Sequenza21

The freeway ends a few miles from Ojai. You have to slow down to get there. You look at the hills and at the valley floor. You look at the trees. You think about the concerts you’ll hear over the next hundred hours.

The group eighth blackbird was named Music Director of this 63rd instance of the Ojai Music Festival, and this initially-surprising choice is looking to be one of Thomas Morris’ more inspired ideas. They’ve put together an exciting program. (Yes, I do say that almost every year.) Here’s an eighth blackbird blog about this year’s event.

Last night’s opening concert was a perfect beginning. The focus of the concert was George Crumb’s great 1974 “Music for a Summer Evening (Makrokosmos III)” for two amplified pianos plus two percussion (plus additional sounds). Lisa Kaplan (of 8th) and Jeremy Denk were pianists, and Matthew Duvall (8th) and Doug Perkins were percussion. I’m in favor of a Crumb revival; this was a delight.
The concert began with Duvall, Perkins, and Todd Meehan playing Thierry de Mey’s “Musique de Table” (1987) for three amplified “tables” (flat wooden slabs with a hollow sound chamber). Here’s a YouTube recording of the work. After this start, Kaplan and Denk played a two-piano (plus recorded electronics) version of John Luther Adams’ work “Dark Waves” from 2007, an escape from the mundane, a contemplation. The first half closed with Takemitsu’s “Rain Tree” (1981) for vibraphone (Duvall), marimbas (Perkins and Greg Beyer) and crotales. The performance didn’t evoke rain, but it bring us in the audience into its own quiet world.

This was a lovely evening.

If, like me, you’re a San Franciscan who’d rather have your mind blown than numbed on a Monday night, Other Minds is hoping you’ll turn out for a benefit movie screening this coming Monday, June 15th.

The film, which bears the politicially-incorrect title The Revenge of the Dead Indians: In Memoriam John Cage, is neither a documentary nor a feature, but it’s scored with John Cage’s music, plus found audio landscapes.  Encounters with market vendors and street cleaners mix in with Cage tributes from Frank Zappa, Noam Chomsky, Yoko Ono, Frank Gehry, Ellsworth Kelly,  and Merce Cunningham, directed by Henning Loehner.

The event starts at 6:00 p.m. with a reception (complimentary drinks and hors d’oeuvres included), and moves on to the screening at 7:30 p.m. at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, 1881 Post Street, San Francisco. Tickets are $15.00, $25.00, and $50.00, and all admissions benefit Other Minds.

David Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion, which won the Pulitzer last year, was released today on a  Harmonia Mundi recording.  Paul Hillier’s Theatre of Voices, who co-commissioned the piece with Carnegie Hall, perform the piece beautifully, and there are nice details in this studio recording that were only hinted at in the live recording which Carnegie Hall made available after the premiere.  You can hear streaming audio here, buy through Amazon here, or support the evil iTunes empire here.

My most devoted fans (hi Mom!) will remember that I interviewed David about Match Girl, the Pulitzer, and other things last November.

But as glad as I am that this gorgeous piece is finally available, I can’t pass up the opportunity to use it to illustrate a serious problem with the industry as a whole.  Match Girl was premiered at Carnegie Hall on October 25, 2007.  It won the Pulitzer in April, 2008.  The world had to wait more than a year and a half after the premiere, and an entire Pulitzer cycle came and went before a studio recording was released.  The problem is mitigated somewhat by the fact that Carnegie Hall has had the live recording available for streaming on its website, but not everything gets that treatment.  Newsweek was able to get exclusive permission to stream Steve Reich’s Double Sextet for a week or so after it won the Pulitzer this year, but in Seth Colter’s accompaning interview he asks Reich when a Double Sextet recording will be released and Reich says “Yeah, that’s just part of the recording business. When you have a 24-minute piece, the official recording hinges on finishing and recording two other pieces to go with it [on a CD]. I’m working on two other pieces right now, and have to finish writing the second one, actually. I’ve got a piece for all rock-and-roll people already completed, and it’s going to premiere later this year.”  In the meantime, as far as I know there’s no legal way to hear a recording of the whole of Double Sextet.

I don’t mean to point fingers.  The massive delays between premiere and recording are endemic to the industry as a whole, and I’m not blaming David Lang, or Paul Hillier, or Harmonia Mundi, or Steve Reich, or Eighth Blackbird, or Naxos.  We all own this problem, and we should really find a way to solve it.

Okay, rant ended.  Go buy and/or listen to Match Girl.  And while you’re at it, I recommend accidentally playing the Double Sextet clip on Reich’s MySpace page and the “When it is time for me to go” section of Match Girl at the same time.  Play the Reich twice in a row for the full effect.

