Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music

Forget It, Jake. It’s Chinatown.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Fallto: New Release from Drifting In Silence
Chicago,IL – August 7, 2007 – Labile Records announces its latest release from recording artist Drifting In Silence.

The latest release, Fallto, is a continuation and further development of themes introduced in Truth, and Ladderdown, from 2005 and 2006, respectively, completing the cycle of this trilogy work.

Fallto has been described as shoegaze meets dancing shoes. Listeners familiar with previous work from Drifting In Silence will recognize the trademark prismatic tonalities and looping rhythms suspended in an ambient mix. Fallto brings these previous threads together, and makes its own statement with edgy timbres and hard driving beats that punch through their atmospheric setting in unexpected ways. If Truth and Ladderdown were explorations in clouds and shadows, Fallto is clouds and shadows moving at the speed of an express train.

Fallto further explores the use of voices and lyrics, rendered faithful to the mix by judicious but delightfully risky application of filters and vocoders. True to the established Drifting In Silence aesthetic, the voices in Fallto are part of the instrumentation. Standout tracks include “Texture” and “Unknowndivide,” which features Jess Hewitt of Drev. Also two separate remixes from Drev and 3l3tronic of the vocal-laced “Chameleon,” injecting industrial-quality breaks and a sick vocal filter, to make for a dance floor smash.

Debuting at #5 on the CMJ RPM most added report for issue 1019. Fallto is available now on

and wherever fine alternative music can be found. 

Watch the new video chameleon.
by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, Festivals

August in New York

Verbier3.jpg                                I don’t ski.  Asthma.  And fear.  Mostly fear.

I used to party a bit though and because many of my companions were ski buffs, I have socialized, but not skied, at some of the best places in the world.  I have not skied Kitsbuehl and Chamonix and Lillehammer, for example.  I have not skied Aspen and Telluride and Jackson Hole.   Especially, I have not skied Verbier, the favorite hangout of some rowdy Norwegians of my acquaintance.  We have been thrown out of the Feed Club, Verbier’s most lively nightspot, not once, but twice over the years, not a record I’m sure but respectable for middle-aged businessmen.

Alas, I have never attended the Verbier Festival, which has become one of the best music festivals in Europe in recent years.  Fortuntately for all of us, they have a terrific web site when you can view all of the performances, including the August 1 premiere of our familiar Avner Dorman’s Spices, Perfumes and Toxins, under the direction of Zubin Mehta.  For more Dorman, check out the Metropolis Ensemble’s performance last May of his Mandolin Concerto.

And, welcome back to the S21 blogging fold Judith Lang Zaimont.

by Jerry Bowles
Click Picks, Contemporary Classical

English Ecstasy via Myspace (Steve’s click picks #33)

Our regular listen to and look at living, breathing composers and performers that you may not know yet, but I know you should… And can, right here and now, with so much good listening online:

The British — reserved wet-blankets all, right? Ha! There’s an ecstatic light that burns in each of these composers’ work, though in very different ways:

The laser: Brian Ferneyhough (b. 1943)

Brian Ferneyhough

“Brian Ferneyhough is a composer whose every work probes afresh and ex nihilo the extremes of the musically and technically feasible and stretches the limits of notation. His music is conceived as an ongoing process of transcendence, a constant crossing of boundaries. Each composition is a flight into a virgin land, into uncharted territory. And he is a musical thinker to whom art, rather than existing for its own sake, represents what he himself calls Erkenntnisform — a ‘vehicle of knowledge’.”  — Dieter Borchmeyer

 

 

The mirror-ball: Jonathan Harvey (b. 1939)

Jonathan Harvey

“Jonathan Harvey’s music – ecstatic, inspired, filled now with contemplative rapture, then suddenly with exuberant, joyful dance, and always beautiful – has long stirred me. Among contemporary composers there is none except Stockhausen who can so regularly ‘with sweetness, through mine ear, dissolve me into extasies, and bring all Heav’n before mine eyes’.”  — Andrew Porter

 

 

 

The soft translucent glow: Laurence Crane (b. 1961)

Laurence Crane

“In Laurence Crane’s music the material chosen is familiar; mostly consonant, often tonal, triads, elementary chords, old well-used intervals rescued from a previous unjust ignorant redundancy. The familiar sound or image is abstracted by being placed in a new, clean and often isolated context, like a museum glass case. Its innate value is respected by it remaining alone, unornamented and unaffected during the course of the piece by any development or transformation; the image staying as and where it is by being gently reiterated or prolonged so that it holds our full attention.”  — Tim Parkinson

by Steve Layton
Contemporary Classical

Dogday Thursday

Some interesting fodder for conversation in this month’s Gramophone.  Item #1, there are more than 4,000 one-handed piano pieces for the left hand but no more than 75 for the right.  Jeremy Nichols reckons that it’s because when great pianists are injured it is invaribly their right arm.  His evidence is purely anecdotal, but convincing.

