The Original New Music Community
Got four and a half minutes for a meditation on life, religion, and nature?
Our friends at Aguava New Music Studio have a new video by Susanne Schwibs, music by Cary Boyce, performed by Aguava New Music Studio and the IU Contemporary Vocal Ensemble directed by Carmen Helena Tellez. A DVD will be available very soon from www.aguava.com. The score is available from G. Schirmer’s Dale Warland Choral Series.
[youtube]gNn6BsXl_Sw[/youtube]
There are a handful of words that send me reflexively scurrying for the off button: “Mozart,” “President Bush said today,” “Sandy Duncan,” “drum solo. ” I loved it when Buddy Rich told Johnny Carson once that he never practiced “because it hurts my ears.” Which, of course, is why I have to mention that the first of four upcoming concerts organized by Jason Kao Hwang at the Living Theater with RUCMA (Rise Up Creative Music and Arts) is called Drum Solos! and features drummers Newman Taylor Baker, Andrew Drury and Tatsuya Nakatani.
Thursday, July 17, 10:30 PM
Drum Solos !
Newman Taylor Baker
Andrew Drury
Tatsuya Nakatani
The Living Theatre
21 Clinton Street (bet. Houston and Stanton; F to Delancey Street or J,M,Z to Essex Street)
Admission: $10 / students and seniors: $7
Sure, a short latte, or a couple humbows & a coke… Or, just about any couple weeks through this year, that or even less will get you into any of a slew of great concerts in the sfSound series. Beginning tomorrow (!), when you can hear Steve Reich’s Four Organs (1970), Giacinto Scelsi’s Kya (1959), Salvatore Sciarrino’s Muro d’orizzonte (1997), Tom Dambly performing Mauricio Kagel’s Atem (1970) for trumpet and tape, violist Alexa Beattie performing Alan Hilario’s kibô (1997), and a new collaboratively-created piece by sfSoundGroup, directed by Matt Ingalls.
The sfSound Group consists of a central core (currently David Bithell – trumpet; Kyle Bruckmann – oboe; George Cremaschi – bass; Matt Ingalls – clarinet; John Ingle – saxophone; Christopher Jones – piano, conductor; Monica Scott – cello; Erik Ulman – violin) augmented by a whole constellation of Bay-Area-and-beyond collaborators. Together they put on a stellar (constellation-stellar… cute, huh?) series of concerts; some upcoming shows include:
Details & dates for all these and many more are listed on their series webpage. So spend that pocket change where it counts…
Few operas I have seen have left as great an impact on me as Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten which I originally saw at City Opera in the early ’90s and just saw again in its current run at the Park Avenue Armory as part of the 2008 Lincoln Center Festival. (There are only two performances left and I’ve heard that the run is practically sold out. When I was there on Wednesday night there was a posse of desperate folks hoping they could wrangle tickets, but if indeed no official tickets are left and you haven’t seen it, join them and hope.)
For all the polemics about what works and what doesn’t work musically in opera, Zimmermann’s relentlessly rigorous and sometimes astringent 12-tone score–with nary a hummable melody for its entire duration–is extraordinarily effective. So much so, I think it should put to rest what to some has seemed like an anti-12-tone cabal in recent years.
Ironically, many folks who are otherwise sympathetic to dodecaphonic musings aid and abet this cabal by being so apologetic about such music, e.g. “it’s difficult, but” etc. Even David Pountney, stage director of the current production of Soldaten claims in an essay published in the program that 12-tone opera never really took off and that there are essentially only three important 12-tone operas: the present work, Berg’s Lulu and Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron. What about Montezuma or the operas of Luigi Dallapiccola?
I love minimalism (Einstein and Satyagraha changed my life and I’ve seen three different productions of Nixon) and am also deeply moved by some neoromantic operas (Vanessa is heart-wrenching). In the world of dramma-per-musica, shouldn’t “by any means necessary” be the only guideline?
