Concerts, Contemporary Classical

Being, Nothingness and Morton Feldman

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TEWQZ5tLD0[/youtube]

Some people like to think that music is always somehow about something… usually them.  My bad love affair, the world will never understand me, much less remember me.  And lots of music — from the troubadours with their songs of courtly love  to the meditations and dramas of the romantics to the skitterings and upheavals of the New Vienna School — have been a kind of narrative of this beleaguered self, or if you will, the audience’s identification with the composer’s ups and downs. But the New York School  of Earle Brown (1926-2002), Christian Wolff (1936-  ),  John Cage (1912 -1992), and Morton Feldman (1926-1987) threw  this book out the window. Like the abstract expressionist painters with whom they were friendly, they believed in the concept of art as abstraction, not a representation of something external.  They wanted their listeners to experience music as sound unmoored from any story frame, an event in and of itself. Morton Feldman made a career out this approach and his focus on the specifics of sound was his calling card.

FOR JOHN CAGE (1982), which violinist Graeme Jennings, late of the Arditti Quartet, and and Christopher Jones performed here in mid-September as part of the sfSound Series, has all the stylistic hallmarks of his late work. It’s ultra soft – down to ppp – has an evenness of color, and its duration –78 miniutes– is roughly the same as a Bruckner or Mahler symphony, or the Beethoven 9th. But what happens in that time frame is an entirely different  story.

Feldman isn’t after a logical dialectical continuity but an ahistorical present, and this can make his music, with its fragmentary gestures, seem odd, or even empty. But Jennings and Jones made that lack of “content “ convincing,  and urgent. A slow steady sequence of quietly inflected piano chords sounded as if they were going somewhere, and Jenning’s playing of Feldman’s circumscribed violin gestures — cells, simple, spaced chords, harmonics -– was equally acute. And I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the composer achieved a kind of Brechtian alienation effect/affect by having the violinist use a leather mute, and the pianist play with the damper pedal half depressed so that the music appeared to disappear as it was being heard.

Classic masters like Brahms meditated on the past in the solo movements of his violin sonatas, but that past existed within a kind of narrative frame, whereas here only a present  past survived. Feldman’s music is both annoying –- when will it change, and where will it end ? –- and transcendent, and Jennings and Jones came down squarely on the side of the latter. And  the music seemed to gain much of its poetry from the place where it was played. A big mirrored dance rehearsal studio, with a spic and span Steinway grand where each sound had its tenuous, and all too fleeting life.

by Michael McDonagh
Contemporary Classical

Sure From Far and Near, You’ll Always Hear, The Wearing of the Green

That famous Irishman Frank J. Oteri tells us that the Contemporary Music Centre Ireland, which is basically the Irish equivalent of the American Music Center, is producing its first-ever New York concert featuring a wide range of contemporary Irish composers at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall tomorrow night (Friday, October 17, 2008). 

New Music – New Ireland aims to showcase a selection of the best of today’s Irish composition played by top-level young New York- and Irish-based performers in this prestigious venue. The ConTempo String Quartet, Galway’s Ensemble-in-Residence, will be joined by New York-based clarinetist Carol McGonnell and pianist Isabelle O’Connell, both originally from Dublin, to perform music by Ed Bennett, Ailis Ní Riain, Deirdre McKay, Jane O’Leary, John Kinsella, Ian Wilson and Jennifer Walshe.

Tickets are $20 (with senior and student discounts available), but the CMC is additionally offering a 20% discount to anyone who emails a request for one at tickets@cmc.ie.

The Contemporary Music Centre Ireland also happens to be a very new-media-savvy kind of place, and at this page you’ll find a video preview of the concert, as well as chats with the performers and composers.

by Jerry Bowles
Chamber Music, Microtonalism

Interpretations Season 20: Artist Blog #2 — Ted Mook

This Fall marks the twentieth season of provocative programming in New York City brought to you by Interpretations. 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. Our second concert this season, on 16 October, features cellist Ted Mook, who has put together a program celebrating Ezra Sims’ 80th birthday on one half and promoting the music of Daniel Rothman on the other half:

Pansonority/Luminance: Music of Ezra Sims and Daniel Rothman

The two composers sharing this program have several things in common, things which are easy to talk about, write about and argue about. Sadly, some of these things can also be used as labels, to either wave as a standard of allegiance or a category to avoid. Neither composer has an institutional association, both composers work quietly in the calm, away from the frenzy of self-promotion. Both composers write meticulously considered music, consciously keeping the past in mind, but always stepping away from their last piece. Neither composer is on the tip of anyone’s tongue, but they are as well regarded as any similarly controversial artist. They are comfortable writing music that departs from the 12 note equal-tempered scale that dominates music today, though they can and do otherwise. Hence, pansonority.

