for a project I will present at RADAR festival in Mexico City in March. As part of a new version of Mauricio Kagel‘s LUDWIG VAN I am working on a collage of Beethoven fragments. I’d like to ask you to contribute to this project by recording a Beethoven tune for me, preferably in an unusual manner (for example singing under the shower, whistling bits of the viola part of the Egmont Overture backwards, ….. whatever you
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