Columbia University doctorial student wins prize for young composers.
Composer competition decided American Idol style.
Setting out to establish one’s music in another country can feel overwhelming; it’s often problematic enough getting your music played in your own town! But overseas performances don’t have to remain a distant fantasy.
Here’s one for radio stations afraid of playing new music, a 2002 mini-opera actually created for the radio medium which conjures up the sonic milieu of World War II through simulating a 1940s radio broadcast and musicalizing it. Based on a text by Kurt Vonnegut, the performance is given extra authenticity by actually featuring Vonnegut… Read more »
Pining for the good ol’ days of Xeroxed punk zines and all those mysterious fly by night publications whose purpose is all but inscrutable? Well, if you’re an electronic music fan, you’re in luck. The latest Sonic Circuits compilation comes all pimped out, sealed in a Ziploc bag complete with a 9-page typewritten booklet and… Read more »
Meet Ezra Reich. Influenced more by ’80s pop than dad, his band includes a guy named Elliot Glass, and it just gets weirder from there. More…
Tessa Brinkman & East-West Continuo Paintings by the playful Catalan modernist Joan Miró (1893-1993), previously the inspiration for Bobby Previte’s greatest work to date, are also the muse behind Mark Fish’s more intimate 2004 Pictures of Miró scored for flute and string trio whose 11 movements total less than 20 minutes. In the fourth movement,… Read more »
National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia announced seven new NEA Jazz Masters today.
Deep in the pile of new sax/bass/drum improv-based recordings, a shake up occurs: sax, percussion, and….wait for it….guitars! Yay! Lingua Franca delivers the new sound palette the ears are thirsty for. It’s a little bit global, but in a way that even the world-music-phobic won’t have cause to cringe over. “Here & There” piles up… Read more »
Composer Beata Moon celebrates the personalities who created a valuable resource for the new music community.
Who would have guessed that drum machines—those old clunky plastic boxes of preordained sound—would become fetishized a few decades down the line? It goes way beyond the likes of Ikue Mori and Micky T’s Drum Machine Museum. The whole electroclash scene would never have happened without those infamous synthesized beats, now would it? Time to… Read more »
Tasha Dzubay, clarinet Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kirk Trevor In his somewhat confessional notes for his 2004 clarinet concerto, American Midlife, Indiana School of Music-based composer David Dzubay says that he wrote this music “during the year I turned forty while trying to save a failed marriage.” Innova’s new recording of it features… Read more »
A look at the a new collaborative project introduced by the contemporary dance group Danceworks.
A tribute album is a convention much more common in the pop world, but it is one warmly taken up here in gratitude to Andrew Imbrie on the occasion of his 80th birthday. The disc features a mix of works—some penned by Imbrie, others in his honor. John Harbison’s Chaconne for piano and four instruments… Read more »
The Conservatory of Music at Purchase College will benefit from popular composer and recording artist Billy Joel’s endowment gift of $300,000. The college plans to use the grant to establish an in-residence ensemble named the Billy Joel Graduate String Quartet, whose members will be selected by a competitive audition process, and the Billy Joel String Student Scholars Program, which will benefit undergraduate students.
John Adams spills the beans about his new opera.
Cold shower? A cup of joe? Maybe a slap in the face? Nothing is more effective than the opening of Elliott Carter’s third string quartet—guaranteed to wake you up faster than smelling salts. The Arditti Quartet manages to capture every bit of potential energy contained in Carter’s score—feel the wallop! Of course Carter is no… Read more »
Despite all the memorials aimed at codifying the expression of grief, perhaps catharsis is simply not within our ken as composers.
Performances of George Crumb’s Black Angels and Phil Kline’s Symphony for 21 iPods ring out from Cleveland’s under-utilized Old Arcade.
Though having forsaken the Boston jazz scene for Rome last year, Greg Burk teams up with the one-two punch of Steve Swallow (bass) and Bob Moses (drums) for his first release on Chicago-based indie label 482 Music. Without in any way ignoring the strengths of the trio, the disc’s second track leaves Burk alone at… Read more »
An interview with the author of Virtual Music: How the Web Got Wired for Sound.
A look at the 2005 San Francisco Electronic Music Festival
In the never ending avalanche of John Cage CDs on Mode comes the 6th volume of the composer’s piano works. The disc’s centerpiece, Music of Changes, is preceded by the economical Seven Haiku, which clocks-in just under two minutes. Although not intentional—we’re talking Cage after all—the side-by-side pairing lends the Haikus a sort of Cliff’s… Read more »
Performed by Alarm Will Sound It seems like a composition assignment from that really cool young prof. who’s intent on shaking up the department: Take an Aphex Twin track (which is to say one created by electronic-pioneer Richard James) and translate it into the acoustic. The project is actually not all that unprecedented (Philip Glass… Read more »
