By Joelle Zigman
What distinguishes Berg, Wagner, and Berlioz from the dude with the guitar?
Is identity politics was the best way to go in making theatre relevant today?
By day three at the Dance/USA conference, I found it most interesting that the theme of honesty, authenticity, and being true to oneself emerged in most of the sessions I attended. This integrity I’m sure is also important in music, and probably most other art disciplines as well.
I left the League of American Orchestras Conference feeling rejuvenated, hopeful about the future, and more in love with orchestral music than before.
Theatre can function very powerfully to develop new understandings of sensitive political situations in communities.
A combination of both the wake of major crash in the financial world and simultaneous major social changes brought on, in large part, by the rapid application of digital connectivity technologies, deals a double blow to the assumptions of the past, and a clearly present feeling that orchestras cannot continue to operate in many traditional ways of the past.
ASCAP joins with the League of American Orchestras in presenting 27 awards to orchestras and with Chorus America in honoring four choral ensembles for their adventurous programming during the 2009-2010 Concert Season. The awards serve to recognize ensembles whose past season prominently featured music written within the last twenty-five years.
Lessons from day two of the League conference, including twelve rules that any organization actively seeking to fail should follow.
The mantra at the League conference has been to find more connectivity, e.g. needing the break down the 4th wall that separates onstage participants and the audience; meanwhile over at Chorus America, with a lot less fanfare, that wall has already come down.
Attending a roundtable with dancers, I realized that they face a lot of the same issues as composers, and really probably all artists.
At the 65th National Conference of the League of American Orchestras, Nickitas J. Demos is anxious to find out what the state of the profession is and what place, if any, contemporary composers hold within the institution.
At the Dance/USA conference’s opening reception at the House of Sweden, I definitely felt like I was the only composer in the room. This did not, however, make me feel too out of place.
By Dan Visconti
The framework for more outside-of-academia, on-the-job training already exists but is underfunded and modest in scope; on the other hand, many elements of a rationally-planned network for new opera development don’t even exist in skeletal form.
The plurality of musical activity here in the Twin Cities is such that it doesn’t lead to unity, but affords the listener the opportunity to encounter many and varied disunities.
After 55 years, Le marteau sans maître is still a drag and Wagner’s remark that Beethoven’s Seventh is “the apotheosis of the dance” should be banned from program notes for at least the next decade, partly on the grounds of overuse, partly on the grounds of fatuousness.
Actual corporeal experiences are the ones that can result in the most profound kinds of connectivity, or even just some cool ephemeral serendipity.
Vijay Iyer, Maria Schneider, James Moody, Joe Lovano, and Darcy James Argue were among the winners in the 2010 Jazz Journalists Association Awards presented on June 14 in a gala at the City Winery in New York City.
By David Smooke
Since their main interest is in “adventurous new stuff” and since they seek to expand the repertoire available to bassoon ensembles, I thought that readers of NewMusicBox might be interested in hearing them answer some questions. Mike Harley took some time out from rehearsing in order to respond to my queries.
Chance and improvisation are the primary forces driving composer/violist/guitarist John King’s 3rd CD of riveting, inventive string quartets.
Was there a seat at the table for composers and new music? If you bring your own chair, you can squeeze in rather nicely.
One of the aims of this book is to help those younger artists in dealing with the richness of the legacy that they carry, as well as in understanding what has been achieved, what was shown to be possible, and what remains to be realized.
Chamber Music America has announced the recipients of 26 grants supporting new works and community-based residencies. CMA will distribute $443,000 to ensembles and presenters through three of its major grant programs: Classical Commissioning, New Jazz Works: Commissioning and Ensemble Development, and Residency Partnership. The grantees were selected by independent review panels of musicians and other music professionals.
By Joelle Zigman
It’s become increasingly difficult to hang out with some of my closest friends from high school because they’re running low on free time; they’re busy working (waitressing, retail, babysitting), so that they can afford college.
For my second afternoon at the Opera America conference, I was attracted to the session focused on the first social opera in the world, the Savonlinna Opera Festival’s Opera by You.
