Perhaps the fissure between neoclassicists and progressives doesn’t seem as pressing when jazz itself is on the ropes—unity in the face of adversity.
Surrealism in both literature and the visual arts is able to fascinate, disturb, and ultimately resonate because it messes with our perceptions. One could argue that any music that deviates from an accepted norm of what people think music should be messes with our perceptions in the same way, and that therefore any music that is experimental is surreal to some degree. But such an argument is ultimately unsubstantiatable.
NewMusicBox would like to welcome a new addition to the Chatter team, Jeannie Gayle Pool.
Most people prefer their whodunits to confound them a bit, and I want new music to do the same.
Whether you’re a confirmed laptopper or an otherwise unplugged instrumentalist, what are your own particular experiences combining instrumental and electronic sounds?
Dada and surrealism exerted a pervasive influence on 20th-century music, especially on mid-century avant-garde composers based in New York—among them Edgard Varèse, Stefan Wolpe, John Cage, and Morton Feldman.
The tune is difficult to sing and the words are earnest but not especially poetic, but I like “The Star-Spangled Banner”—it hearkens back to a time when the USA was by no means a guaranteed proposition.
How a piece of music is performed often shapes an audience’s perception of that piece more than the notes the composer has written in the score.
Carl Stone returns to our pages after a case of wanderlust. Followed by a kind of wander-bust.
This is a concept review, not a concert review, and the concept—program a bunch of short pieces, all regional, that illustrate the scene’s diversity (in every sense of the word)—is seductive.
When you’re keeping folks at bay in anticipation of something, it might not be a bad idea to never lose track of the preparation time/experiential time ratio.
Christopher Rouse believes music should have a sense of urgency and that the listener needs to bring a certain urgency to the experience of hearing it, too.
Every day for the past year David Morneau has produced a new 60-second composition and distributed it via the Internet. His personal creative marathon is over on June 30, 2008, when he’ll post his last composition in this series.
Seven composers have been selected to participate in the 2008-09 Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute, which will be held in Minneapolis from November 1-8, 2008. The Sphinx Commissioning Consortium selects Roberto Sierra for inaugural commission to be performed by 12 American orchestras. The 2008 Jazz Journalists Association Awards. The Jazz Journalists Association presented held its 12th annual awards ceremony at the Jazz Standard in New York City, and Maria Schneider won in four categories. The National Endowment for the Arts has announced the six recipients of the 2009 NEA Jazz Masters Award: George Benson, Jimmy Cobb, Lee Konitz, Toots Thielemans, Snooky Young, and Rudy Van Gelder. Jeff Fairbanks was awarded the BMI Foundation Charlie Parker Composition Prize and Manny Albam Commission at the 20th anniversary showcase concert of the BMI Jazz Composers Workshop. Three living jazz legends—bassist Ron Carter, composer-arranger and saxophonist Bill Holman, and tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins—along with three posthumous honorees—trumpeter Bunny Berigan, drummer Art Blakey, and arranger/composer/pianist Tadd Dameron—were inducted into the ASCAP Jazz Wall of Fame. In addition, pianist/composer Gonzalo Rubalcaba was presented with The ASCAP Foundation Vanguard Award and 27 young jazz composers received ASCAP Foundation Young Jazz Composer Awards. ASCAP also honored 26 orchestras and 4 chorus who have demonstrated exceptional commitment to contemporary composers in special Awards Presentations held in partnership with the League of American Orchestras and Chorus America during the National Performing Arts Convention.
My approach to composing music is, more than likely, grossly misguided.
Would it be hopelessly superficial to market composers based on their personalities, making the case that their traits and quirks necessarily inform their music?
As a rabid fan of (and some might say relentless proselytizer for) new music, I’m somewhat disturbed that I am so often drawn to the old and annoyed by the new when it comes to architecture.
On stage, Molly Thompson’s music comes across as honestly raw and yet sophisticatedly crafted, filled with intimate lyrics and intriguing cross-genre influences. Off stage, she’s disarmingly forthcoming—the kind of woman you could easily think of as your best friend after a 15-minute conversation. Still, her musical personality seems to draw a curtain around some more mysterious internal characters, and it keeps her audiences on their toes.
Missing a few minutes of music isn’t exactly like walking into a movie theater late—in fact, I can think of a lot of compositions that I can skip large swaths of and still feel satisfied.
In any performance, there is an information network that exists between the performer, the instrument, and the audience. By maximizing information exchange between objects in the performer/instrument/audience network and creating interactions between the separate information streams of that network, an electronic composer/performer is more likely to create a compelling performance.
What can we do to better impress upon communities across the entire country that the arts are relevant to their lives, to improve the state of arts education not only for K-12 but for everyone, and to increase the diversity of people involved with the performing arts on creative, adminstrative, and audience levels?
I returned home from Denver with a renewed focus and excitement about what I’d like to accomplish this summer. That kind of clarity is a byproduct of the vibration that comes from being surrounded by several thousand art-makers and art-supporters, and I can’t think of the last time I was part of a specialized herd that large. It’s reassuring to know just how many of us there are out there.
NPAC is over, and the three chief missions with which we’ve been tasked—impress communities with our relevance, improve arts education, and increase diversity—are broad but by no means insurmountable goals.
I’ve felt for a while that the greatest beneficiaries of the arts are not necessarily the audience members, but the participants. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so hard to make the case for supporting the arts to people who are not themselves artists.
