Click Picks, Composers, Contemporary Classical

Steve’s click picks #22

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, since they’re nice enough to offer so much good listening online:

Katharine Norman (b. 1960 — UK, Canada)

Katharine NormanKatharine is a British-born composer, sound artist and writer, currently living about as far out West as you can get on Pender Island in BC, Canada. Prior to this “slightly alarming” (her words) change of direction she was Director of the Electronic Music Studios at Goldsmiths, University of London. She now supports the composing habit by freelance writing and some teaching.  She’s composed instrumental music, music combining instruments or voices and digital media, and purely electronic work. Her music makes frequent use of documentary sound – conversation, city sounds, birds etc. – in a way that perhaps invites new appreciation both of the ‘real world’ and of the concert hall.  Increasingly, she writes about music, in particular electroacoustic and electronic music. Her book of experimental writings on recent electronic music (of many kinds and approaches) entitled Sounding Art: Eight Literary Excursions through Electronic Music was published by Ashgate in 2004.

“I have been enthralled with sound as a means of expression ever since I discovered my violin playing made my parents cry (for all the wrong reasons). I started composing not long after, and in the last ten years or so have become more and more interested in the sounds that surround us, and what they can mean in different contexts. Although I remain fascinated by what computers can help me to do with sounds, technology is the least of my concerns – I’m trying to get somewhere, although happily the goal keeps moving. I’ll take whatever transport seems appropriate at the time, whether that’s works for sound alone, or piano pieces, or words on paper. But I will probably never write for solo violin.”

Katharine’s very welcoming site has a lot of peruse-worthy nooks and crannies, including some interactive pieces made especially for the web. The MP3 download section is being reworked, but luckily a lot of the recordings are parked at the SONUS website as well.

Ryan Brown (b. 1979 — US)

Ryan BrownRyan is a San Francisco-based composer and performer, most frequently combining the two in the “rock chamber ensemble” OOGOG. His formative years were spent playing rock and jazz guitar in various bands before beginning formal musical studies at the age of 17. These early years continue to heavily influence his approach to composition, “[pushing] the ensemble sound beyond the Western classical realm” (Josef Woodard, Santa Barbara News-Press). He holds degrees in composition from Cal State Long Beach and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and has studied with Dan Becker, Robin Cox, Michael Gordon, Martin Herman, Scott Johnson, David Lang, Steve Mackey, and Julia Wolfe. Recent commissions include music for violinist Todd Reynolds and the SFCM Guitar Ensemble. His work our friend adam for alto sax, electric guitar, electric bass, and piano received its East Coast premiere on Philip Glass’ MATA Festival at the Brooklyn Lyceum on March 20th.

Ryan’s generous “downloads” page will give you all kinds of listening, including the MATA piece for all you East-coasties who stayed home. (Be sure not to miss hearing the maniacally demented boogie-woogie piano of Oogog Says Hello.)

by Steve Layton
Contemporary Classical

How Christopher Rouse Does His Thing

Consider this: Christopher Rouse does not compose every day; he starts every piece in full score, on measure one; he doesn’t use a piano much, because he can hardly play; he finds the entire process of composition miserable from start to finish and perennially aspires to artistic levels he believes he cannot attain; he only hears the bad things when his pieces get performed, and he is waiting for the day when people wake up and realize he’s no good.

Rouse is, as in his music, unafraid to air his honest thoughts. He can appear neurotic and contradictory one moment, pragmatic and confident the next. He was so thoroughly interesting, I couldn’t resist trying to switch him before interview’s end to my own favorite topics: music and education. But we still had music to discuss.

Rouse has two upcoming world premieres: a Requiem (commissioned by Soli Deo Gloria, Inc.) and Wolf Rounds (commissioned by the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music). The former takes place March 25th at Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles, the latter at Carnegie Hall on March 29th.

Rouse has been thinking about a Requiem for a while and all along the idea of interspersing the Latin liturgical text with secular poetry has inspired him. In his new work, he uses the secular texts to tell the story of a man’s encounters with death: a Seamus Heaney poem describes death from the perspective of the man as a ten year-old boy; a poem by Michelangelo mourns the death of the man’s father; a Siegfried Sassoon poem relates the suicide of a comrade in the trenches of World War I. These poems – and others – are sung by a solo baritone; the Latin is reserved for the chorus. Musically, Rouse organizes the work into an instrumental palindrome, building up from the opening unaccompanied baritone solo to the tutti “Tuba mirum,” and closing again with the solo baritone.

