The ‘reenvisioned’ Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center opens Sunday. I hope they haven’t moved the chairs closer together. It was the only concert hall in New York where you could walk across a row without stepping on a fellow patron’s feet. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaWYSvlCZH4[/youtube]
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ACO, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Downtown, Electro-Acoustic, File Under?, New York, Orchestral, Orchestras, Philadelphia, Uncategorized
While well-known for his writings about music, including books about Elliott Carter and George Gershwin, David Schiff is also a prolific and active composer. A professor at Reed College, he’s visiting New York this week to hear the American Composer’s Orchestra premiere a revamped version of Stomp, a piece that celebrates the music of James Brown. The concert, part of the Orchestra Underground series, also includes premieres by Margaret Brouwer and Kasumi, Rand Steiger, Fang Man, and Kati Agócs. Carey: Stomp was written in 1990 for Marin Alsop. How did you decide to write in homage to James Brown? Schiff:
Read moreA couple quick bits passed along by S21 compadres: Ed Lawes wants to remind every classical afficionado to take a gander at the Gramophone’s online archive. Literally every issue of the magazine is there, from 1923 (!) until today. If that doesn’t count as a fabulous resource, I don’t know what does. And our favorite crusty uncle, Seth Gordon, has word on a new-music Oscar tie-in that you may not be aware of: Yeah, yeah, we all know that the best score is headed to one of the semi-usual suspects: Alexandre Desplat, James Newton Howard, Danny Elfman, A.R. Rahman, Thomas Newman… But
Read moreTo paraphrase the last part of Watson and Crick’s seminal (no pun intended) 1953 paper on the x-ray crystallographic structure of DNA, I wonder if this might have some relevance to our situation…
Read moreBig Up to our familiar Lawrence Dillon whose Ravinia Festival winning composition The Better Angels of Our Nature will be performed on tour by the Lincoln Trio (ensemble in residence at the Music Institute of Chicago) and narrator Welz Kauffman (CEO of the Ravinia Festival) 33 times from February 11th to April 24th in cities throughout Illinois, including Chicago, Springfield, Champaign, Decatur, Urbana, Evanston, Lincoln and Bloomington. The work is one of three competition-winning compositions, the other two of which are James Crowley’s From the Earth and Eric Sawyer’s Lincoln’s Two Americas. All three works will be presented on the tour.
Read moreJust imagine the impression you will leave with your guests, as you drop sparkling bon mots on combinatoriality, pitch accumulators, harmelodics, and gradual phase shifting!… If they haven’t fled for the door yet… I’m really just reminding you that the American Music Center, as part of its absolutely wonderful and essential web-service Counterstream Radio, has the first four podcasts in their “Crash Course” series available. Each gives you a quick, expert-led introduction to some facet of American contemporary music: Matthew Guerrieri on American serialism, Kyle Gann on minimalism, Tom Lopez on acousmatic music, and Lara Pellegrinelli on post-jazz jazz. If you’ve
Read moreYesterday I got an e-mail from a PR person at The Rebel Media Group. One of her clients, John Wesley Harding, has a new album and it’s being promoted with a somewhat unorthodox tiered pricing scheme which ranges from CD plus download plus live disc for $15.98 to a package which includes the aforementioned plus a bunch more swag plus the artist coming to your house and putting on a show for you and your friends, all for $5,000. BoingBoing posted about it, and The Rebel Group’s Stef Shapira sent me a brief personal e-mail with that link and the
Read moreIt’s pretty easy to drive by Fredonia, NY without realizing you’ve done so…it’s one of the many small communities that dot the I-90 Interstate between Cleveland and Buffalo, practically on the shores of Lake Erie. The surrounding countryside is known for grapes and snow…Norman Rockwell would feel right at home in the town square, and it’s often found in the dictionary illustrating the definition of “quaint”. Not exactly the place you’d expect to find a new music series, but that’s just the way we like it. Over 30 years ago the composition students at SUNY Fredonia began to fund their
Read moreI’ve been trying for maybe a more “genteel” word, but keep coming back to it… What I’m talking about is the composer, pianist and conductor Ketty Nez and her music. Born (1965) in Macedonia but quickly whisked away to the States, the whisking has continued through studies at Bryn Mawr, Curtis, Tokyo, UC Berkeley, Amsterdam and a couple passes through Paris, as well as teaching first at the University of Iowa and now Boston University. Ketty is a ferociously talented pianist (though currently working mostly in tandem with violinist Katie Wolfe), and also conductor of BU’s Time’s Arrow new music ensemble.
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Classical Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Downtown, Electro-Acoustic, Experimental Music
Interpretations continues its twentieth season of provocative programming in New York City. Founded and curated by baritone Thomas Buckner in 1989, Interpretations focuses on the relationship between contemporary composers from both jazz and classical backgrounds and their interpreters, whether the composers themselves or performers who specialize in new music. To celebrate, Jerry Bowles has invited the artists involved in this season’s concerts to blog about their Interpretations experiences. The concert on 12 February 2009 brings us back to Roulette for an evening of Annea Lockwood and Larry Austin, two distinguished composers in the electro-acoustic tradition. Both composers collaborated to tell
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