Item #2 is related to this week’s big Focus on Death meme.  We all know that cigarette smoking killed Webern but did you know that Enrique Granados died after the ship he was on was torpedoed by a U-boat and he jumped out of a lifeboat to try and save his wife who was in the water?  Gramophone’s list is pretty well-known.  How about some contemporary updates?

Anybody do Tanglewood?  Give us a report. 

by Jerry Bowles
Chamber Music, Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, Festivals

Hello, Nonino

Seems like only yesterday we reported that Matthew Cmiel, one of our favorite boy wonders, had put together a new band called Formerly Known as Classical.  (Actually, it March 15, 2006, but let’s not quibble.) Looks like the group has done okay since last we checked in; on Sunday, August 5, they’re appearing in a concert at the Cabrillo Music Festival with Marin Alsop, the conductor and music director of the Baltimore Symphony and recent MacArthur Prize winner. 

Matthew–now a sobering 18-years-old–will conduct the group in Osvaldo Golijov’s Last Round, an exciting piece of music which gets its title from a story about boxing by Julio Cortazar and is an homage to Astor Piazzolla the late master of neuvo tango.  

Then, recent Juilliard graduate, cellist Drew Ford and San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra pianist Preben Antonsen will play Matthew’s piece Macho, Cool and Dangerous, which was inspired by the music of Golijov and Piazzolla.

The concert is Sunday, August 5 at 8:00 PM in the Sant Cruz Civic Auditorium, 307 Church Street, Santa Cruz.  If you’re in the neighborhood, write us a review.

Hey, the Steve Layton Songbook is coming along nicely.  Check out Prufrock (T.S. Eliot) 2007.

by Jerry Bowles
Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, Odd

Monday Who’s Dead Wrapup

Frank Zappa has a street named after him in Berlin.  Frank Zappa Strasse is in Marzahn, a district on the eastern fringe of the capital made up of communist-era housing blocks. 

Can’t think of any connection to music except for famous interviews with John Lennon and Johnny Rotten but Tom Snyder was the man for whom talk radio and TV was invented.  Nobody did it better except, perhaps, for Dan Aykroyd doing his impression of Tom Snyder. 

Ingmar Bergman died at 89.  There are lots of connections between Bergman and opera and classical music, both through productions he directed and the use of composers and musicians as characters in his films.  That’s today’s topic.  

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

Dispatch from the Lincoln Center Festival: Into the Little Hill

Lincoln Center Festival presented last night the North American premiere of George Benjamin’s first opera, Into the Little Hill. Hill tells a version of the “Pied Piper of Hamelin” story, wherein a mysterious stranger drives the rats from an infested town with his beguiling music. When the mayor reneges on his promise to pay him, the stranger kidnaps the mayor’s little daughter. Martin Crimp’s libretto assigns all roles – the stranger, the mayor, the mayor’s wife, the little girl, the crowd, and the narration – to two singers, a soprano (Anu Komsi) and a contralto (Hilary Summers).

Benjamin and Crimp subtitle their work a “lyric tale,” a label that captures well the unusual storytelling. In that the singers switch between first and third-person points of view, and that each singer inhabits four different “roles,” Hill places considerable distance between us and the drama. If the result lacks emotional impact, the work is nonetheless fascinating and satisfyingly odd. Benjamin’s spare, clear music complements the literary high-jinks of the libretto by providing a sophisticated, cerebral setting of what is essentially an innocent fairy tale. While a certain awkwardness does emerge when the little girl sings tenderly about the rats, the apparent mismatch between style and story actually succeeds overall, because the aim of Benjamin and Crimp is less to make us sympathize with the characters on stage than to make us contemplate their fate.

Given the many complexities of the work, the 40-minute running time, though impractical from other points of view, is a smart musical decision. Hill moves steadily and never overwhelms us conceptually or musically. Midway, a haunting bass flute evokes the Piper’s music, and a cimbalom adds a magical touch to many passages throughout. Anu Komsi has about the most extraordinary high register a composer could dream of, and Hilary Summers’s stage presence is as sharp as her voice is dusky. The austere blocking and set design are of a piece with the musical and dramatic conception.

Before the opera, members of the Ensemble Modern performed Benjamin’s Viola, Viola and Three Miniatures. The viola duet of the first work anticipated the vocal duet that is Hill, and the third of the miniatures uncannily foreshadowed – in its long lines and pizzicato – the concluding passages of the opera.

Into the Little Hill receives performances again tonight and tomorrow, and, if you’re around, I’d recommend going.

by David Salvage
Classical Music, Contemporary Classical, Opera

Die Meisterbators

From today’s Deutsche Welle:

Germany’s annual Bayreuth Festival of Wagner operas began on Wednesday with a highly anticipated, make-or-break production by the 29-year-old great-granddaughter of the composer Richard Wagner.

And while the applause after the first two acts of Wagner’s only “comic” opera was friendly, the audience — which included a smorgasbord of German political and social elite — was less amused by the third and final act, which featured a few minutes of full frontal nudity, a bizarre sight of Richard Wagner dancing in his underwear and a bunch of master singers horsing around the stage with oversized penises.

by Jerry Bowles