In Wolf Rounds Rouse gets the chance to rock out. The 17-minute work for symphonic band attempts to capture the rhythmic vitality and virtuosic energy of Rouse’s favorite rock music – most notably Led Zeppelin. Over a driving beat, instruments take up variations of the same melodic line; the close, quasi-canonic counterpoint calls to mind the circling of wolves around their prey. There are even some flutter-tongue trombone growls: mimesis, but also a nod to John Corigliano’s Symphony No.3 – another work for symphonic band.

Near the end of the interview, Rouse told me he was worried about his stage bow at Disney Hall. It takes 90 seconds to reach the stage from the balcony, and it was possible the applause might not last that long. The performers have assured him they will stretch the applause in the unlikely event such measures are necessary.

P.S. He’s also on MySpace.

by David Salvage
Contemporary Classical, Strange

Great Movies You Probably Never Heard Of

Okay, I started making a list for friends called 13 great movies that you probably never heard of.  Here’s what I’ve got so far:

1.  Leolo (Canadian) Young French-Canadian kid named Leo believes his mother was impregnated by a Scilian tomato which is why he only answers to Leolo.  And he’s the sanest member of his family.  The filmmaker Jean-Claude Luzon died at 43 with his girlfriend when the Cessna he was piloting crashed but he lived long enough to tell Norman Jewison to go fuck himself when offered the chance to direct a Gene Hackman thriller and to tell Jamie Lee Curtis, a judge at Cannes, that he wanted to chew her up like a piece of liver.

2. Lovers of the Arctic Circle (Spanish) Directed by Julio Medem.  Otto and Ana fall in love as children, become accidential brother and sister, become lovers, fall apart, and never quite find each other again, despite heroic efforts to that end.  I’ve watched it six times and it breaks my heart every time.

3.  Off the Map (American) Inept IRS man tracks down deliquent family in desert, falls in love with wife (who is standing naked in the garden) at first site, comes down with a fever, bonds with depressed husband, takes up painting and becomes famous at it although he doesn’t really care.  Told from the perspective of the young daughter of the family. 

4.  Last Life in the Universe (Thai)  Directed by Pen-Ek Ratanaruang.  Suicidal Japanese librarian on the run from Yakuza moves in with Thai prostitute because there are two dead guys in his apartment.

5.  Morvern Caller (Scottish) Lynne Ramsey’s second film (the first was the equally extraordinary Ratcatcher) stars the incredible Samantha Morton as a grocery store clerk who wakes up on Christmas morning to find that her boyfriend has killed himself in the kitchen, leaving behind the manuscript of a novel and the addresses of some publishers.  She changes his name to hers and sends it in and then heads off to Spain with her girlfriend for a holiday. 

6.  Barbarian Invasions (Canadian) Directed by Denys Arcand.  A fairy tale about dying not simply with diginity but with joie de vive. 

Who has something to add to the list? 

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

Last Night in L.A.: Another Monday Evening

Last night’s Monday Evening Concert was programmed by Kent Nagano:  “Bach and the Music of Today”.  This is hardly a fresh theme, and last night’s program didn’t reveal any fresh ideas of resonance across the centuries.  But it did let us hear works of four composers of today, and that was welcome.

I first heard the music of Kurt Rohde when Nagano programmed his Double Trouble (2002) for the 2004 Ojai Festival.  Last night Rohde and his friend Ellen Ruth Rose performed the virtuosic parts for two violas, supported by a small ensemble of violin, cello, flute, clarinet, piano; I enjoyed last night’s performance much more than my vague recollection of the Ojai performance.  Rohde’s web site has clips from the first and the last of three movements, and listening is worth your time.  Rohde and Rose also played the delightful Viola, Viola (1997) of George Benjamin.  This work was written at the behest of Takemitsu for the opening of a Tokyo concert hall, and Benjamin gets a seldom-heard range of color and expressiveness from his viola duet.  Here’s the single clip from a recording of the work, but you won’t get a feeling for how good a work it is.  Fortunately, it receives reasonably broad appearance on programs.

