Improvising with complete strangers is really hard, and playing music isn’t always about having a good time. I have found that having fun while playing is a perk, and not a necessity to playing good music. And it should be emphasized that not having fun isn’t a reflection on the people one is playing with—it’s about how one feels at the moment.
American operas, apparently, can have the second acts American lives cannot. The concert performance, at Tanglewood on July 11, of John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby—after the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who famously hypothesized that particular limitation of biographical dramaturgy—was a bid for redemption.
Each year, the Guildhall Leadership course accepts a handful of students from all over the world. The course asks them to improvise, compose, teach, and collaborate with each other and with London artists from many other disciplines. They generate new work, embark on research projects, and actively facilitate creative music-making in London communities that wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity.
By reveling in the small details and rough edges of her musical landscapes, composer Paula Matthusen creates musical environments that heighten perceptions of the ephemeral nature of sound, and ensures that surprises can be found at practically every turn.
This lovely new recording by the Eclipse Quartet and percussionist William Winant is, primarily, united by the relatively unusual, pleasantly mad scientist-ish combination of string quartet and percussion. But it also presents three works that wear their respective approaches to marking the time on their sleeves.
The metaphor of “submission” as my ideal audience intake position has now reached a whole new level for me. Last week, for the John La Bouchardière production of Lera Auerbach’s opera The Blind I attended at Lincoln Center, the entire audience is required to be blindfolded.
A work six years in development with a libretto written by the composer, The Gospel of Mary Magdalene is an earnestly personal and thoroughly researched re-examination of the role of the main women in Jesus’s life, as well as an attempt to understand Jesus and his disciple Peter as flawed human beings.
It was understood by anyone who called on the services of jazz bassist Chuck Metcalf (1931-2002) that he would go the extra mile. Part of that effort included organizing sessions, gigs, and recording dates; in a word, Chuck was a leader. But he led from the back of the band.
Two seemingly unrelated events over the past week—a fire and a conversation—have demonstrated to me the power of support and encouragement from those around you.
I don’t exactly need to point out that Milktape is a preposterous rip-off; savvy consumers could purchase a 20 GB flash drive off of eBay or from discount retailers for about the same price.
With my antennae more or less permanently oriented toward music and the arts, the defining mood of this year’s commencement season has been realism. This is a year in which, it seems, society is determined not to let students of the arts out into the world without making sure they’re painfully aware of what awaits them.
Since the The Police disbanded in the mid-1980s, drummer Stewart Copeland has composed soundtracks for numerous films and television shows and has had works performed by such acclaimed ensembles as the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and Cleveland Orchestra.
Almost everyone I know second-guesses themselves when creating something that references the work of the recent past. It’s true that this often doesn’t stop people from creating, but it does often affect what we can do with those works once they’re created.
A couple of months ago, I came across a new disc devoted to Christine Southworth’s music with an immediately identifiable title, String Quartets. But after hearing the truly new sound world she created in her earlier disc—called Zap! Music for Van de Graaff Generator, Tesla Coils, Instruments & Voices—I was quite sure she’d create something totally unusual despite using the most popular instrumental combination in all of chamber music. She did not disappoint!
While music and sports are both are mostly group activities, team sports is ultimately about one group against another group—in order for one group to win the other must lose. But once a group comes together to actually make music, everyone wins.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra has presented John Harbison with the Mark M. Horblit “Merit Award” for distinguished composition by an American composer. In connection with the presentation of the award, the orchestra will release the composer’s six symphonies as digital downloads, available on their website beginning July 9.
For two weeks in June, Chicago composer Mischa Zupko did something that composers don’t often have the opportunity to do: he toured with an orchestra. Camerata Chicago traveled to the Czech Republic, France, and Italy and gave five performances of Zupko’s new Chamber Symphony: Pilatus.
The 2013 edition of Jazz Camp West is officially over. On Saturday, June 29, everyone packed their belongings and went to the last round of concerts before the barbecue lunch that was our last camp meal. But I had the pleasure of performing in several concerts featuring JCW artists in the days immediately following this year’s camp.
New Music USA has announced grant awards totaling $33,245 to 28 composers through the April 2013 round of the Composer Assistance Program (CAP).
From the outset, June in Buffalo 2013 demonstrated that a composition doesn’t communicate in a vacuum, but instead often reveals its vitality while in dialogue with other works.
The allure of Austin (like many places I suppose) is partly genuine and partly manufactured. Spending a few days at the New Media Art and Sound Summit and the REVEL Summer Solstice Festival might be all it takes to renew one’s faith in this live, weird town.
Who is Luke Cissell? It sounds like the name of a character from either a Louis L’Amour or Flannery O’Connor novel, or perhaps the protagonist in something published in Astounding Stories magazine. Fittingly, the press release that accompanied a CD of his music described it as “bluegrass on a distant planet.”
How do you prepare for a concert presentation of over eight nearly continuous hours of new music? If you’re a performer, and the event is the Iditarod at the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice, it involves nine intensive days of practice, rehearsal, workshopping, and bonding with other musicians.
It is hard for me not to see the departed Shapero as not only the bristling, often vulgar man I remember, but as the end of an era, the period on a sentence, the final clause in an important but also completed chapter—and yet I will try to not calcify him into a notion or a trend or an idea, because he deserves better.
