Sequenza21

And NYTIMES WIN, as the kids like to say.

That’s right, Monday night’s S21 concert at Waltz Astoria was a big success.  Lost Dog played wonderfully, and I can vouch for the fact that the program is every bit as good as we’ve been claiming.  And of course a good review in the Times by our pal and internet neighbor Steve Smith is a nice bonus.

This Friday at the Good Shepherd Church (152 West 66th Street in Manhattan) should be even better, and I’m told that most of the composers will be in attendance, many having traveled hundreds or thousands of miles to be here.  Admission is free, and the show starts at 8PM.

Also, it’s not to late to help out with a modest financial contribution–your support helps us make these things free.  You can give online here, (please be sure to write “For the Sequenza21 concert” in the “Special Instructions” box–otherwise it won’t be applied to our event), or if you’d prefer you can send a check to:

The Astoria Music Society
38-11 Ditmars Blvd.
Box 102A
Astoria, NY 11105

(If you send a check, please include a note indicating that you want your gift applied to the S21 concert.)  All contributions made through Astoria Music Society (Lost Dog’s parent organization) are tax deductible.  If for whatever reason you hate those options but still love us, e-mail me at galen[at]galenbrown.com and we’ll work something out.

Hot off the…ur presses.  Australian Brett Dean has won the 2009 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for his violin concerto The Lost Art of Letter Writing (2006; if you have RealPlayer installed you can hear a couple minutes of it here, as well as a podcast interview with Dean himself). The Grawemeyer Award, granted annually by the University of Louisville, is the world’s most prestigious composition prize—worth $200,000—and  Dean is the first composer from Oz to win the award. Dean’s The Lost Art of Letter Writing was selected from a field of 145 entries worldwide, and the Grawemeyer’s prize announcement describes the concerto as “a wonderful solo vehicle that also contains terrific writing for orchestra.”

“The writing of music is a solitary process, and one spends a lot of time immersed in one’s own internal sound world,” says Dean.  “A prize is an acknowledgement that one’s work is not only being heard, but appreciated in the big, wide world outside of one’s own studio. But I can think of no prize which represents a more significant acknowledgement of this kind than the Grawemeyer Award. To read the names of the award’s previous winners, and to know that my own work will stand alongside the work of these legendary musicians that I admire so greatly, is a humbling and moving experience.”

We’re not the kind of folks to say “we told you so” but our founding publisher Duane Harper Grant spotted Dean as a comer way back in 2000 and did an interview with him for Sequenza21.  Here’s what we wrote at the time in the introduction:  “Unless you follow the Berlin Philharmonic or the Australian classical music scene or have stumbled into the late night underground experimental music scene in Berlin or onto one of his very hard to find recordings, you may never heard of Brett Dean (b. 1961).  But, you will.  You will.”  The interview is here.  (more…)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1ThSi1wbqU[/youtube]

Did you learn anything in music school? Or does the phrase “circle of fifths” mean nothing to you?

How does one learn “anything”? Doesn’t one learn “something”? “Something” and “anything” really aren’t the same thing, are they? Could you help me out here?

What’s your favorite “bad” piece of music? And briefly justify your crappy taste.

Would my favorite “bad” piece of music be “better” or “worse” than my next-favorite “bad” piece on my list? Just trying to get oriented. . . .

Your five-composition-long playlist for Schoenberg would contain:

Huh. I was not aware “composition” was a unit of measurement. One more American who knows nothing about the metric system, I guess.

Congress calls on you to draw up a bailout plan for contemporary music! What do you do?

Well, that would depend on whether On-You-To-Draw-Up-A-Bailout-Plan-For-Contemporary-Music answered the call. Maybe he or she wasn’t home or on the other line. And am I the only one who thinks first names are getting ridiculous these days?

Y’all know the song. “Down. Town. Galen Brown… Meaner than a–” Galen’s meaner than a… um… he’s meaner than a Boobah. Yes, Galen is meaner than a Boobah.  As you’ll see from his incendiary responses below.

Did you learn anything in music school? Or does the phrase “circle of fifths” mean nothing to you?

Yes. Actually, the worst music theory teacher I ever had managed to teach me that the only legitimate chord progressions are derived from the circle of fifths, which of course isn’t true. That was in undergrad, though. In conservatory I learned that homework generally doesn’t have to be handed in on time

What’s your favorite “bad” piece of music?  And briefly justify your crappy taste.

I like plenty of music that other people think is bad, although I won’t agree that it is in fact bad. I’m hard pressed to name a favorite, because there are so many wonderful examples. Recently, for instance, I became a fan of Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl and I Liked it.” I even recorded a cover version (unless you’re with RIAA, in which case I totally found this on the internet by accident).  I think the video provides all the justification required.

Your five-composition-long playlist for Schoenberg would contain:

Laibach’s “Let It Be” album
Skinny Puppy’s “Last Rights” album
Steve Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint”
David Lang’s “Men”
Michael Gordon’s “Trance”
Frederick Rzewski’s “The People United WIll Never Be Defeated”

Congress calls on you to draw up a bailout plan for contemporary music! What do you do?

Establish a slush fund for commissioning composers and bribing orchestra music directors to play the commissioned works. Establish an MTV style contemporary music cable channel. And there are some people I’d like to send to Gitmo, but I’ll keep that list to myself.

Rusty Banks.  Composer.

Did you learn anything in music school?  Or does the phrase “circle of fifths” mean nothing to you?