The largest work of the first half of the concert was by Unsuk Chin, whose “Alice in Wonderland” opera is scheduled for performance in Munice this June, led by Nagano.  Chin’s work was Fantaisie Mecanique (1994/1997), a work for trumpet, trombone, piano, and percussion (two players).  The work has been recorded, and a single clip is available from the German Amazon site here.  Chin achieves a great amount of sonority from her five performers, and the piece was very well played last night.

Ichiro Nodaira was the most active person in last night’s concert.  He performed the four Bach works on Steinway.  (One of these was Busoni’s inflated “transcription” for piano of Bach’s “Chaconne” from the Partita in D Minor; this provided a rather bizarre conclusion to the program and its theme.)  Nodaira conducted three of the works.  One of these was his own composition, Texture du Delire I (1982) for violin, cello, flute, clarinet, piano and two electronic keyboards.  The work has been recorded with Nagano conducting the Intercontemporain, but I couldn’t find a clip.  Nodaira’s transcriptions of Bach keyboard works for orchestra has been performed by the Chicago Symphony and the NY Philharmonic.

 

by JerryZ
Classical Music, Contemporary Classical

Live…From New York

Well, okay, so it’s recorded but we now have in-house music for your dining, dancing and surfing pleasure thanks to our friends at the American Music Center and their new Counterstream Radio.  Click on the blue thing with the white toilet seat in the right column and up will pop a dandy little player that delivers an amazing variety of “new” music–in the broadest possible sense.  If your tastes run from Judith Lang Zaimont to Cecil Taylor to Miguel Frasconi, you’ve come to the right place.  Nice going Frank, Molly, Ian and gang.

Lots of neat things happening involving some of our favorite people this week at the MATA Young Composers – Now festival in Brooklyn.  Brian Sacawa and Jenny Lin are playing in tonight’s performance.  Alex Ross will lead a panel discussion before Saturday night’s concert. 

Grant Gershon’s L.A. Master Chorale is premiering an extremely ambitious work by Christopher Rouse at Disney Hall on March 25th– a 90 minute Requiem for double chorus, children’s chorus, baritone soloist (Sanford Sylvan) and large orchestra.  A couple of weeks ago Grant gave an informal talk on the piece at the piano for the chorale’s board of directors. An enterprising staff member videotaped it, edited it and posted it on Youtube.  Good stuff.  Have a look and listen.

[youtube]1SDSBrGsw8Y[/youtube] 

by Jerry Bowles
Contemporary Classical

if you like PostClassic Radio, Counterstream Radio, Contemporary-Classical.com, et al, sign this petition!

Just read this on CrooksandLiars.com, one of the best political blogs out there if you’re a leftist radical like me. In any case, the Copyright Royalty Board is essentially moving forward with a plan to increase the royalty fees for playing music over the Web. All you folks out there who are for strict intellectual property protections and copyright, get ready to potentially lose your favorite Web radio programs. They’ll all be gone unless they are willing to pay through the nose in order to provide more money to the record companies (and remember, for all the pro-IP arguments out there, the reality is that the majority of the fees tend to go to the record companies, not the composers or performers).

What can be done? Probably not much, but signing a petition takes little time and effort so please go here and sign on. As C&L correctly point out, it will perhaps take a politician or two to take this on and reverse the momentum. But the more people who sign, the better—it can’t hurt.

by David Toub
Concerts, Contemporary Classical

Five Things about Chris Thile

I caught the second of “In Your Ear Redux” concerts at Zankel Hall with The Tensions Mountain Boys Saturday night, and I was happy I did!

1. Chris Thile (mandolin, voice and composer) is clearly a masterful musician. His new group The Tensions Mountain Boys (Chris Eldridge, guitar/vocals; Greg Garrison, Bass; Noam Pikelny, Banjo; Gabe Witcher, violin (nee fiddle)/vocals; and Thile) is a perfect match. They all connect with astounding playing abilities and a certain nonchalance on stage. Thile was downright comedic in his delivery: “You’re all so kind to come here tonight, but why are you in your underwear? We dressed up!” and as the lighting changed for the evening’s featured work, “Yeah, Blue! – uhm, of course, it’s Bluegrass!”