Luminance, because it’s music that, for whatever reason, glows with its own light.

Daniel Rothman’s musical and visual preoccupations wander beyond the concert hall into eccentric spaces and timescales both smaller and larger than life. I’ll be performing a work Daniel wrote for me, aptly titled For Ted, a short, simple cello monologue, composed almost exclusively on the extreme upper harmonic partials of the instrument, assembling a narrative from heard, barely heard, unheard (imagined) sounds, much in the same way that the mind assembles a darkened room’s features from wisps of information from the dark adapted eye and the mind’s fabrications rushing in to fill the void. Pianist Eric Huebner will be playing la mùsica: mujer desnuda – corriendo loca pro la noche pura — the title being a poem by Juan Ramón Jiménez in its entirety, and Telling the Bees, which Eric premiered last year, and concerns a ceremony performed by a younger member of a household when his/her master or mistress dies, who visits the beehive rattling a chain of small keys, and whispers:

Little Brownies, little brownies, your master/mistress is dead.

Little Brownies, little brownies, your master/mistress is dead.

Little Brownies, little brownies, your master/mistress is dead.

Ezra Sims is a horse of a different color, and an older one, too, since we are celebrating his 80th birthday. Born in 1928, far off the musical reservation in Birmingham, Alabama, he showed intellectual and musical precociousness as a youngster and progressed through piano, string bass, choral singer, composer, Yale student, Mills student (with Darius Milhaud), New Yorker, Guggenheim Fellow in Japan, inventor of a 72-note per octave non-symmetrical notation system, resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts, co-founder of Dinosaur Annex (a Boston based new music ensemble) and still is writing music. In the 60s, driven by his ear to write down notes that were not reproducible on the piano, he developed a tonal system of 17 irregularly spaced notes, fully transposable, resulting in a 72 note sub-division of the octave. Taking it one step beyond the flattened system of Harry Partch (based on a root-ratio), Ezra’s system evolved a harmonic language allowing for closely related and fully chromatic modulations. These vast tonal resources are tamed by a somewhat conservative, almost Brahmsian romanticism, and the resulting music is clear and expressive. Pianist Eric Moe, mezzo-soprano Mary Nessinger, and I will be playing a set of works spanning his career.

Interpretations at Roulette
20 Greene St between Canal and Grand
New York NY
8:00pm

more information

by Ted Mook
Contemporary Classical

Tom Myron Rules the Universe

Whoa!

Our own Tom Myron has taken two more bold steps in Sequenza21’s irreversible march toward Complete Intergalactic Domination.

This Friday the New York Pops plays two of Tom’s Bernstein arrangements (“My New Friends” and “Spring Will Come Again”) on their Lenny 90th concert at Carnegie Hall.

Then on Saturday the Eastern Connecticut Symphony plays Tom’s Katahdin (“Greatest Mountain”) on a concert sponsored by the Mohegan Tribe. Very nice. You can download Katahdin over on Tom’s page.

by David Salvage
Contemporary Classical

Those is some bitchin’ sounds, yo

Dude!

Next week those SOB’s from Lost Dog get their season off to a hooowwwling start with a program at Tenri they call “Color Wheel.” Lost Dog top dog Garth (“Arf!”) Sunderland explains:

The focus of this program is instrumental color – the astonishing variety of sounds even a single instrument can produce. Each instrument in the concert (Clarinet, ‘Cello, and Piano) will be experienced individually in the first half of the program, in virtuosic solo works which explore their unique color pallete – the ‘sound-identity’ of the instrument. In the second half, all three instruments come together to explore and experience those colors interacting with each other, in a very rare performance of Helmut Lachenmann’s timbral masterpiece, Allegro Sostenuto. 

Those first half pieces are by Ligeti, Xenakis, and Donatoni.  (Ouch-kabibble.)

The real deal takes place next Saturday night (10/25) at Tenri Cultural Institute, a joint which is finally about to live up to its middle name. There’s a preview program the night before at Waltz-Astoria. C-ya!

by David Salvage
Composers, Contemporary Classical, Exhibitions, Scores

I Like to Look

Steve Roden - When Stars Become Words - 2007 My first year in college (1974-5), we were treated to an exhibition of the original score pages selected by John Cage and Alison Knowles for their highly influential 1969 book Notations (currently available as a free PDF download at UbuWeb).

