While I had a fabulous time at the free Bang on a Can Marathon at Manhattan’s Winter Garden Atrium, my level of commitment and connectivity to the listening experience was nowhere near what it had been just days before in concerts at L.A.’s Walt Disney Hall.
Pauline Oliveros’s newest CD, Primordial/Lift, might leave you standing on your head. Her writing is influenced by Gregg Braden’s book on the shift occurring in the Earth’s resonant frequency, which outlines a change from 7.8hz in 1960 to 8.6hz in 1994. According to Braden, the measurement will rise to 13hz by 2010 and, concurrently, the… Read more »
06-07 Rome Prize Winners; Boosey & Hawkes Inaugurates Jazz Publishing Initiative; MUSIC ALIVE Composer Residencies Announced; ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming Presented to 25 American Orchestras
Many composers who are mid-career or beyond lack the training and experience of composing music that is for the blossoming musician. How can we entice them into exploring this uncharted territory?
Whenever the opportunity arises, which it doesn’t very often, I gleefully profess my love of what I puckishly term cheesy ’70s serial music. For my own ironic reasons, I just can’t get enough of the stuff. Really, the word cheesy doesn’t have to carry a negative connotation. For me it certainly doesn’t. I not only… Read more »
So, with the long holiday weekend cutting into the work week and rising summer temperatures to distract, apparently even sun-adverse bloggers have abandoned their computer terminals for a bit of R&R in the great outdoors. Or the boss has been peering over the cubical walls and monitoring keystrokes again. Either way, posting has been at something of a minimum…
If you conjure the combination of saxophone and piano in your mind, you probably will imagine either something rhythmically-charged coming out of the jazz tradition or a frivolous piece of French chamber music. William Albright’s powerful and heart-wrenching Sonata is neither of the above. The second movement, a lament for fellow composer George Cacioppo who… Read more »
Orchestra Summit 2006
No one denies that we all want performances of new orchestral work that composers, musicians, and their audiences will look to with pride and satisfaction. Six key industry players discuss ways of reaching that goal and the hurdles that remain in our path.
No, not that John Lennon! But this one also does wonders with a guitar as this collection devoted to his solo guitar music reveals. It was hard to zero in on a personal fave here, and I still haven’t—but this otherworldly fantasy consisting entirely of guitar harmonics is undoubtedly one of the most enticing pieces… Read more »
I’ve tried my hardest to penetrate the Uptown/Downtown dialectic that seems to dominate stylistic discourse among many NewMusicBoxers, but there’s something about it that I could never quite wrap my head around, and I think I finally know what it is.
One of my favorite moments of musical glee, San Francisco-style—no, not smoking pot with my professors—was a gig where clarinetist Matt Ingalls paired up with laptop renaissance man Tim Perkis. Absent was that familiar chime of the Mac OS software powering up, and the ritualized moistening of reeds. Instead, both musicians played violins, by the… Read more »
Perhaps there’s a way to make the American Symphony Orchestra League conference more of a new music event.
In the few days since the publication of “Serial Port: A Brief History of Laptop Music,” I’ve already begun to hear from people, some referenced in the story itself, others simply involved in the culture at large.
I recently met the legendary jazz drummer Louie Bellson, now 82, at the ASCAP I Create Music Expo in Hollywood, and his wife handed me this CD. Like everyone else who’s a jazz fan, I’ve always been awed by Bellson’s percussion work—no less an authority than Duke Ellington, with whom Bellson played for many years,… Read more »
Our house has been overrun with dozens of children’s videos for preschoolers but last evening my husband decided to take matters into his own hands; he began with popping in a DVD of Philip Glass’s Koyaanisqatsi.
This is the sort of record we like to sit back and have the “Is this new music?” debate over. Any yes or no answer to the question is fairly pointless, of course, but the debate it can generate usually gets so loud we attract the attention of the entire office. DJ Logic’s tracks are… Read more »
Elizabeth Brown’s Rural Electrification, a 55-minute piece for voice, theremin, and recorded sound, chronicles a young girl’s adjustment to the electrical age.
In which we ask none of the big questions, but address a few of the little ones.
The National Association of Composers/USA brings us down yonder to the musical fields of Texas, Kentucky, Illinois, Florida, and more with their newest CD, Greetings from NACUSA. Though the overall impression might be somewhat inaccessible to the new music novice, the CD celebrates American composers off the beaten track with inspired, even techno-esque, compositions. And… Read more »
Is composing for posterity hindering your creativity?
It’s official. Pure and simple beauty is back, maybe even with a vengeance. Lou Harrison, Ned Rorem, heck, even Lowell Liebermann stuck to their aesthetic guns long enough to endure the tidal waves of postmodernism and new complexity, not to mention that tsunami known as serialism, and their brand of lyricism, aimed directly at the… Read more »
I’ve thought about submitting scores to competitions under the name, in the style, and in the simulated hand of one of the judges, carefully pieced
together at the computer; on one level it’d be a joke, of course, but
part of me thrills at freaking out successful composers this way.
Computer music is nothing new, though it has certainly blossomed in the past decade thanks to the rapid spread of personal computing. The question is: What’s “laptop music”?
Though Vijay Iyer and Rudresh Mahanthappa are floating on a decade-long history of collaboration, their self-titled Raw Materials release is the first recorded project the relationship has generated. The bulk of this disc is dedicated the suite Sangha: Collaborative Fables, and though they ping-pong the writing credits back and forth, these are clearly two musical… Read more »
