Big Band, CDs, Concerts, Downtown, New Amsterdam, New York

Not-So-Secret Society

You can only keep a secret society secret so long, and with our old S21 pal Darcy James Argue‘s new CD release that time has come.  Infernal Machines is out now on New Amsterdam Records, and to celebrate the kick-off DJA’s Secret Society will be performing the music from the CD Friday at Galapagos Arts Space (16 Main St. @ Water St., Brooklyn / Door – 9pm, Show – 10pm, $10).

Troy Collins advance-reviewed it at AllAboutJazz.com:

Drawing inspiration from classic stalwarts like the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra as well as pioneering post-rock bands like Explosions In The Sky and Tortoise, Argue tastefully incorporates electric guitars, Fender Rhodes and electric bass into traditional big band instrumentation, extending the innovations of such visionaries as Don Ellis, Gil Evans and George Russell.
Straddling the pastoral opulence of Maria Schneider’s Orchestra and the visceral brio of Adam Lane’s Full Throttle Orchestra and Satoko Fujii’s various big bands, Argue has succeeded at creating a magnificent chimera. His harmonically rich blend of contrapuntal horn voicings, atmospheric electronic textures and post-minimalist rhythms surpass the early fusion experiments of his predecessors, yielding a fully integrated sound world as current as it is timeless.
A masterful tunesmith, his dramatic sense of pacing borders on the cinematic, and his instinct for arranging multiple voices into colorful pitch sets exudes kaleidoscopic detail worthy of Ellington.

Drawing inspiration from classic stalwarts like the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra as well as pioneering post-rock bands like Explosions In The Sky and Tortoise, Argue tastefully incorporates electric guitars, Fender Rhodes and electric bass into traditional big band instrumentation, extending the innovations of such visionaries as Don Ellis, Gil Evans and George Russell [….] Straddling the pastoral opulence of Maria Schneider’s Orchestra and the visceral brio of Adam Lane’s Full Throttle Orchestra and Satoko Fujii’s various big bands, Argue has succeeded at creating a magnificent chimera. His harmonically rich blend of contrapuntal horn voicings, atmospheric electronic textures and post-minimalist rhythms surpass the early fusion experiments of his predecessors, yielding a fully integrated sound world as current as it is timeless.

If you want to get primed and pumped beforehand, New Amsterdam is letting you stream the whole CD online. The musical cast is stellar, the pieces are grand, the recording immaculate. Way to go Darcy; here’s to many more words like those above, now and in all the Machines to come.

by Steve Layton
Chamber Music, Contemporary Classical, San Francisco

ADORNO Ensemble takes on student work

ADORNO EnsembleWhen I was an undergrad at San Francisco State University in the late 1980s, we didn’t have a new music ensemble-in-residence. Like many music majors then and now, we relied on our fellow students to perform our pieces, and didn’t have a professional-level new music group serving as role models on campus.

All that has since changed, and the SFSU School of Music and Dance has the ADORNO Ensemble to take this challenge on. The group has spent the last few years impressing local audiences and getting cordial reviews, including this one from San Jose Mercury News music critic Richard Scheinin: “A crackerjack new music band that plays with conviction and vitality and blows the dust off classical music.” In 2007 they won an ASCAP Adventurous Programming Award, and launched an online composers’ workshop at www.scorexchange.org.

Clarinetist Jeffrey Anderle, violinist Graeme Jennings, cellist Gianna Abondolo, contrabassist Bill Everett, percussionist Loren Mach and Christopher Jones on piano will team up this Friday, May 8th, to realize that most un-dusty kind of classical music – student compositions. Five fortunate young artists will get what every emerging composer needs so badly: a professional performance of their work, plus a decent recording. Here’s the program:

  • Gamaliel Galindo: Among the Multitude for violin, clarinet and piano
  • Ryan Ike: Thermodynamica for percussion and contrabass
  • Natan Rodriguez: Piano Trio for violin, cello and piano
  • Allegra Mitchell: Hush, Hush Sweet Faire: A Set of Miniatures for clarinet, percussion and contrabass
  • Aaron Nudelman: Unforeseen Circumstances for clarinet, violin, cello and piano

The show starts at 7:30 p.m. in Knuth Hall in the Creative Arts Building on the San Francisco State University campus at 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco. General audiences get in for $10.00, students and seniors for $5.00.

by Polly Moller
Contemporary Classical, Housekeeping, Online

Many hands (and ears) make light work

Being an all-volunteer gig, Sequenza 21 has always relied on a cast of characters — almost all musicians themselves — that lend a hand as they can, but often end up caught in a whirl of other demands. And because based in NYC, there are times when it gets just a little too easy to report on all the events happening around the city, and get a little sidetracked about keeping tabs on so many wonderful musicians and concerts elsewhere in this country and beyond. So every once in a while the call goes out to some of the many good aquaintances we’ve made, asking if this or that person might like to have a go at sharing what’s up in their neck of the metaphorical woods, both geographically and stylistically. I’d like to take a second to introduce, and thank, some of the new contributors that you’ll spot around here in the coming weeks:

Hanging down here with me in Houston, TX, Elliot Cole.

