Contemporary Classical

Friday Night Clearing House

I always walk around with a guilty conscience. My inbox gets loaded all the time with press releases and so forth, and I’m a bit stingy about passing on the goods. Let’s give this another try by way of redemption.

SoCal’s S21 readers might want to check out RedBox, an experimental music series held the third Thursday of every month at the Steve Allen Theater in Hollywood. A bunch of groups with achingly hip names are performing this summer. Tickets are only $10.

Here’s a composition competition in Finland. Dust off your small orchestra piece and see if you can impress Magnus Lindberg (he’s on the jury). Deadline December 1st, so, as they do in Finland, you can chill for now.  Rim shot.

Ronen Givony’s unstoppable Wordless Music series is all over the Whitney this month. Ingram Marshall, Chen-Yi, and Jefferson Friedman are all represented. How about you represent now, huh?  Shout out to the tenacious Amanda Ameer…

Speaking of Friedman (who I pretend is much older than I am so it’s okay he’s so successful): the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is giving the Chicago premiere of his Sacred Heart: Explosion The piece is based on the outsider art of Henry Darger.

Question: whom do you have to know to become an “outsider” artist?  Rim shot.

New ensemble alert: It’s called the MZJ Ensemble, presumably after this guy who founded it. He writes: “The medium-sized group (between a chamber ensemble and a full symphonic group) consists mostly of winds and brass, with some strings, and will perform my compositions as well as some arrangements of existing repertoire.”

And there’s fresh dirt at the CD Reviews and Composers Forum.

And Good Heavens!!  C4 is performing Saturday night.  Give it up, yo.

by David Salvage
Click Picks, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical

PBE/LA/OC

Paul Bailey EnsembleThe Paul Bailey Ensemble is a self-described “alternative / classical garage band” busy these last few years in and around Los Angeles. Though Bailey (The bulky but sharp-looking fella in the center of the photo, surrounded by some of the PBE posse) gets naming rights and creates a large amount of the featured music, the ensemble performs works by a number of other like-minded composers, too — most living, a few dead guys as well. That “like-mind” is post-minimal, with equal parts 1980s minimalism, 1680s Purcell, and heavy doses of the rock-band riff factor (though there’s usually no drumkit in the ensemble, there’s almost always electric bass and guitar).

The way Bailey tells it, he’s …had an eclectic musical career since moving to Los Angeles from Wichita, Kansas in 1989. A trained classical and jazz trombonist, he started his career as a staff musician at Disneyland. In 1995, he resurrected the music program at John Marshall High School in Los Angeles. During his tenure, the band won numerous awards and was recognized as one of the most outstanding music programs in the city of Los Angeles. He is now adjunct Professor of Music Education and Music Theory at California State University, Fullerton.

In 2005 Rex Reason interviewed Paul for the OC Weekly, and I can’t think of a better way to explain Bailey and his ensemble, than in few more of his own words:

OC Weekly : So you left Kansas to become a professional musician in California, and you ended up . . . at Disney. How was that?

Paul Bailey: It’s Disney. Anything anyone else has said? It’s true. I was trained to be a musician, I practiced very hard, and I got there, and I basically had to make farting noises on my trombone and play show tunes. At Disney, you don’t have a choice. We played the same 12 songs for four years.

OCW: Is that what drove you to become a teacher?

PB: Being a teacher is the only way I can be a composer and a musician and not have my soul taken out of me. Being paid to play trombone or being paid to write music, I have to worry about who’s going to pay me next. Now, in a sense, I have no filter. I can write whatever I want. It can be shitty, but at least it’s what I want.

OCW: So explain why you want to do what you do.

PB: I’m 36. Are people my age supposed to listen to pop music their whole lives? The whole music industry is set up to please a 17-year-old kid. I don’t mind listening to that stuff, but am I supposed to live my life through the eyes of a 17-year-old child?

OCW: But you told me earlier how much you like Weezer.

PB: I love Weezer. They’re one of my favorite bands, but it would be false of me to write pop songs or rock songs. Is rock and pop music the only way you can express yourself in today’s culture? If I had drums, we’d be a rock band. Right now, it’s very deliberate—I’m not a rock band, although I use rock instruments

OCW: So is this something closer to an orchestra?

