In Live From Golgotha by Gore Vidal, St. Timothy — who is an old man, and by that time the keeper of the story of the early church — is visited by time travelers from the future who try to persuade him to change his story. When he refuses, they simply travel further back in time and change the events. At one point Timothy is perplexed because he thinks he remembers what happened but he isn’t sure, which isn’t surprising since the actually events and, consequentially, events after those events, have been changed. His past — what he remembers —
Read moreAt the suggestion of an admirer of Sequenza21, I filled out and submitted an application last night to A National Summit on Arts Journalism, a project of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the National Arts Journalism Program, which will feature five competitively-chosen projects at its annual conference on October 2. It would be great if S21 were one of them. I hope the judges don’t take away too many points for typos. The form was one of those where you paste your stuff in but you can’t see it all while you’re working or fix it later and
Read moreLet’s just say that “life” has distracted me a bit lately from my updates here. But, for those of you who have been following, you know that the good times never ended and that podcast episodes have been arriving on schedule. So, where were we? July wrapped up Parts III-IV of interviews with the members of ETHEL. What did we learn here? Perhaps the cliché that a quartet is more than the sum of its parts? Am I the only one who is continually amazed that ensembles like string quartets even work? Can you imagine committing yourself to playing for
Read moreIt’s high summer, which of course means baseball… which of course means Annie Gosfield… Or at least her 1997 piece Brooklyn, October 5, 1941. You can read about it over at the NewMusicBox archive; seems to me that it’s still the only piano piece out there using two baseballs and a catcher’s mitt (though if you know more I’m happy to hear about it). I just wanted to share this lively performance by Jenny Q Chai, taped live at The Stone. Afterwards head to Jenny’s YouTube channel; you’ll find a lot of other wonderful performances of things off the beaten
Read moreHDTracks.com Over the years since the advent of the MP3 file format, every now and then some misinformed or luddite journalist writes an article about how MP3 and digital downloads are killing music because MP3 has lower fidelity than CDs. I always maintained that MP3 encoding wasn’t nearly as bad as the doomsayers claimed, and that in a few years when file storage got cheaper and internet bandwidth got broader digital downloads would outstrip CDs in quality. My rationale was that 44.1kHz recording makes CDs high enough in fidelity that there isn’t enough demand for higher quality to make a
Read moreOn Saturday at 2:30, Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music continued with its second concert. The FCM performances contain generous helpings of music. While established composers such as George Benjamin, David Rakowski, and John Corigliano were included Saturday, curator Augusta Read Thomas programmed a great deal of music by the “emerging” generation and by composers underrepresented on US concerts. Some highlights: Jacob Bancks’ Rapid Transit, for mixed chamber ensemble, received its premiere. A TMC commission, the piece started out slowly, alternating nervous percussion flurries with chorale-like pan-modal verticals. Eventually, the winds picked up the percussion’s rhythmic ideas, and the ensemble was
Read moreThe opening concert on Tanglewood’s 2009 Festival of Contemporary Music on Friday featured several works by established composers and a TMC commission. This year’s festival is curated by Augusta Read Thomas. Rather than creating a unified theme for the five days of performances, Thomas has put together a varied group of offerings. In her opening remarks in the TFCM program booklet, she emphasizes,”This is not a festival with a house style.” Instead, what has thus far unified the proceedings are well-prepared, dedicated performances by youthful yet artistically focused musicians. Christopher Rouse‘s percussion ensemble piece Ku-Ka-Illimoku is a great curtain-raiser: splashy,
Read moreThe Hilary is Hahn, with her monthly installment of a video chat with a composer; the Harold is Meltzer, one of those composers with lots of great awards and commissions (finalist for the Pulitzer this year, no less), whose work always grabs my ear with interesting things unfolding, but whose recorded output is pitifully small! The awards and concerts are wonderful; but the few thousand who’ve had the chance to experience his inventive music could easily be multiplied by some factor of ten, with just a few more good recordings released. Here’s hoping… In the meantime, you can watch all
Read moreLike Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham‘s fame will always be for his use of multiple electric guitars, often in non-standard tunings and often at just-about-ear-splitting volume. The slight shame is that the guitar stuff is only one part of Chatham’s long and restless musical exploration: there’s also all his work as a trumpeter, as well as works for everything from two gongs to just-tuned piano to wind ensemble to full orchestra. And while the massed guitar resources may be similar to Branca, I’ve always felt that Chatham’s clang/clash/drone carried something almost ‘lyrical’, compared to Branca’s body blows. A major force in
Read moreFor all you Angelenos and outlying: word from Paul Bailey that this Thursday evening there’s a midnight performance of Terry Riley‘s In C, and you’re all invited to come on over and participate. Bailey’s eponymous ensemble will be joined by the Los Angeles New Music Ensemble and others — now, said others can include you! The place is Juanita’s (5930 York Blvd., Highland Park); there’s a 10:30pm load-in, 11:30pm rehearsal, and the midnight performance. In C is shaping up to become this century’s new Messiah — except we don’t need no stinking Christmas to trot it out and have a
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