Sounds Heard: In the Mood for a Melody (Piano Person Edition)
This week, three unique keyboard albums caught my attention: Phyllis Chen’s Little Things, Jim Fox’s Black Water, and Timo Andres’s Home Stretch.
New Music USA Announces More Than $1.2M in New Grants
New Music USA has announced more than $1,200,000 in new awards made during the spring season through its grantmaking programs.
It's Always Now
All of us, not just those of us who are involved with music, waste so much time dwelling on the past as well as trying to predict what the future is, when in fact the only thing we can really affect is the present.
Grant Enables Major Expansion of American Lyric Theater’s Composer Librettist Development Program
A $150,000 Mellon grant enables the American Lyric Theater to expand its Composer Librettist Development Program from an annually offered 10-month period to a comprehensive three-year artist mentorship cycle. Plus newly acquired videoconferencing equipment ensures that composers and librettists from around the country can participate.
New England's Prospect: The Manicured Lawns (Tanglewood's Festival of Contemporary Music)
Tanglewood channels history at every turn, but it is not so much the history of the land it sits on, or the century’s worth of people who passed through it on its way to its current incarnation. It is the history of itself. The past that Tanglewood leverages is its own. It is a recursive monument.
A Category of Our Own
I can see why the Bureau of Labor Statistics might combine music directors and composers, since neither occupation performs (at least for public consumption) on an instrument or sings in the execution of their occupation. But there are many reasons why this conflation of composers and music directors is inappropriate; our occupation deserves its own category.
Copy Rites
Copyright regulations are intended to entitle the creator of a work exclusive rights for a period of time; currently 70 years beyond the life of the composer. Unfortunately, loopholes exist that obfuscate authorship.
Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival: A Sandbox of Sounds
We were asked to shed restrictions, open our ears, and return to a place of youthful excitement where we found our love of music; take risks, share that idea we’d kept to ourselves, and always say yes.
Listening to the Unknown
If you’ve read a few of my posts you may have noticed a common refrain of “context matters.” So I decided I would test out this hypothesis in a live setting and see if my cherished beliefs would hold true.
Caleb Burhans: Inner Voices
As a singer and instrumentalist who has worked in at least a dozen different musical genres, Caleb Burhans has always been drawn to the inner voices preferring to, as he puts it, “play second violin or viola than first fiddle.” This attraction spills over into his own deceptively simple, extremely meticulous musical compositions.
Sounds Heard: Rebekah Heller—100 names
It’s refreshing to hear the bassoon edging it’s way towards the sonic foreground in contemporary music. Anyone with doubts about how cool the instrument can be has not yet heard bassoonist Rebekah Heller perform; in her hands, the oft-underappreciated instrument is transformed into a fierce creature that cannot be ignored onstage.
The Numbers Game
I must confess that to me the concern about the dwindling readership for music blogs is something of a tempest in a teapot, but then again I’m someone who is perpetually skeptical of best-selling novels, Billboard-charting albums, blockbuster movies, and highest Nielsen-rated TV shows.
Forest for the Trees
We cannot learn about life simply through the sciences or technology or business or marketing or law or even education. Artists need—must—be allowed to “say something important.”
Delay Is Denial
A well-rounded musician should be able to improvise as well as compose and/or perform music; it’s a matter of being able to speak as well as listen! Probably one of the hardest things to accept about improvisation is that learning how to improvise is done by improvising.
In the Bay Area: Cahill at the Piano and Music@Menlo
Pianist Sarah Cahill’s engaging solo recital last Friday included an advance look at a program of music by Henry Cowell she’s planning to perform at San Quentin State Prison next month. Though nearly all of the Music@Menlo’s programming is traditionally in the Bach/Beethoven/Brahms vein, one concert this year’s stood out for its programming of Nancarrow, Cage, Reich, and other 20th-century composers.
The Second Performance and Beyond
How a piece goes from a perhaps uneventful premiere to even somewhat standard repertoire is the new music million dollar question. But one thing seems certain: There has to be a second performance.
New England’s Prospect: All-Lou Harrison Concert At Monadnock Music
Lou Harrison translated the Mahāyāna Buddhist Heart Sūtra into Esperanto for his choral setting, La Koro Sutro—a universal wisdom in a universal language. And then, paradoxically, he set it in a way that guaranteed that performances would be few, far in between, and heavily dependent on where you were.
Sounds Heard: Brooklyn Rider—A Walking Fire
Brooklyn Rider thrives in the realm of world music and folk traditions, yet they’ve always sought to tie this impulse into their considerable classical chops—all while at the same time cultivating the ensemble as a kind of composer collective led by violinist/composer Colin Jacobsen.
It’s Not Carved in Stone
Information technology now develops faster than any of us can keep up with, and to what end? If there is no permanence to the formats we use to store information, what is the point of storing information in them?
No Place Like This—The 2013 Mizzou International Composers’ Festival
Like most composers, I’ve done the summer festival dance for a while now. Every music festival is different, but there’s one thing I’ve learned: It’s a bit weird to be a composer at any of them. It’s a brand-new experience to come to a festival where composers are the center of attention.
Up Against the Ceiling
Pursuing music as a vocation in America requires a sense of dedication and commitment that defies what most reasonable people would consider sound decision-making. The average veterinarian in 2010 was paid $82,000 per year; in 2011 the average mail sorter earned $48,400. Musicians average around $34,000.
Sounds Heard: Jacqueline Humbert & David Rosenboom—Daytime Viewing
While Jacqueline Humbert and David Rosenboom’s Daytime Viewing is a by-product of that brief window in the late 1970s and early 1980s when a fusion of experimental music and New Wave created numerous uncategorizable hybrids, it is also very much a harbinger of our own much longer-lasting “indie-classical” zeitgeist.
Wanted: Local Bay Area Musicians
This fall will be an exceptional time for San Francisco Bay Area musicians of all stripes who are interested in making music with a large community of fellow new music lovers. Two massive projects—Lisa Bielawa’s Crissy Broadcast and Rhys Chatham’s A Secret Rose—will be rehearsed and performed.
A Wholly Factual Account of a Failed Attempt to Transcend Gender Through Electroacoustic Musical Theatre
While music itself isn’t inherently gendered, gender can have a huge impact on how music is perceived and interpreted.