Tag: New Music

Golijov tribute concludes Cornish’s 2010-2011 season

Osvaldo Golijov

Cornish College is fast becoming Seattle’s center of daring, modern classical music performances. It is a rapid turn around for a college and a music program which identifies itself readily with John Cage, a composer critical to the growth of avant garde music in the United States. The school doesn’t boast a resident student orchestra like the University of Washington, but it has brought the Seattle Modern Orchestra to the school to perform as part of its music season. It’s talented and busy faculty routinely perform in recitals at the school and around town. In addition, more than a few of them are involved in curating programs and events of their own — like tomorrow’s May Day, May Day new music festival at Town Hall.

Cornish’s 2010-2011 season ended last Friday with a retrospective concert of Argentinian, American, Jewish composer Osvaldo Golijov. Anchored by the Odeonquartet, the program included a line up of  musicians that included Joseph Kauffman (bass with the Seattle Symphony); Laurie DeLuca (clarinet with the Seattle Symphony); and Paul Taub (flute and Cornish faculty member).

Two of Golijov’s more popular pieces — the string quartet version of Tenebrae and Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind — along with three lesser known works filled out the program.
Continue reading Golijov tribute concludes Cornish’s 2010-2011 season

Seattle Percussion Collective plays Gallery 1412

Seattle Percussion Collective Plays John Cage from gatheringnote on Vimeo.

Last night the Seattle Percussion Collective played a show of late John Cage percussion works at Gallery 1412 at the collision of Capitol Hill and the Central District. I’ll be writing a longer post about the experience later today.  In the meantime I urge you watch the video above — a performance of two composed improvisations played simultaneously. If you have even a passing interest in percussion music the Collective is playing another show tonight at the Good Shepherd Center’s Chapel Performance Space. The music won’t be Cage, but there will be a number of premieres for percussion and other instruments, including Greg Sinibaldi’s Quintet for Percussion and Piano. Since they formed in 2009, the Seattle Percussion Collective has generated a loyal following. Gallery 1412 was almost completely full. Dale Speicher told me last night that their Chapel performances have always generated big crowds. If you go to their Chapel performance, it would be wise to get their early.

The show starts at 8 PM. The Chapel Performance Space is located in the Wallingford Neighborhood at 4649 Sunnyside Ave. N, 4th Floor, Seattle, WA.

World premiere plus Dvorak’s 7th from SSO

Violinist Elmar Oliveira

By R.M. Campbell

The Seattle Symphony premiered another work, this time by Aaron Jay Kernis, in the Gund/Simonyi set of commissioned works to celebrate the final year of Gerard Schwarz’s directorship of the orchestra, Thursday night at Benaroya Hall.

Unlike some of its predecessors in the series, Kernis’ “On Wings of Light” is bombastic, urgent, bright. It is over seemingly moments after it starts. If ever a piece was a curtaion-raiser, this is one. Kernis writes in the program that the piece was inspired by words of the 18th-century philospher and scientist Johann Heinrich Lambert: “I take on wings of light and soar through all spaces of the heavens. I never come far enough and the desire always grows in me to go farther.” Perhaps, but I got little sense of wings of light and soaring through the heavens. Rather the work is more like blasting your way to any destination. There may be little poetry or subtlety, but it was fun to be along for the ride.
Continue reading World premiere plus Dvorak’s 7th from SSO

Haptadama comes to a close at Olympic Sculpture Park on Saturday night

Composer/conductor Eric Banks explains Haptadama to a capacity audience Saturday night.

With Haptadama: The Seven Creations of Ancient Persia, Eric Banks unexpectedly challenges audiences to reconsider how they think about opera. It’s not that Banks is dabbling in new forms or means of expression – although he does have a tremendous gift for contemporizing ancient languages and melodies in ways that observe texts, respect original ideas, and avoid kitsch. Banks calls Haptadama a choral opera. However the piece synthesizes opera, song cycles, and sacred music that leads listeners in a number of different directions.

Banks got the idea to write Haptadama after two visits to India. The material for the piece comes from the Persian creation story of the Zorostrians drawn from both the Gathas and Bundahisn. The Gathas, perhaps the oldest written music in history, provide an austere framework for the piece. The Bundahisn, on the other hand, gives the music its mystical quality. The creation story follows a well worn formula. A benevolent creator coexists with evil. The creator creates life and the known world. Evil strikes back causing cataclysm and robbing the world of its innocence. The creator redeems the world by wiping everything out with a cleansing flood.
Continue reading Haptadama comes to a close at Olympic Sculpture Park on Saturday night

May Day! May Day! part three

May Day! May Day! has come and gone. Thanks to everyone who attended. But I’d also like to thank the musicians who made it possible. The whole day a quote from Robert Spano was ringing through my head “there is no ghetto for new music.” By taking Seattle’s vibrant new music scene and putting it in a venue like Town Hall for 12 hours, I believe we helped the cause of new music. But I also think the performances helped too the cause too.