Nothing for those slooow summer days like another round of “everything sucks/everything’s fine” wars… Courtesy of The Guardian, Joe Queenan kicks it off with an article on how he just can’t take any more, what we “high priests of music” have been pawning off as art these last couple-three generations or so… While Tom Service tells Joe he needs to unbunch his underwear a bit… Or is that Tom getting in a bunch over Joe’s blow-off?… Read both sides; and there’s plenty of room in the comments both here and there, to thoroughly reach no consensus or conclusion whatsoever. Ah Summertime, and the livin’ is easy…
Update: A propos this little dust-up, and also related to Frank’s opera post just above, venerable art-imp-rocker David Byrne caught Zimmermann’s Soldaten and writes about it on his blog. Along the way, he echoes a few of Joe Queenan’s criticisms.
From composer Paul Laino.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSasEp1-j1Q[/youtube]
And don’t forget: the S21 concert submission postmark deadline is one week from today. Fire me an e-mail; Pierrot or subsets thereof.
BSO MUSIC DIRECTOR JAMES LEVINE LEAVES TANGLEWOOD TO UNDERGO SURGERY
BSO Music Director James Levine regrets that he will have to withdraw from the balance of the 2008 Tanglewood season. Because of a cyst causing pressure and discomfort, Levine will undergo surgery this week to have a kidney removed. The procedure has been described by Levine’s doctors as curative, with no other treatment necessary and with every expectation for a complete recovery. The anticipated recuperation period is six weeks -leaving ample time to prepare and conduct the season openings of the BSO and the Metropolitan Opera in September.
“It is extremely frustrating that I need to have this surgery now,” said Levine. “My projects at Tanglewood have been planned so carefully and coordinated in such detail by the Festival administration. I especially regret not being here with Elliott Carter for his 100th birthday celebration, which I was looking forward to more than I can say. And I’m very disappointed at having to miss concerts with my colleagues in the BSO, as well as my work with the young musicians of the Tanglewood Music Center.”
Mark Volpe, BSO Managing Director, expressed the sentiments of everyone at the Festival: “All of us at Tanglewood are very disappointed that James Levine will not be with us for his remaining concerts this summer,” said BSO Managing Director Mark Volpe. “However, we are primarily concerned for Jim’s health and well-being, and that everything be done to ensure a complete recovery so that he returns as soon as possible to his musical life with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Metropolitan Opera.”
The 2008 Tanglewood concert schedule, which offers 67 ticketed performances and runs through Labor Day weekend, will not be disrupted, with all concerts to take place as originally scheduled. An announcement about guest conductors scheduled to take over Maestro Levine’s remaining Boston Symphony Orchestra and Tanglewood Music Center concerts will be forthcoming. Maestro Levine led the BSO, a cast of international soloists, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus in the opening weekend of the Tanglewood season, leading a performance of Berlioz’ monumental Les Troyens, July 5 and 6. Also last week, Maestro Levine led the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in a performance of Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony.
Tanglewood, located in Lenox, MA, is the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. For complete details about the 2008 Tanglewood season, visit www.tanglewood.org.
I come to praise Michael Nyman. No, really. Since the nice people at Naxos began distributing Nyman’s MN Records a couple of months ago, several of his musical adventures have come into my possession and I have to admit that I find them as light as the floating feather in Forrest Gump and as addictive as an open box of Entemann’s chocolate-covered doughnuts. I play them again and again, knowing I should move on to something meatier–like, say, the amazing new Da Capo recording of Per Norgard chamber works or Lee Hyla’s extraordinary Lives of the Saints.
But it couldn’t hurt to put on Nyman’s Mozart 252 while I’m deciding. Mozart 252 (Nyman was a couple of years late in finishing his tribute to Wolfgang’s 250th birthday) brings together two main bodies of Nyman work inspired by Mozart (whose music, by the way, I loathe). The first is the soundtrack for Peter Greenaway’s Drowning by Numbers, and the second draws from Nyman’s score for Letters, Riddles and Writs (1991), a BBC2 homage to Mozart. Like my favorite doughnuts, there’s lots of empty calories but it tastes so sweet going down.