PB: Fuck the orchestra. Let’s burn that puppy down and start over. The orchestra’s proper place is the museum. The idea you’re getting some cultural experience that’s going to make your life better and it’s going to expand your mind is total bullshit.

OCW: Then how do you reconcile the two forms?

PB: There’s the technical aspect where I can say, academically, we’re not modernist music. We believe in stuff that has the same chords as Weezer, the Beatles or Radiohead. I’m choosing to deal with music I grew up with and that interests me. But I don’t want to make people go through all these things to decide whether they like it or not. In this big piece I wrote, there might be a message, but the actual music takes very little to understand. You don’t need to listen to Michael Nyman or Steve Reich or Phillip Glass to listen to my music—although it’s based on them. You don’t need to have 20 years of musical history in your mind to listen to stuff I write.

The PBE website has more info, and lots of music to hear, watch, and purchase, so go/do/hear/buy. Their next performance is as part of the line-up for RealMusic 2008, kicking off at 7pm June 21st at Whittier College (on the way from LA to the big OC, yo…). Also on the bill are plenty of other like- and unlike-minds, like Steve Moshier’s Liquid Skin Ensemble, John Marr/Brother Mallard, Susan Asbjornson, Brian Kehlenbach and Melody Versoza. All this for not more than a ten and a little gas money, what could be better?

by Steve Layton
Contemporary Classical

Last Night in L.A.: Salonen’s Piano Concerto

The last concert of the season for the Phil closed with roars of applause and approval for Esa-Pekka Salonen‘s Piano Concerto, given its premiere last year by the New York Philharmonic. Listening to the broadcast of that performance was only a weak preparation for what we heard and felt yesterday. It seemed as if the whole audience was, like me, swept up and carried away by the music. And what a performance it was! The concert was recorded by DG, for which we are grateful, and I’ll download it on release. Yefim Bronfman was the soloist, as he has been in all prior performances. The orchestra was at their best.

In this work Salonen’s compositional styles seem to have taken a new step in evolution. Who would have imagined that this seemingly-cool, calm, analytical Finn would become such an emotional composer? The music is very busy, with many lines and rhythms, but it has an emotional sweep and surge that I haven’t heard in earlier music. “Wing on Wing” for instance doesn’t really make you feel you’re on the boat with its spinnaker and mainsail extended into the wind; it’s a nice picture, but you aren’t caught up by it. The music of the concerto catches you, gives you no time to think, and moves you into its world. I don’t know what to call the style. “Neo-romantic” isn’t quite right. “Neo-emotional” isn’t right. Maybe “contemporary” will just have to do for a while. The music seems right and very much for today. Salonen wrote some really excellent program notes.

The rest of the program ending with the concerto comprised to pieces of today looking back at yesterday. The concert began with the West Coast premiere of Colin Matthews‘ orchestration (and adaptation) of four Debussy preludes for piano; this was followed by a Matthews “Postlude” in which he tried to create a sound portrait of Debussy. This was a decent job of orchestration, except for the fact that his reinterpretation of “The Girl with Flaxen Hair” was too different from my memory, and I didn’t like that change.

Then the orchestra, the Master Chorale and four soloists gave the world premiere of Steven Stucky‘s orchestration of “Les noces”. I thought it was interesting, but not wholly successful in its result. Stucky’s program notes state that he was careful not to try to create a new sound as Stravinsky might have imagined. Perhaps he was too respectful to have the result more than “interesting”. The Stucky orchestration lets you hear the internals of the work more easily than is the case with the density of the four pianos in Stravinsky’s definitive fifth version of the work, but in performance I missed the verve and spark of that version. Perhaps I would have liked the result more if Stucky had gone back to an earlier Stravinsky idea of pitting two string quartets, one playing only pizzicato. Stucky’s notes say that the idea came from Salonen, looking for a work to share a program with “Rite of Spring”. That might have worked out differently for me.