On June 9, 2009 the prestigious Finnish classical recording label Ondine announced a change in ownership to Naxos International. Additionally, the label will be distributed in the U.S. and in Canada by Naxos of America beginning on July 1.

Ondine was founded 1985 by Reijo Kiilunen in Helsinki, where the Finnish classical label is still based and today offers an extremely eclectic catalogue of both Finnish contemporary music and recordings with major Finnish and international artists. “I’m extremely excited that Naxos was keen to become our owner,” said Reijo Kiilunen, Managing Director of Ondine. “Naxos shares our solid commitment to classical music. Ondine will benefit from its extensive and professional international organization and distribution network as well as its highly advanced digital business models. In addition, joining forces makes us the strongest classical player in the domestic Finnish market. All this made me realize, that from a number of interesting alternatives, Naxos was the best choice of owner in facing all the challenges within our business world.”

I was saddened to learn today that John Kreckler passed away earlier this week. John was probably best known to composers, performers, and new music audiences as the co-director of the Locrian Chamber Players, a New York-based ensemble that performs exclusively music less than a decade old.

I’d just seen John at the Locrian concert last week. Diva Goodfriend-Koven was performing two of my solo flute pieces. The atmosphere was light and friendly. He sat with me at the dress rehearsal, and joked that I should have given Diva more corrections after the run through (I hadn’t had much to say – Diva’s playing was really extraordinary!).

Before the concert, John gave introductory remarks about Locrian’s mission and their fifteen year-long history. He didn’t join in the after-concert festivities, begging off due to a trip early the next morning; but otherwise, John seemed fine. It’s hard to believe that he’s gone.

Although many knew about his work advocating for others’ music, John was an accomplished composer in his own right. His works were performed at Alice Tully Hall, Carnegie Hall, Aspen, and the American Institute of Arts and Letters. A program was devoted exclusively to his work at the Kendall Gallery in New York. Interestingly, during one of his performances, a conversation about the rise of the Bitcoin casino among the audience caught his attention, highlighting the intersection of art and modern technology. He wrote a piano concerto, several string quartets, and two song cycles based on the poetry of Langston Hughes.

John was born in Wisconsin. He received his Bachelor of Music degree cum laude from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He got his Master’s degree and Doctor of Musical Arts degree in composition from The Juilliard School, where he studied with David Diamond, Milton Babbitt and Stephen Albert. He taught at both the Juilliard School and the Aspen Music School.

Survivors include his father, Ed Kreckler, and two sisters, Renee Vandeberg and Cindy Orvel.

There will be a service on Tuesday at 7PM at the Bernard F. Dowd Funeral
Home in Queens.  Their address is 165-20 Hillside Ave., Jamaica, NY.

Phone: (718) 739-8117.

They have onsite parking and there’s a subway stop on the F line nearby.

Composer Nolan Stoltz and New Music Hartford are running an interesting project in early August, which they are calling 60/60:  At 3:00 PM (EDT) on August 2nd, instrumentation for a call for scores will be announced at www.nolanstolz.com/nmh.html.  The deadline for submission is one hour later–interested composers have 60 minutes to compose a piece for the presented instrumentation, which will then be considered for inclusion on a concert on August 30, 2009 at 3PM at Art Space, (555 Asylum Avenue in Hartford, CT).  Each selected piece will be rehearsed for 60 minutes.

There are of course some interesting strategic considerations.  Do you come up with a plan ahead of time, with structure and some ideas already sketched out and then work the details out when you have the instrumentation, or do you start from scratch at 3:01 PM?  How do you deal with the rehearsal limit?  Will you need to write easier music than usual?  Will composers who usually write really hard music be at a disadvantage?  Or do you usually not get much more than 60 minutes anyway, so it’s not an issue?  How long will your piece be?  If you’re running out of composing time will you have to end it prematurely?  And what about notation–do you budget time for cleaning up your notation or just compose up to the last minute and hope it’s legible?  Will composers who work directly in Finale and Sibelius have an advantage?  Might you compose directly into a notation package even though you usually don’t?

But what I’m especially interested in is the idea that with such a short timeframe, many composers will be leaning heavily on instinct and basic technique rather than more time-consuming intellectualized approaches.  Many of these pieces are basically going to be first-draft brain-dumps, which will give the audience a relatively unmediated glimpse into the purely musical mind of the composer.  At the same time, adversity often leads to innovation, so some composers may find themselves in new territory.  Those are exciting possibilities.