The San Francisco Tape Music Center’s 1964 Tudorfest was more than what you could read in the reviews. It was more than its success. It was a scramble, a stretch, a compromise—the usual behind-the-scenes madness.
It is the history of music, forever communicating—what, exactly? But forever communicating, nonetheless, even as the message gets hopelessly lost in the translation to music. And it’s not a bug; it’s a feature.
I make sample-based music because I feel like it’s more worthwhile to identify existing sounds that have been overlooked, to bring them to fresh ears, and to give them fresh meaning in new contexts.
Last week’s gathering of the American Choral Directors Association in Salt Lake City, Utah was one of the largest national music conventions ever held in the United States. Thanks to a newly added composer track at this biennial conference and a greater emphasis on new music, there were also tons of composers and new music aficionados there.
I went to graduate school to study the sounds of burning pianos and squeaky rubber dolls and trash can lids. This music made people think; this music provoked discussions, This music was gutsy and political and sometimes it even required us to reconsider our definition of music.
The American Academy of Arts and Letters has announced the sixteen recipients of the 2015 awards in music, which total $205,000. The recipients will be honored at the Academy’s annual Ceremonial in May.
Caroline Shaw’s compositions are central to her musical identity and, in recent years, she has been venturing far beyond works that she has created for her own performance.
The power of making music is found in the accretion of work and thought we put in over a lifetime, not single moments of inspiration.
A casual, musicological meandering developed into a hunt for forgotten music and transformed into a deeper understanding of the interconnectedness of music, art, fathers and sons.
William Thomas McKinley was a true American original and, to my knowledge, the first American classical composer who was also a major post-bop jazz pianist. He abolished this duality and saw creative music from a perspective of higher unity. Tom demonstrated how, musically and spiritually, one could embrace both—through notes, gestures, and at every imaginable level.
There are highly visible musicians who are bravely sticking their necks out. They are not programming what the audience wants, they are programming what the audience needs. Contrast this with the classical groups that program rock or pop transcriptions and advertise it as out-of-the-box thinking.
The award includes a $30,000 commission, residency at the Hermitage Artist Retreat, a performance by a professional arts organization, and assistance with future performances.
What happens when you stop practicing under the weight of worship and start playing to see what you can add to the conversation?
With a background that spans music theater, woman-at-the-piano club shows, and the presentation of experimental work, Gelsey Bell finds herself most at home in spaces of creative risk and vulnerability.
I know people who have purposely worn dark colors to rehearsals because of the secret world of sweating that happens with a new work. But when in doubt about how to behave in the rehearsal room (or in meetings or when drafting emails, for that matter), always default to professionalism.
For better or worse, I have become more interested in the ways in which people think and grow than I am in their ability to reproduce subtle variations on a limited personal language, regardless of how successful that language may be.
If the Recording Academy feels that certain awards they give are not worthy of exposure on network television (which ultimately are the awards that wind up getting reported on in most of the media outlets and therefore the ones that most people are aware actually of), why give the awards in the first place?
Composers need to control their materials and, to an extent, their musicians. This is true for the murderer Gesualdo and the gentle John Cage, more so for the latter. Most composers are autocrats; Cage was totalitarian. And autocracy and totalitarianism, in their view of and relationship to human beings, are the political equivalents of malevolent psychopathology.
Over the course of the next four months, the American Composers Forum will present “Champion of New Music” awards to Michael Morgan, Claire Chase, and the American Composers Orchestra at public ceremonies in Oakland, Brooklyn, and New York City.
The New Music Bake Sale brings you cookies and new music on March 15 at Roulette.
As the notion of genre is becoming increasingly difficult to define in today’s musical landscape, artists are actively embracing this ambiguity not only as a happy byproduct of our endless channels through which ideas are shared, but as an artistic advantage.
As with any political issue, your inner Che Guevara might be telling you to organize a protest or to occupy a square on your campus. While that could be a good way to draw attention to an issue, it’s clearly not the best way to get lasting results.
Ezra Sims came to a place so uniquely his own that it has no siblings, no cousins, no counterparts. His ear made the demands, and once he found the sound his ears sought, he drew the map for us to retrace his steps back to the music traditions he loved. He was not an iconoclast, but a logical evolutionist, who ironically arrived at his destination by a leap of faith.
The ASCAP Foundation has announced the 26 recipients of the 2015 Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Awards who will each receive cash awards and range in age from 16 to 30.