For young composers at the time, these bits and pieces of anything-but-standard notation were eye- and ear-opening, sent us scouring the library stacks for more, and led us all to go a little crazy trying to mimic or out-write what we saw there.

Then as sequel this year, Theresa Sauer carried the idea up to our own time with Notations 21, an updated compendium of all the fruit that’s come from those first flowers.

Wadada Leo Smith- Cosmic Music - 2007 I’m mentioning this because down here in Houston I just received a little whiff of that wonderful déjà vu this afternoon. The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston has a show up and running through December 7th, titled Perspectives 163: Every Sound You Can Imagine. It’s kind of a mix of both Cage/Knowles-old and Sauer-new, with a scattering of more traditional scores by some of the recent “big names” (Lou Harrison, Rorem, Glass, Reich, Riley, Dresher, Adams — John and John Luther –, Bryars, Crumb, Nyman, etc.).

The list of old mingling with new is long: Steve Roden (image above right), Wadada Leo Smith (image left), Cage, Brown, Bussotti, Feldman, Ashley, Mumma, Brandt, Stockhausen (dad and son), Xenakis, Wolff, Dick Higgins, Knowles, Yasunao Tone, Subtonick, Cardew, Curran, Per Norgard, Phill Niblock, La Monte Young, Stephen Vitiello, Kaffe Mathews, Maja Ratkje, Nancarrow, Daniel Lentz, Elena Kats-Chernin, Jennifer Walshe, Stephen Scott, Wallace Berman, Marina Rosenfeld, Christian Marclay… etc., etc….  If your travels take you down this way, be sure to make room for a visit.

by Steve Layton
CDs, Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Recordings

Sampling your way through Sunday brunch

Sunday Music: CD Samplers in the Era of Pandora
Sunday Music Volume 4

Big Helium Records BHRSM004 / www.bighelium.com

Unlike the album driven days of yore, today it’s all about the mix. From purchasing single tracks digitally at online stores such as Itunes and Amazon to the internet radio sensation Pandora, which tailors ‘stations’ to a listener’s preferences, music is presented as eminently accessible; instant gratification, inevitable. While all aforementioned methods of mix are exciting in their potential for discovery, surfing the impossibly commercial Itunes or using Pandora’s efficient but sometimes ham-fisted engine is unlikely to provide the enlightening swerves and hidden treasures found on the best mixtapes and compilation CDs.
Sunday Music, promoted by Barnes and Noble and released by Big Helium, has to cast a wide net; but despite this, the fourth volume of the series is an intriguing mix of classical and crossover-classical fare. There are chestnuts such as Magdelena Rozena’s fluid rendition of Lascia chi’io Piange from Handel’s Rinaldo and Bernstein’s Somewhere from West Side Story: Symphonic Dances. Also included are current favorites: Hilary Hahn playing Bach beautifully and Sting singing a lute song: Robert Johnson’s Have you Seen the Bright Lilly Grow. While no one will mistake the latter for Rogers Covey-Crump or Andreas Scholl anytime soon, his crooning take on the Elizabethan repertory has introduced a number of listeners to its charms.
True, some of the pop-oriented moments – Lisa Gerrard’s evocative but somewhat out-of-place instrumental The Unfolding and Craig Armstrong’s regrettably New Age take on Be Still My Soul – dilute the classical bent of the CD and may raise the eyebrows of purists. Rather, what makes Sunday Music 4 better than your average comp disc are its adventurous classical choices. The inclusion of up and comer Eric Whitacre’s Lux Autumque, with its lush cluster chords and ambient atmosphere, is a master stroke, as is Anna Netrebko’s glorious rendition of O Silver Moon from Dvorak’s Rusalka. Pepe Romero playing Rodrigo and a Schubert Impromptu performed by Wilhelm Kempf round out the disc in handsome fashion. While designed for the Sunday brunch set, this CD promises to keep things interesting and may well spur on many a conversation about classical music discoveries; something that keeps the spirit of the mixtape/comp CD very much alive.
by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical

The King of Queens

In 2002, Silas Huff moved to New York City for a girl, got a day job, and, while riding the bus into Manhattan, noticed a lot of folks getting on in Astoria carrying instrument cases. A composer and conductor himself fresh from a year in Germany, Silas started approaching these Astoria musicians, and, next thing he knew, he was holding auditions for the “Astoria Symphony.”

But the symphony was actually his second ensemble.