Thursday is the start of the Ojai Music Festival. Prior to the concert there will be a special gathering of bloggers, sponsored by the Festival, and Alan Rich will be honored and welcomed into the blogging world. Now that my schedule is back to enabling me to write about my hobby, I’ll be there.

by JerryZ
Contemporary Classical

Hot Time, Summer in the City

Bang on a Can NYC Marathon
May 31 – June 1, 2008 6:00pm

World Financial Center Winter Garden, New York, NY

This year’s Marathon will take place at the World Financial Center Winter Garden from 6pm on Saturday May 31st through 6am on Sunday June 1st. Here is a schedule of composers and performers:

6:00pm

Alarm Will Sound performing Son of Chamber Symphony (3rd Movement) by John Adams

Pamela Z performing Chalky Crystal Liquid Cave by Pamela Z

Alarm Will Sound performing Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Petpetuum by Harrison Birtwistle

Lisa Moore performing Lightning Slingers and Dead Ringers^^ by Annie Gosfield

Crash Ensemble performing Gra agus Bas by Donnacha Dennehy

8:00pm

Crash Ensemble performing Loops for Ancient Giant Nude Hairy Warriors Racing Down the Slopes of Battle (3rd Movement)^^ by Terry Riley

Karsh Kale and Raj Maddela performing Timeline by Karsh Kale

Ensemble Nikel peforming Sahaf^^ by Chaya Czernowin

Caleb Burhans performing _no_ by Caleb Burhans

Hartt Bass Band performing Strong Hold^ by Julia Wolfe

Young People’s Chorus of New York performing Every Stop on the F Train by Michael Gordon (with film by Bill Morrison)

10:00pm

Bang on a Can All-Stars performing music from Shadowbang by Evan Ziporyn

Bang on a Can All-Stars performing Convex-Concave-Concord^ by Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen

Owen Pallett performing works by Owen Pallett

Bang on a Can All-Stars and Owen Pallett performing Twelve Polearms^ by Owen Pallett

Bang on a Can All Stars performing Glamour Girl by Lukas Ligeti

Bora Yoon performing ( ((PHONATION)) ) by Bora Yoon (with live visuals by R. Luke DuBois)

MIDNIGHT

SIGNAL performing Daniel Variations by Steve Reich

Crash Ensemble performing Resonant Relations by Arnold Dreyblatt

Alarm Will Sound performing Revolution #9 (arr. Matt Marks) by The Beatles

2:00am

So Percussion performing the so called laws of nature by David Lang

Marnie Stern performing works by Marnie Stern

Ensemble Nikel performing Riba^^ by Sivan Cohen Elias

Ensemble Nikel performing Nikel^^ by Ruben Seroussi

4:00am

Dan Deacon, Kevin Omeara and Jeremy Hyman performing Ultimate Reality Part 3 by Dan Deacon (with visuals by Jimmy Joe Roche)

Contact performing Discreet Music (arr. Jenny Pergolesi) by Brian Eno (with film by Suzanne Bocanegra)

Toby Twining Music performing Stimmung by Karlheinz Stockhausen

^ = World Premieres ^^ = US Premieres

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

Brrrrrrrrrr!!!!!

Think you’re too cool for Facebook?

Not any more you’re not.

S21 has put the freeze on the Internet’s leading social networking site.  Get over there and join the Sequenza21 Facebook Group!   Members will get a taste of the awesome powers at hand to those on the inside of S21.  Oh yeah!  AWEsome powers.

C’mon.  You know you wanna.

(AWESOME!)

All right, back to interval cycles and Kurtag.  Sigh.

by David Salvage
Electro-Acoustic, Experimental Music, Festivals

Just Because It’s June in Buffalo

For the past couple of hundred years, David Felder has been running June in Buffalo, the venerable annual music festival that traces its history back to Morton Feldman. Having recently suffered through ‘Savages,’ a small but brutally great film about old people with Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman set in Buffalo, I have to think that the festival is only justifiable reason to ever set foot there.

This year’s festival is set for June 2-7 and this is one of those year’s when the festival departs from its usual format and explores an overarching theme. This is “Music and Computers” year, drawing in some of the world’s most illustrious and innovative composers, researchers, and teachers of algorithmic, interactive, multimedia, acousmatic, and electroacoustic computer music. Headlining the conference are senior faculty Charles Dodge, Cort Lippe, Roberto Morales, Miller Puckette, Morton Subotnick, Ben Thigpen, and Hans Tutschku, a diverse and international group of composers and pedagogues.