Harrying the hoipoloi from Birmingham, England, Ed Lawes.

Hustling through the heaving masses of San Francisco and the Bay Area, Polly Moller.

And holding the fort in Kansas City, MO, Scott Unrein.

(And though he’s been around a few weeks already I’d be remiss to not give a quick shout to James Holt.)

They’ll be joining all our established crew you’ve grown accustomed to reading. These are just the first wave of new voices, as part of our constant effort keep you up to speed on living, breathing new music and musicians, no matter what & where. On with the party!

by Steve Layton
Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical

Thanks for All the Fish

As stated in Oberlin College’s ‘Oberwiki’:

“…to enter you needed to take a sugar pill with a dot on it…and you rolled the dice, cause 1/3 of the dots were LSD…”

Yep, that’s our (currently) eldest composition teacher speaking of Oberlin’s glory days when he was but a wee lad out of grad school. Randy Coleman is many things, best summed up as “a real post-modern feminist old-time patriarch from Virginia.” He is most feared for his red pen marks on freshperson’s melody assignments and for the fabled “piece-per-day” routine with private students. His music contains much variety, with each new piece vastly different than what had come before. Also, as a result, he takes a long time in writing these pieces.

For the past 15-20 years, every course that Randy has taught has been called “Postmodernism.” He has taught at Oberlin since 1965, placing him as the conservatory professor with the second-longest post at Oberlin, second only to David Boe.

After forty-three years of showing impractical, starry-eyed composition students how it’s really done, Randy Coleman is moving on. A fine appreciation is here; On Friday May 8th at 8pm, The Contemporary Music Ensemble there is giving an all-Coleman farewell concert bash, featuring Bellagio (2007-09), a concerto for piano and large ensemble with Ran Duan, piano; Apparitions (2003) for string ensemble and piano, Tom Fosnocht, piano with videodance by Nusha Martynuk and Carter McAdams;  Soundprint III (1973),  in memoriam Ezra Pound for dancer and percussion, Nusha Martynuk, dancer; The Great Lalula (1988) for voice and chamber ensemble, Molly Netter, voice, with dance choreographed by Nusha Martynuk and performed by Cleveland GroundWorks Dance Company. It’s at Hall Auditorium, Room ID_1 @ 67 North Main Street, Oberlin, OH, and absolutely free.  If you’re close come on by; this composer gave in a big way, and it seems only fair to give back.

by Steve Layton
Contemporary Classical

New Music Bake Sale

Two weeks ago at the First Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn Heights, 25 different organizations in New York’s new music scene assembled for a the first annual New Music Bake Sale; an event that was a cross between a music festival and a the vendor fair at a conference.  I mean that second part in only the best possible sense–in fact the sense of community created by the setup was the best part of the whole event.  Each of the ten ensembles that performed, and fifteen other groups, all had tables lining the main room and the entry area, where they gave out promotional materials, sold baked goods and CDs, collected names for mailing lists, and in some cases bought names for mailing lists with the enticement of baked goods in exchange.  The modestly sized space was packed throughout the evening, and the participants and audience members were like a who’s-who of the 20-and 30-something music scene.  (Our old friend Ian Moss was even there.)  Everyone milled around, listening to the music and hanging out, and it felt more like a genuine community event than anything I’ve been to in New York except for Bang On A Can.

The performances by So Percussion, itsnotyouitsme, Lisa Moore and Martin Bresnick, Lukas Ligeti, Newspeak, ACME, JACK Quartet, Dither, Loadbang, and Ensemble de Sade were all excellent (okay, I missed a couple of them, but I have no reason to suspect that the ones I missed were any less good than the ones I saw).  Highlights included David T. Little’s “Sweet Light Crude,” performed by Newspeak, an epic guitar quartet rockout by Lainie Fefferman, performed by Dither, the brilliantly simultaneously creepy and funny “The Exaltation of Grace Budd” by Matt Marks, performed by Ensemble de Sade (“You clap when we tell you to clap”), and So Percussion’s pieces which featured audience participation, conceptual an performance art elements, and a fascinating blurring of the boundaries of what was part of the piece and what wasn’t.

Organized by Newspeak and Ensemble de Sade, this was the first of what should become an annual event.  It’s hard to know for certain where it will go from here, but the concept is brilliant, the execution was spot-on, and we may well have witnessed the birth of a critical New York institution.

by Galen H. Brown
Chamber Music, Classical Music, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, File Under?