If you think new music is only noisy and unapproachable then this was the festival for you. It would have definitely changed your view of what constitutes new music in our city.

In my sets, there was the Odeonquartet’s performance of Nat Evans’ Candy Cigarettes. You can hear the piece, as performed on Saturday .

The composer says about the piece:

“One idea I keep coming back to is one particular may day event when I was in elementary school. every year on may day the whole school went out to the front lawn and had lunch, then went to the big field in the back for various events and games. everyone always looked forward to this day because it was a day away from class, and after may 1 you could wear shorts to school! anyway, one particular year, in first grade, Victor Merril — the class bully and general rabble rouser — was overjoyed and ecstatic to discover that he had candy cigarettes in his lunch! I was entranced by them and wanted one, as did everyone else. victor wouldn’t share…but then, just as the whole class was running in a rush out to the field after lunch victor (who was wearing cowboy boots, cut off jeans shorts and had a mohawk) secretly gave me one! I was overjoyed at this sudden act of generosity, and as I went around to the different may day stations out on the field I felt great knowing i’d been acknowledged by the class bully and gotten a candy cigarette.”

Continue reading May Day! May Day! part three

May Day! May Day! part two

May Day is still going at Seattle’s Town Hall. I finished my last two hour set. Highlights for me were Stuart Dempster’s moving tribute to double bassist Matthew Sperry; Byron Au Yong’s Kidnapping Water: Bottled Operas; and Michael Lim and Melia Watras’ improvisations on S.O.S. Alas, wifi problems are continuing. Sometimes the network works, other times not so much.

Still to come: The Esoterics; Christina Valdes and friends play Louis Andriessen’s Workers Union; Paul Rucker playing Call, a piece he wrote for cello; and to close the night the Seattle Chamber Players do Nicolai Korndorff’s Get Out.

Hearing and helping emcee this festival has been a tremendous experience.  I’ll be remembering and processing the music a few days.  I am looking forward to hearing Byron Au Yong’s CD of 24 of his bottled operas.  I’m curious about the trial and execution of Joe Hill thanks to Wayne Horvitz.

I hope it happens again next year. In the meantime, here are some pictures from the the afternoon and evening:

May Day! May Day!

Julia Tai and friends before performing Tehillim

Technological problems are preventing me from posting from inside Town Hall so I’ve stollen away to the cafe in the lobby for a quick post.

We are now more than three hours into the festival and we just heard two sections from Steve Reich’s Tehillim by Julia Tai and friends. Tai and her friends will be doing the entire piece later this spring in Magnolia. Look for more information here and elsewhere. It is well worth seeking out.

My two hour emcee block was…well…interesting. It was hard being first and it was hard to draw energy from a crowd that was still coming together. A short piece by the Affinity Chamber Players put everything ahead of schedule by a little bit.

Continue reading May Day! May Day!

Corigliano Quartet performs at Cornish College

The Corigliano Quartet. Photo credit: Michael Jinsoo Lim.

Even though half of the Corigliano Quartet calls Seattle home, and another member has family in the city (Amy Sue Barston is the sister of Elisa Barston, principal second violin with the SSO), the group’s performances in the area haven’t been as plentiful as you might expect. To my knowledge, the last one was in 2008 when the group made their debut on the University of Washington’s International Chamber Series.  This quartet’s local schedule this season includes two concerts at the Cornish College of the Arts and a forthcoming performance in May with Simple Measures.

A Corigliano performance tends to be an adventure in contemporary music. This doesn’t mean the pieces they play are replete with dissonances, microtones, and explorations of the percussive properties of string instruments, far from it. The ensemble takes its name from the composer John Corigliano, a living, breathing, active artist who finds inspiration in the popular neo-romantic idiom that has demonstrated music can be easy on the ears and challenging to hear.

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What’s 400 years between composers?

Seattle has struggled to create an identity as a major, American city for as long as I have lived here. Each time, it seemed poised to break out, the provincial mindset, which has long dominated the city’s culture, reasserted itself. For 72 hours last weekend, Seattle’s music and performance finally broke loose, bringning us Heiner Goebbels’ “Songs of Wars I’ve Seen,” a music and theater piece based on Getrude Stein’s writings.

Continue reading What’s 400 years between composers?