The Callithumpian Consort is at work again at 8:30 pm tomorrow night at NEC’s Jordan Hall in a slightly premature celebration of the 80th anniversary of Earle Brown’s birth (it’s actually December 26). They’ll be playing Brown’s Sign Sounds, a rarely heard masterpiece of open form from that resides somewhere on the frontier between serialism and improvisation. They will perform the piece several times, and have assured us that no two performances will be alike. And they’ll also be continuing their exploration of Alvin Lucier with his Ever Present, for saxophone, flute, piano, and sine waves (which they describe it as “infinitely slow expansion of the music between your
Read moreI’m told that some of you are having problems with the comments drifting across the page in Internet Explorer. I use IE 7, the latest version, and they scroll perfectly for me. If you’re using an earlier version of IE, you might want to download and install IE 7 to see if that helps. If not, let me know. Also, some of you are getting mixed signals from the RSS feeds–some of which come from the old Blogger setup and some from the WordPress pages. Here’s a directory of all the feeds from the site: WordPress Blogs Front Page https://www.sequenza21.com/index.php/feed/ Composers Forum
Read moreDear Jerry- Thanks for your kind words earlier this year about the Ben Johnston String Quartet release on New World Records. I am the producer of that disc, and also the 2nd violinist in the Kepler Quartet (so, not an unbiased perspective…) I am writing you and your readership with a plea, an invitation (however you wish to frame it) to become a part of bringing this great composer’s legacy into broad daylight. We recently received a Copland grant towards finishing the recorded cycle of Ben’s 10 string quartets, but still need to raise significant dollars to make it happen.
Read moreWe have a terrific new blog to unveil this morning. It’s called From the Faraway Nearby: An American Composer in Latvia and is written by Charles Griffin, a native New Yorker who is now living in Liepaja, a small industrial city in the western region of Latvia, on the Baltic Sea. Fascinating insights into a musical world that is far different from the one most of us know. Elsewhere, the classical pretentiousness thread goes on forever on the Composers Forum page. Leonard Slatkin weighs in with some new fodder over at Drew McManus’ Adaptistration, which is where the conversation began. Did I mentioned that Steve Reich
Read moreJerry was nice enough to ask if I’d maybe post here once a week, each time sharing a few links to sites where I’ve encountered composers and performers offering excellent work to listen to online. Forgive the length, but once the pleasantries are out of the way in this post, the rest will be to-the-point. Why me? Besides being a composer lo these past 30-something years, and having a life-long receptivity to music from across the temporal and cultural spectrum, since I first got online in the mid-90s I’ve actively pursued new work that composers and performers have been kind
Read moreChris Thile, the best bluegrass mandolin player alive except for maybe Mike Marshall and Sam Bush is having a joint CD release party with some girl fiddle player named Hillary Hahn next Tuesday night starting at 7 pm at Housing Works Used Book Cafe, 126 Crosby Street, NYC 10012 (212-334-3324). What makes this an unusual CD release event is that tickets are being sold to the public for $15 with the proceeds going to charity, specifically Housing Works which does a lot of good things. The kids have a lot in common; both were child prodigies. They will performing both classical and bluegrass music which
Read moreThe Elastic Arts Room (formerly Project One), whose artistic and managing director is S21 home Christopher Zimmermann, is teaming up with the super cool composer/performer collective counter)induction and the Chris Lightcap Quintet (Tony Malaby, Mark Turner, Craig Taborn, Chris Lightcap, and Gerald Cleaver), to present Bigmouths on Monday, October 16th at 9 pm at the Tenri Cultural Institute of New York. Bigmouths explores the nature of improvisation and aleatoric music-making. Counter)induction will give world premiere performances of new works by Douglas Boyce and Chris Lightcap and will perform works by Earle Brown and Vinko Globokar. Chris Lightcap’s quintet will then use Lightcap’s compositions as departure
Read moreSteve Reich turns 70 today. There will be the usual superlatives–greatest living composer, most important musical thinker, and other fun, but largely unreliable, speculations. We won’t burden Reich with any of them. The path of music history is already littered with the ghosts of greatest livings whose work has since fallen into neglect and obscurity. Others fade for awhile only to have their reputations re-claimed by forceful new advocates. One of the great things about leaving behind a body of work as essential to its time as Reich’s is that it is a legacy each age can evaluate on its own terms and through the prism of its own judgements and tastes. Suffice
Read more“What to Wear” ended its all-too-short run yesterday. When you find out its schedule for performance in New York, get your tickets right away. Better yet, get tickets for two dates (or more), because you’ll want more than one evening. As reported and commented on last week, this is the opera with music by Michael Gordon and libretto, design, direction, and occasional voice-overs by Richard Foreman. Gordon’s music is a pleasure to hear and feel. (I wouldn’t have minded a few fewer decibels.) David Rosenboom, one of whose sidelights is being dean of the CalArts School of Music, was music director
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