Vienna’s Ensemble On_Line visits NYC on Monday

THE AUSTRIAN CULTURAL FORUM NEW YORK CONCERTS

ENSEMBLE ON_LINE

MONDAY MAY 4, 7:30 PM
Austrian Cultural Forum NY, 11 East 52nd Street, New York, NY 10022

Also touring to Philadelphia, Washington and Chicago, this program is curated by Karlheinz Essl and Reinhard Fuchs, in cooperation with Soundfield and the Slought Foundation.

PROGRAM

Gene Coleman | Subaugusta (2009) for bassflute, bassclarinet, violin, cello and piano
Karlheinz Essl | Sequitur II (2008/09) for bass clarinet and live-electronics
Simeon Pironkoff | Spiel(t)räume (2006) for piano solo
Gerard Grisey | Talea (1985/86) for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano
Leah Muir | i frammenti di desiderio, act four (2009) for clarinet and cello
Beat Furrer | Presto (1997) for flute and piano
Marcel Reuter | Interludio (2007) for clarinet, cello and piano
Gerald Resch | Gesten (2002) for violin and cello

ensemble on_line

Sylvie Lacroix (flute)
Theresia Schmidinger (clarinet)
Johannes Dickbauer (violin)
Martin John Smith (cello)
Mathilde Hoursiangou (piano)
Karlheinz Essl (live-electronics)

RESERVATIONS
Free Admission. Reservations necessary. Call (212) 319 5300 ext. 222 or e-mail reservations@acfny.org

by Christian Carey
Composers, Interviews, Performers, Podcasts, viola

My Ears Are Open. This week on the podcast: Elizabeth Weisser

As promised, during the month of May I’ll be talking exclusively with violists, beginning with Elizabeth Weisser of the iO Quartet. I swear it’s a total coincidence that, two weeks in a row, I’ve talked with musicians who had great experiences with Helmut Lachenmann (and I already know there will be one more mention this month). Elizabeth does have lots of other things for us to think about, though, for instance: when a composer brings material to a musician, the musician improvises, and the composer notates the improvisation, then whose music is it? She also asks, “What’s the core of what we do? What’s the main thing we are trying to get across? And, why?”

Looking ahead, the week of May 17 will be my interview with violist Nadia Sirota and the week of May 31 will be violist John Pickford Richards.

Want to take a listen? Subscribe in iTunes here, or point your blog-readers here. You can also find it on instantencore by clicking here.

by James Holt
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Music Events, New Amsterdam, New York

All Your Fridays Are Belong To Us!

Almost everyone in and around the New Amsterdam Records scene has been written up by us. Many are good and long-time visitors, contributors and pals of S21. But screw that; the real reason we follow this crew is that they’re an awesome bunch of composers and performers, with a fresh, open and energetic approach to this whole art-music thingy-ma-jingy. They’re proving it again this May, with… Aww, just let the poster tell you:

Makes a nice prelude to the BOAC “oldsters” Marathon, dontcha think?

by Steve Layton
Birthdays, Contemporary Classical, Online, Publications

I Would Have Gotten You a Card

To paraphrase a comment I spotted once on Myspace, “We would have got you a card or something but we spent all of our money on booze, speed, and hookers”…  So let’s just do with this shout-out to NewMusicBox, the American Music Center, the whole unsung crew and of course the one-and-only Frank J. Oteri, for seeing this most vital and consistently important modern classical site through its first decade.

Before appearing May 1st, 1999 there had never, ever been such a resource for living composers, performers and their music-hungry audience. Ten years on, there’s still no equal. It’s our island and oasis; though we might visit a host of other wonderful and worthwhile sites, we must visit NewMusicBox. Perfectly perfect? No. Plenty important? Yes!  Here’s to the next ten, Frank.

by Steve Layton
Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Music Events, New York

2+2=5: Christopher O’Riley at Miller Theatre

Christopher O’Riley performs his final recital in the 2+2=5 Series tomorrow night at Miller Theatre. Each of the programs has featured a pairing of a classical composer and O’Riley’s transcriptions of songs by a pop musician.  Thus far, the recitals have featured Shostakovich / Radiohead & Debussy / Nick Drake. Tomorrow’s program pairs Schumann and Elliott Smith.

Yesterday, O’Riley released a digital single on iTunes of his interpretation of Kurt Cobain’s Heart Shaped Box. It’s featured on the iTunes’ “Rock” page! On May 5th the digital single will be widely released to other music download sites. A Heart Shaped Box ring tone can be created at iTunes and will be available through major cellular carriers by May 5th.

O’Riley played HSB as the encore for his Debussy/Nick Drake recital at Miller. He really wails the stuffing out of it!

by Christian Carey