2. The concert started with a few short selections before The Blind Leaving the Blind. It allowed the group to warm up, check things and was a delightful introduction. Thile has a “voice sweetly bland” and performs with a certain integrity and distinction.

3. The main work (really why I was at the concert in the first place) was The Blind Leaving the Blind. Terry Teachout * in his notes describes it as a “40 minute suite” and perhaps as a “cantata.” Thile announced that there would be three definite stops, with tuning in between and that it might be considered in six sections.

It is a beautiful journey, with sometimes angular melodies (such as the second movement) and for me, the emotional pinnacle was the lengthy third movement. The finale is aptly virtuosic, but not as engaging as the middle movements.

I don’t think this will translate well for others, the way Bach does or even the way Glass or Reich do in the hands of say Alarm Will Sound, but it is great music. I just believe this ensemble fits like a glove to the music and would not fit others – but I’m happy to be wrong on this point.

Suffice it to say, The Blind Leaving the Blind isn’t a typical bluegrass jam or a stuffy cantata, rather a blend of genres and talents that only a virtuoso like Thile & company could pull off.

(*Small aside, I think Teachout was sitting just a row ahead of me at the concert – and John Adams was on the right side boxes – I even spied Dawn Upshaw as I was upstairs before the concert)

4. The concert had a certain flow and good feeling. The group jammed to a point of ebullience, and certainly communicated both musically and verbally this joy in performing. The audience was certainly into the groove as well, I don’t know that I’ve felt such a vibe in a long time.

5. Thile announced that The Tensions Mountain Boys was the new group and they would continue on after tonight. They also came back and did encores for the ecstatic crowd, including a very fun blues tune which started completely a capella for all five. Even after this, the audience wanted more, but the house lights finally faded up with the realization that the magical night had come to a close.  (Photo courtesy Carnegie Hall; by Jennifer Taylor)

John Clare is an ASCAP Deems Taylor award winning radio host and violinist.  He’s currently on the air in Harrisburg, PA with a new show, Composing Thoughts.  A voracious music fan, you can read his about his travels, interviews, and reviews at ClassicallyHip.com.

by John Clare
Chamber Music, Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical

The most satisfying medium of all

Why a String Quartet? What is it that has given it its exalted reputation and mystique? Why have so many composers regarded it as the perfect medium of expression, though it is perhaps the most demanding to write for? And why do distinguished artists often prefer to work as a team in a first class quartet rather than make bigger money as, say, orchestral leaders? Music means different things to different people: but for those to who music is an intellectual art, a balanced and reasoned statement of ideas, an impassioned argument, an intense but disciplined expression of emotion – the string quartet is perhaps the most satisfying medium of all.

These are the words of Elizabeth Maconchy (above) who was born one hundred years ago on March 19th 1907. She wrote a remarkable cycle of thirteen string quartets that were influenced by Berg, Bartok, Janacek and her teacher in Prague, Karel Jirak. But despite its obvious merit Elizabeth Maconchy’s music remains scandalously neglected. Which prompts On An Overgrown Path to ask, how important is a composer’s music?    

by Pliable
Chamber Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical

New positions for a string quartet

Vanessa Vanessa Lann emails – Today is the world premiere of my string quartet, Landscape of a Soul’s Remembering. In this work there are six separate locations on the stage where the musicians will stand or sit throughout the performance, changing to new positions between each of the four movements. At each spot there is specific music to be played, consisting of recognizable, repeated patterns that the players will interpret in turn – on their respective instruments – during each movement. As these patterns emerge again and again in new contexts, played on different instruments by different performers, they will each be heard in a new light.

Rather than this being a string quartet where the discussion exists in real time between the players, this is a study of the discussion, or realization, that takes place in one human soul – between the present, the future and one’s understanding of Memory.