David Felder, currently Birge-Cary Professor of Composition at University of Buffalo, and Director of the Center for 21st Century Music, as well as Founder and Artistic Director of the Slee Sinfonietta, has actually presided as artistic director of June in Buffalo since 1985 (you didn’t really think it was a couple of hundred years, did you), when he resurrected the festival after a five-year hiatus. He has since reshaped the festival, emphasizing the importance of meaningful interaction between the senior composers and students.

This summer’s resident ensembles and soloists include some of the world’s leading performers of contemporary and computer music: the Ensemble for Intuitive Music, a German ensemble founded in 1980 in what was then East Germany for the performance of music considered taboo by the Communist government; members of Germany’s acclaimed experimental chamber music group Ensemble SurPlus; members of the widely-renowned New York New Music Ensemble; and UB’s own professional chamber orchestra-in-residence, the Slee Sinfonietta. Other distinguished performers will include bass-baritone Nicholas Isherwood, the Paris-based early music and new music specialist, and the Swedish classical guitarist and new music pioneer Magnus Andersson.

Joining the faculty and performers will be composition students from around the world, who must first pass through JiB’s fiercely competitive application process (last year there were 100 applicants for 20 spots.) June in Buffalo offers these students the rare opportunity to work and mix with top musicians and world-class faculty in an intimate and casual environment. Under the direction of Felder, more emphasis is now placed on providing opportunities for these emerging composers. For example, each gets to rehearse one of his or her pieces with world-class musicians in a professional setting, resulting in a public performance.

The round-the-clock festival schedule consists of daily seminars, lectures, master classes, panel discussions, and open rehearsals-capped by first-rate afternoon and evening concerts that are open to the public. Every seminar and concert since the Feldman days of ’75 has been recorded, and remains in the UB library’s extensive archives.

If you’re in the neighborhood, pounce. Send me a postcard if you go.

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

Gerhard Samuel – A Small Remembrance

We take so much for granted – the sun will go down , the sun will come up – that we never seem to realize that some day it won’t be there or we won’t be here to see it.  Same thing is true of friends you could always count on. So when I got an e-mail from my composer-conductor friend Gerhard Samuel’s companion, Achim Nicklis, that Gerhard had passed away a few weeks ago, I was shocked.  Sure, I sensed he wasn’t well – repeated e-mails saying he’d changed his address indicated as much. – but the sad fact remains. He’s not here anymore.

One comes to know a person through what they say, or don’t say, do, or don’t do, and if that person’s an artist one gets to know them through their work. I first encountered Gary’s music when I was driving my sister Kathi’s car in Belmont Shore, Long Beach, and was so moved  when I heard the La Salle Quartet perform his String Quartet # 1 (1978) on the radio, that I stopped the car until it was over. But isn’t that what art’s supposed to do, and isn’t its awareness meant to make us more aware?

Other pieces had just as much impact. There was his original and very touching “gloss ” on Mondeverdi, Looking at Orpheus Looking  (1971), which he wrote for the Oakland Symphony when he was its extra innovative music director, Requiem for Survivors  and suddenly it’s evening  (1974), which he composed as a memorial piece for his Oakland successor, Calvin Simmons, when he was Mehta’s assistant conductor at the LA Philharmonic; the chamber piece, Nocturne on an Impossible Dream (1980), which he wrote with his mother in mind;  the 1998 chamber work with tenor and saxophone solo, Hyacinth From Apollo, to a poem by his frequent collaborator, Jack Larson, who was the original TV Jimmy Olsen; and the 1994 Transformations for chamber string orchestra and solo violin. And though these were all completely different in style and expressive intent, they couldn’t have been more of a  piece with who Gerhard was – passionate, charming as all get out, refined, yet always full of surprises.

