We cannot learn about life simply through the sciences or technology or business or marketing or law or even education. Artists need—must—be allowed to “say something important.”
A well-rounded musician should be able to improvise as well as compose and/or perform music; it’s a matter of being able to speak as well as listen! Probably one of the hardest things to accept about improvisation is that learning how to improvise is done by improvising.
Pianist Sarah Cahill’s engaging solo recital last Friday included an advance look at a program of music by Henry Cowell she’s planning to perform at San Quentin State Prison next month. Though nearly all of the Music@Menlo’s programming is traditionally in the Bach/Beethoven/Brahms vein, one concert this year’s stood out for its programming of Nancarrow, Cage, Reich, and other 20th-century composers.
How a piece goes from a perhaps uneventful premiere to even somewhat standard repertoire is the new music million dollar question. But one thing seems certain: There has to be a second performance.
Lou Harrison translated the Mahāyāna Buddhist Heart Sūtra into Esperanto for his choral setting, La Koro Sutro—a universal wisdom in a universal language. And then, paradoxically, he set it in a way that guaranteed that performances would be few, far in between, and heavily dependent on where you were.
Brooklyn Rider thrives in the realm of world music and folk traditions, yet they’ve always sought to tie this impulse into their considerable classical chops—all while at the same time cultivating the ensemble as a kind of composer collective led by violinist/composer Colin Jacobsen.
Information technology now develops faster than any of us can keep up with, and to what end? If there is no permanence to the formats we use to store information, what is the point of storing information in them?
Like most composers, I’ve done the summer festival dance for a while now. Every music festival is different, but there’s one thing I’ve learned: It’s a bit weird to be a composer at any of them. It’s a brand-new experience to come to a festival where composers are the center of attention.
Pursuing music as a vocation in America requires a sense of dedication and commitment that defies what most reasonable people would consider sound decision-making. The average veterinarian in 2010 was paid $82,000 per year; in 2011 the average mail sorter earned $48,400. Musicians average around $34,000.
While Jacqueline Humbert and David Rosenboom’s Daytime Viewing is a by-product of that brief window in the late 1970s and early 1980s when a fusion of experimental music and New Wave created numerous uncategorizable hybrids, it is also very much a harbinger of our own much longer-lasting “indie-classical” zeitgeist.
If there were a music version of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” it could very well be “Six Degrees of Carman Moore” since Moore—in a career spanning decades—connects to everyone from Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen to John Lennon and Aretha Franklin. And yet, many people are unaware of Moore, even within the contemporary music community.
This fall will be an exceptional time for San Francisco Bay Area musicians of all stripes who are interested in making music with a large community of fellow new music lovers. Two massive projects—Lisa Bielawa’s Crissy Broadcast and Rhys Chatham’s A Secret Rose—will be rehearsed and performed.
While music itself isn’t inherently gendered, gender can have a huge impact on how music is perceived and interpreted.
During the heyday of the laterna, an early mechanical musical instrument popular in Greece in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, playing instrumental music and singing were gradually being supplanted by gramophones and radios in most households. It was the beginning of on-demand home listening and drastically reduced the amount of amateur at-home music making.
In the last few months, there have been a number of highly circulated articles about women and contemporary classical music. Reading all these articles got me thinking about the role that gender plays in my own musical life. So here are some thoughts on what it’s like to be a composer on the trans-female spectrum in the early 21st century.
As if to assuage my soul’s re-awakening sense of being pilloried by life in the Big Apple (something I forgot I had become used to while I was on the Left Coast), I heard a husky and familiar voice on my radio singing Vincent Youmans’s “Sometimes I’m Happy.” I searched my memory, but couldn’t come up with a name to attach to the voice.
As someone who both creates and teaches for a living, I find myself in a continual and simultaneous state of reflection on the past and projection towards the future. I’m curious: How do you “stay the course” in your own career and life?
Sierra’s style is definitely more modernist than maverick, but her accent is a little more subtle and elusive. The music is dense, dissonant, precipitously fluid, but there’s a groundedness to the extravagance, pitch and even tonal centers anchoring the busy crosstalk.
Austin Chamber Music Center has been around for decades—long enough to have existed when the governor was a Democrat, SXSW was a baby, and Austin was just a gleam in marketers’ eyes. Its summer festival is more recent, and the inclusion and promotion of new music even more so.
ScoreStreet, a new website offering automated dissemination, promotion, and payment for self-published classical, jazz, and theatrical composers, launched today. Composers who offer their music through ScoreStreet pay a monthly subscription fee but retain full ownership of all of their materials.
From Charles Seeger to his contemporaries William Schuman and Henry Cowell in the 1940s, through John Cage and William Duckworth in the 1970s and 1980s, to young composers like David T. Little and Gabriel Kahane today, the American shape-note tradition has been a steady source for reexamination and inspiration.
The music included on this nine-track album showcases a seamless marriage of acoustic instruments and electronics that opens its mouth and sings, up close and personal, in a language that retains its vibrant human energy even while being processed and polished by Wohl’s electronic hand.
Virtuosity is not what a public sing is about; rather, it’s about having fun with a piece of music that you love. Might such an enterprise be possible with new music?
The parallels between the emergence of cable television and contemporary music-focused chamber ensembles are numerous. Both are definitely creating new paradigms within their disciplines. However, both fields still experience significant challenges.