Back in 1995, as a classical guitar major at Texas State University, he wanted to put on some new music concerts. Now, new music concerts don’t get much attention anywhere. But Silas had an idea: he’d call his ensemble the “Lost Dog” ensemble, and make a poster whereon “Lost Dog” was writ large. Who could pass up such a sign?

Add together the Astoria Symphony and the Lost Dog New Music Ensemble, throw in the Random Access Music composers collective, and you get the Astoria Music Society—an organization that, since 2002, has performed over 85 concerts featuring everything from standard orchestral repertoire to jazz.

With AMS in place, Astoria now has a classical voice to join the vibrant pop-world music scene currently filling the neighborhood’s cafes, restaurants, and other venues. While the organization’s primary function is to serve Queens, it performs in Manhattan as well. This weekend, the Astoria Symphony kicks off the season with a program featuring world premieres by Steve Horowitz and Angelica Negron. In December, AMS’s Lost Dog Ensemble plays a program featuring music by (gosh) Sequenza21 folks. Next March, AMS collaborates with the Long Island City Ballet. Go here for more.

Attendance is, shall we say, encouraged.

by David Salvage
Contemporary Classical

Q&A with Gabriel Kahane

Gabriel Kahane performs Thursday, 9 October with Rob Moose at the Cornelia St. Café (8:00pm, doors; 8:30 Diane Birch, opening; 9:30 Gabe). This week, Gabriel and I exchanged some e-mail Q&A. The conversation got pretty deep. –David Salvage

DS: Gabriel, I’m enjoying your album [Untitled Debut]. I’m wondering, as I listen, what non-musical sources of inspiration you might have. Like poets, artists, and so on.

GK: I think that’s a great question. There are certainly some fairly explicit literary inspirations for some of the songs on the record. “The Faithful” was written as a kind of response to Claire Messud’s novel “The Emperor’s Children,” which I think very elegantly and devastatingly deals with 9/11. “7 Middagh” was written after reading Sherill Tippins’s glorious book “February House,” which is an account of the artist commune at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn Heights during World War II in which W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Gypsy Rose Lee, and Jane and Paul Bowles were charter members. But more generally, I think I’m always looking at art of all mediums to find different approaches to achieve some kind of emotional catharsis. I try to be as emotionally direct as possible in my work without getting sentimental (I hope), and so that tends to be what I seek out in other art. (more…)

by David Salvage
Contemporary Classical

Last Night in L.A.: the art of Kraft

Another full house at Zipper Hall, and we enjoyed ourselves with the music of William Kraft and his “Encounters” series of works for percussion. This was the third and final program in the Kraft/Encounters retrospective given by Southwest Chamber Music, honoring Kraft for his 85th birthday. By the end of tomorrow the whole series will have been recorded, and next year a 3 CD set will be available of this important set of compositions by a man who has been such a major participant in contemporary music in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, the conversations with Bill Kraft will probably not be in the CD. Listening to Kraft’s comments, not limited to his music, has been one of the treats of the series; he is a witty, charming, thoughtful, knowledgeable gentleman.

Last night’s concert gave us the newest Encounters: the world premiere of Encounters XV for Guitar & Percussion; and Encounters XIV (2006) Concerto a Tre (for piano, violin and percussion). To these were added two earlier works: Encounters IV: Duel for Trombone and Percussion (1973); and Encounters V: In the Morning of the Winter Sea (1976) for cello and percussion. Kraft’s compositions explore the textures of sound; he makes extensive use of a wide variety of tuned percussion and seems to delight in the unique sounds that result from simultaneous notes on two or more instruments, often with special striking or bowing techniques. His works explore the variety of sounds from his selected pairings, not merely from the percussion alone. For example, Encounters IV begins with a duet between tympani and a trombone using a range of mutes. That work also included use of tuned steel mixing bowls; since the original bowls could not be located, tuned cowbells were substituted.

The percussion responsibilities were shared last night. Lynn Vartan performed Encounters XIV and XV. The two principals of Mexico City’s Tambuco Ensemble, Ricardo Gallardo and Alfredo Bringas, performed Encounters V and IV, respectively. Tambuco played a key role in Southwest’s performances and recordings of the complete set of chamber works by Carlos Chavez, and Tambuco brought some of their instruments, such as the tuned cowbells for the performance (and recording). In an interesting symmetry, Kraft conducted the world premiere of Chavez’ Tambuco. Bill Booth was the dueling trombonist, Peter Jacobson the cellist, Shalini Vijayan the violinist, Ming Tsu the pianist, and John Schneider the premiere performer on guitar. Watch for these recordings.

by JerryZ