Circle of fifths?  I remember that.  Never cared for how it sounded, but it looked good on a T-shirt.  Kinda like Glam Rock Super-group KISS.

What’s your favorite “bad” piece of music?  And briefly justify your crappy taste.

Bad Music?  Oooh.  I LOVE bad music.  There are just too many.  I cite three from different parts of my life.

As a pre-school age boy my favorite song was Sam the Sham and the Pharaoh’s “Whooly Bully” played at too high of a speed.  Nine years later, Alvin and the Chipmunks released a cover of it.  It just didn’t work.  It has to be on vinyl, it has to be faster, and God help me, it has to be a sped up Sam Samudio yelling “Watchit now, watchit now, here it comes!”

Violent Femmes’ “Gone Daddy Gone.”  I really can’t explain this one.  I think it’s the xylophone solo…

Country super group Alabama’s “Dixieland Delight.”  I love to play a bossa nova version of this when no one’s around.  I get choked up on the lyric “chubby little groundhog.”

Your five-composition-long playlist for Schoenberg would contain:

I have five pieces I wish Schoenberg could have heard:

George Crumb:  Ancient Voices of Children

Louis Andriessen:  De Stijl

Nine Inch Nails:  The Fragile (album)

Monroe Golden:  Alabama Places

Roger Miller:  Do Wacka Do

I think Schoenberg had some great ideas, but if he had heard works like these it could have opened him up quite a bit.  Crumb’s emphasis on beauty, Andriessen’s insistence on groove, Trent Reznor’s emphasis on sonic richness, Golden’s acoustically-ground sound explorations.  I think there are many lessons for all of us in Roger Miller’s music.

Congress calls on you to draw up a bailout plan for contemporary music!  What do you do?

Bailout plan?  Easy.  Forgive all student loan debt immediately, give loans for fair credit, and have free universal healthcare.  We composers are all sitting on great ideas that our pizza delivery jobs don’t leave time for.  Imagine unleashing all that power!

We continue with Alex Kotch.  Composer.

Did you learn anything in music school?  Or does the phrase “circle of fifths” mean nothing to you?

Sure, there’s plenty to learn. Orchestration and taking apart scores are essential, and stuff I sometimes put off if I don’t have an institution to force them on me. But probably the most important thing I’ve learned from school is what we need to change. The status quo needs to be purged. Development, counterpoint, linearity need to be options, not requirements. We’re being given a standardized set of tools, which inevitably produce homogeneity. And pop music needs to be taken seriously by composers, not just by small pockets of musicologists. Most importantly, in my opinion, if we claim to contribute to culture, we need to study it: critical theory, race and gender studies, and new media (not to mention psychology and psychoacoustics). I’ve found much more inspiration from cultural theory than from music theory.

What’s your favorite “bad” piece of music?  And briefly justify your crappy taste.

I’m against qualifying music these days. Almost any song has some element that we can learn from and is therefore not “bad.” In fact, I think this false musical hierarchy has caused the group that thinks it’s the best (us) to write the music that most other people think is the worst. However, at the risk of seeming completely humorless, I’ll go with the album, Club Nation America Volume Two. I love sentimental, mainstream house music–it’s generally got great beats, beautiful voices, and perfect production–and it usually takes up a giant amount of space on my mp3 player.

I also dig the latest Britney Spears album, Blackout, for its irony, vocal treatment, and grungy production. I don’t think Britney’s popularity could have lasted over a decade in one-hit-wonderland if she, along with her lyricists, composers, and producers, didn’t innovate, as this album demonstrates. (There’s a great article on the album at Pitchfork.)

Your five-composition-long playlist for Schoenberg would contain:

Well, here’s a short list that anyone who happens to wake up from a 57-year nap might wanna listen to, and why:

—Meshuggah: Catch 33 album (the legends of math metal)
—Bjork: Selmasongs album (a gorgeous combination of found sound, instrumental writing, and delicious electrobeats)
–David Rakowski: Imaginary Dances (harsh dissonance with rhythmic drive)
—Richard Devine: anything (dark, masterful electronics)
–Notorious BIG/Method Man: “The What” (amazing flow, especially my favorite MC, Biggie)

Congress calls on you to draw up a bailout plan for contemporary music!  What do you do?

Jump-start a new public works program with concert hall demolition crews nationwide. After the work is done, new music groups will have no place to perform aside from bars and clubs. Since young people tend to frequent these types of venues, and tend to eat and drink, the venues can split the bar profits with the band and charge 5 bucks, or less, for the entertainment. And we can write dance remixes of our pieces, and others’ work! Basically, do what Gabriel Prokofiev does in the UK.

As we watch the inexorable approach of the Sequenza21 concerts (December 1 and 5.  Those dates are in your calendar, right?  Go ahead and take care of that now, I’ll wait.  All set?  Great.) you may be thinking to yourself “What can I do to help?”  Obviously you can come to the concert, and you can spread the word, but there’s another thing too.

Both of these concerts are going to be free to the public, but we have a variety of expenses to pay for, from the cost of the performance venues to paying the fabulous Lost Dog musicians.  If you would consider throwing a few bucks into the kitty to help defray the costs of things like that, we would be most grateful.

You can make gifts through the Astoria Music Society website, and all gifts are tax deductible:
http://www.astoriamusic.org/support/index.html
Click the “Donate” button, which goes to paypal.  After you log in to paypal, please be sure to click the “add special instructions” tab and put in text like: “Please apply this donation towards the Lost Dog Sequenza 21 program”.  Without that text the money won’t get directed towards the Sequenza21 show.