The premiere of Landscape of a Soul’s Remembering is being given by the Doelen String Quartet (photo above), in the Eduard Flipsezaal, Concertgebouw De Doelen, Rotterdam on Sunday, March 18, 2007, 8:30 pm. The concert also includes the first performance of a work by Giel Vleggaar, and John Adams’ John’s Book of Alleged Dances.

by Pliable
Click Picks, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music

Steve’s click picks #21

Settle in for a little history…

Juan Hidalgo (b.1927 –Spain),

Walter Marchetti (b.1931 — Italy),

and Zaj

Most musicians who’ve fallen for John Cage and David Tudor, also know that offspring of the 1960s and 70s, FLUXUS. Far fewer know about the Spanish version, running parallel yet independently. It’s one thing to have gone experimental in, say, England at the time; quite another to have pursued this stuff in the fascist dictatorship of Franco’s Spain. In one you ran the risk of apathy; in the other actual persecution.

hidalgo & marchetti

 In the mid-50s, Juan Hidalgo and Walter Marchetti were both young student composers. Marchetti’s friendship with Bruno Maderna led them to visit the high-modernist mecca of Darmstadt, but it was their encounter with the ideas, music, and above all the actions of Cage and Tudor (along with the general rediscovery of Marcel Duchamp) that resonated with the two.

Explorations began soon thereafter, and in 1964 the loose confederation of artists (also including the likes of Esther Ferrer, Ramón Barce, Tomas Marco and many more), officially were born under the nonsense-moniker Zaj (Castellano pronunciation “thahh“). High-profile events and confrontational polemics would have never worked in Spain at the time, but keeping everything more “guerrilla” and informal seemed to both confuse and lull the regime into thinking these “fools” weren’t worth the effort to crack down on.

For a good decade and more, the members of Zaj staged a wealth of small subversions, and had already stirred the atmosphere among quite a few key Spanish artists for the day when Franco’s death would suddenly open the country’s door to an intoxicating inrush of fresh air (followed of course later by new problems, but hey, that’s life…).

In the 1970s Gianni Sassi’s small, Italian avant-art music label Cramps would document (besides other notables like Cage, Robert Ashley, Cristina Kubisch, Demetrio Stratos, Alvin Lucier and even a free-improvising Ennio Morricone) some of Hidalgo’s and Marchetti’s work on LP, and some of that can be heard on the web, courtesy of the Universidad de Castilla – La Mancha’s Arte Sonoro website.

4 coversJuan Hidalgo’s Tamaran (subtitled “drops of sperm for 12 pianos“) is a 40-minute unmoored landscape, layering twelve recordings of prepared piano. Rrose Sélavy (referencing Duchamp’s female alter-ego and subtitled a la Satie “six moldy pieces for six sound sources“) collects six tracks; the first’s single line has one more semi-related line join in on each successive track, leading to a happy cacophony.

Walter Marchetti’s La Caccia (“the hunt”) uses all manner of toys, bird-calls and other improvised sound-making objects, to create a kind of loopily busy virtual “forest”. His Natura morta (“still life”) pays homage to Satie: both to the notorious Vexations (which happens to be a piece Hidalgo and Marchetti have performed), and the idea of musique d’ameublement (“furniture music”). For more than an hour the piano — buried under a huge display of fruit and flowers — plays the same simple-yet-unsettled phrase, the damper pedal constantly depressed.

Like all art movements, interests and allegiances shift, some things focus and some fall apart, time and people move on. Ferrer a well-known artist; Barce and Marco both highly-respected “establishment” composers… Hidalgo and Marchetti remained faithful to the object, action and subversion. Hidalgo turned more to Duchampian artifact, but Marchetti (now resident in Italy) has continued to produce a number of newer musical works mostly with manipulated sound and piano (though still highly conceptual), many of them issued on CD. Mimaroglu Music Sales can provide you with what’s currently for sale by both Marchetti and Hidalgo.

The link on Juan Hidalgo’s name at the top of this post goes directly to his website (where you might want to wish him a happy 80th birthday this year!); Marchetti doesn’t seem to have a full site, but the link on his name will take you to a short but good interview in English from 2000 (and for those who read Spanish, here’s a recent interview with Hidalgo). The link for Zaj will take you to a history kept at UBUWEB.

by Steve Layton