Like that September evening in 1998 – the 19th, to be precise – when Tony Gualtieri and I presented him on KUSF-FM’s 3-hour Classical  Salon, and he, during the time his music was playing, seemed completely at sea, and I said “ Don’t worry, “ as Tony looked across the room at us from “ Studio A”, to our  perch at the little table which was “Studio B”, and then when our mikes went on rose to the occasion like the pro he always was. Which reminds me of a story he told me of what happened when he was conducting one of the Stravinsky ballets. The composer was backstage, hand cupped to his ear, listening intently as his wife, Vera, said “Why’s he doing that? He’s heard it a million times!” And Gerhard said “ Because he wants to hear it again!” which was a lot like him too– completely in the present, where everything is. 

by Michael McDonagh
Chamber Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical

Upcoming concert by the Locrian Chamber Players

An Evening of Contemporary Chamber Music with the Locrian Chamber Players
 
Saturday, May 31st at 8 PM
Riverside Church
Entrance at 91 Claremont Avenue
(North of W. 120th Street – One block W. of Broadway)
Free Admission
 
Featured performers: Calvin Wiersma, Conrad Harris, Danielle Farina, Greg Hesselink, Diva Goodfriend-Koven, and Emily Wong
 
Henri Pousseur
Minima Sinfonia (world premiere)
Yehudi Wyner
Madrigal (NY premiere)
Louis Andriessen
Xenia
John Ross
Deux Melodies d’Aspel
Bill Douglas
Celebration IV
Christian Carey
Butterfly Flourish (world premiere)
by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical

Let’s do it again!

Sequenza21 is pleased to scoop the rest of the world wide web and announce the most exciting news of the day in the world of new music.

On December 4 and 5, the Lost Dog Ensemble, in residence with the Astoria Music Society, will be playing a concert of . . . works by Sequenza21 composers!! The December 4 concert will be in Astoria at the very hip Waltz-Astoria Café, and the following night we’ll be at the Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side (right by Lincoln Center –– an institution that will certainly be feeling a little bashful that night).

Okay. Now here’s the good part.

THIS IS A CALL FOR SCORES!!!

The regulations are a bit tighter this time, so read closely, y’all:

  • Submissions are limited to the following instruments: flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano.
  • Pieces using subsets of this ensemble are especially encouraged, though don’t be afraid to send us your Pierrot piece if you think it’s your best.
  • Solo pieces are also acceptable.
  • Pieces should be a maximum of 12 minutes long, One submission per composer.
  • As for electronics, talk to us about the requirements, and we’ll let you know if they’re feasible.

Next, let’s be clear about something: we’re mostly interested in composers who actually blog here or who actually take part in the threads. Now, if you’ve never made your voice heard on S21 and you really want to send a piece, that’s fine. But others who have posted will be ahead of you in line.

Postmark deadline: July 16th. So time’s a little tighter this time, too. But we have our reasons, friends.

To submit: send me an email (my address is down in the credits bar to the left), and I’ll send you the address.

by David Salvage
Broadcast, Click Picks, Contemporary Classical

Re-cue the Wobbly “Meistersinger”

Robert Gable at his aworks blog flagged this gem of news from Dennis Bathory-Kitsz’s We Are All Mozart site:

Beginning this summer, we are bringing back Kalvos & Damian — not the old format of the New Music Bazaar, but rather Kalvos and Damian: In the House!  … We shut down the show in September 2005 after 537 episodes, but the demand for our show has never quite relented. We will start with the four interviews we did not broadcast during the show’s initial run, and then continue with Art Jarvinen and, if things go well, with Lisa Whistlecroft. By then we should have a schedule set up. K&D will not be on the air, which will give us more flexibility to conduct the interviews at our leisure and not be locked into time or geography. The show will be recorded on each end (or all three ends, if David “Damian” Gunn stays home) using a Skype connection, and the resulting recordings dropped atop one another. Fun a-comin!   ~ Dennis

K&D’s original New Music Bazaar was truly a new-music treasure — and still is, since virtually all of the shows are still being archived on the web for your listening pleasure. Dennis/Kalvos and David/Damian (for those not familiar, handily branded with scarlet letters for life by me in the above photo) have selflessly, and often absurdly, promoted a huge swath of new-music activity that often gets little notice or airplay. Chock-a-block full of interviews, music, and offbeat stories, the shows aren’t always (or even often) serious, but the underlying commitment and love for new, living music most definitely is. Stand by your internet dial, and we’ll let you know when links to the show are up.

Update: By the by, Dennis was recently interviewed by current Vermont composer-in-residence David Ludwig, and you can view the whole thing online.

by Steve Layton