Or maybe, I’ll go with Acts of Beauty/Exit no Exit, a couple of extended vocal works that show Nyman’s approach to word-setting, song structure, and choice of subject matter. Oooo..this is interesting. Says here that Acts of Beauty is a song cycle based on miscellaneous texts on beauty from a 1556 text of Vincenzo Cartari, which “looks at the measurements of beauty by comparing buttocks to beauty in the urban environment as viewed by Kurt Scwitters and Dzuga Vertov to Martial’s Epigrams on the weighing of a penis.” Kind of gives a new definition to the word “heavy.”
Exit no Exit began life as Beckham Crosses, Nyman Scores, a ‘homage’ to the England football team as part of a documentary on BBC Radio 3 to celebrate the end of the World Cup finals in Japan/Korea in 2002. Nyman took extracts from announcer John Motson’s commentary to the England v Argentina match and sampled, looped and ‘instrumentalized’ them…in the manner of Steve Reich’s Different Trains: translating the loops repeating rhythmic and melodic patterns played without variation.” Good cover copy that: “In the Manner of Steve Reich’s Different Trains…” Nice. In this version, Motson’s voice has been replaced with a bass clarinet.
There’s nobody here right now except me and the cat so maybe I could even go with the “Composers Cut” version of the score from Nyman’s most famous piece, The Piano. Poor Holly Hunter losing her pinky like that. That’s exactly why I prefer cats to children. Let’s see…Nyman says: “The purpose of the Composer’s Cut series is to present music from my soundtracks in a state of continuous evolution. As I transferred particular cues from film to concert hall both musical structures changed and performance styles developed, enabling the music, perhaps, to realise its true potential. So these recordings represent the Michael Nyman Band’s state-of-performance as of spring 2005.” State-of-Performance…In the Manner of Steve Reich’s Different Trains. Now, we’re getting somewhere.
Nyman’s score for Jane Campion’s 1993 film The Piano is one of the most successful film soundtracks of all time, won lots of movie music awards, and made Nyman one of the few composers who can afford to own their record labels and hire any musicians they want to play their music. The concert suite for The Piano as performed by The Michael Nyman Band is a staple of the band’s concert repertoire and has been performed all over the world with the composer acting as pianist and conductor. According to the notes: “It is this expanded form of the soundtrack that Nyman chose to record as his own definitive edition in Abbey Road studios in April 2005.”
So, let’s see what we have when we put it together: “Live from Abbey Road…a State-of-Performance performance..In the Manner of Steve Reich’s Different Trains…the definitive edition of the Composer’s Cut of…”
And, by the way, did I mention that he’s the man who gave “minimalism” its name?
So the guy’s a pompous asshole. I dare you to buy a copy of one of his CDs and not play it at least 10 times.
For the past couple of years the Kepler Quartet has been on a mission from God to record all ten of Ben Johnston’s string quartets with their intended tunings. The first recording in this series–String Quartets Nos. 2, 3, 4 & 9–was our (or, at least, my) favorite album of the year. Eric Kepler remembered and offered us (with Ben’s blessing) a Fourth of July treat we couldn’t refuse.
Enjoy Ben Johnston’s microtonal version of the National Anthem. It was written for the N.Y. Miniaturist Ensemble a couple of years ago, and Eric made this studio quality recording with Ben as a demo for them. Ben himself is singing. It’s a very short piece, 100 notes, scored for two voices, male and female, violin, clarinet and snare drum
Performers are from Present Music in Milwaukee. Voices Ben Johnston, Laura Monagle, snare Terry Smirl, bass clarinet Bill Helmers, violin Eric Segnitz, engineer, John Tanner copyist, David Bohn
