I CARE IF YOU LISTEN

Exclusive album preview: Big Farm on New Amsterdam Records

According to the band itself,

“Big Farm is a place where serious counterpoint can meet burlesque, earnestness meet abandon; a place where they can kick it or take it to tea, reflect, attack, mourn, dance, pray, or mock with ease or determination, joy or fervor, using any and all means necessary. This world is a big farm – lots of different crops, changing weather, livestock, and a duck pond for good measure.”

Big Farm

Big Farm is Grammy winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist vocalist-lyricist Rinde Eckert; electric bassist Mark Haanstra; Grammy winner and pioneering composer/guitarist Steven Mackey; and celebrated percussionist Jason Treuting (So Percussion). Thanks to our friends at New Amsterdam Records, we are able to offer an exclusive album preview on I CARE IF YOU LISTEN! The eponymous debut album will be out on May 28, and this preview will stream until May 27, midnight EST.

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Chicago New Music Label Parlour Tapes+ Makes a Killing

Just like Jay Gatsby (the literary version, not the current Luhrmann fiasco), Chicago’s new music scene is something of a mystery to the rest of the world. And yet, according to Andrew Tham, one of Chicago’s most passionate new music entrepreneurs (and an ICIYL contributing editor), “it’s something that everyone’s been talking about.” Tham is a tall, lanky man in his 20s, and he’s dressed in a black lace dress with a shawl covering his forehead, like Lorca’s Bernarda Alba with a sunny disposition. His theatricality doesn’t stand out, however, in view of the evening’s other spectacles. On Thursday, May 16, 2013,  in Chicago’s Logan Square, four young new music enthusiasts presented The Guilty Party, a murder mystery event cum concert announcing the arrival of their joint ambition: Parlour Tapes+, the Midwest’s newest new music label, and perhaps the first of its kind. (Ed.: for more background, read our recent 5 Questions to… interview.)

Composer, soprano, and Parlour Tapes+ co-founder Jenna Lyle (photo credit: parlourtapes.com)

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W4 New Music: Ancient Instruments, Contemporary Sounds

In every musical era, composers have conversations with their instruments, and each conversation is different. The sounds composers sought from violins in the 18th century is not the same as what a composer seeks from a violin today. Sure, there is the fundamental concept of the bow gliding across the strings, but the sounds associated with a violin have evolved tremendously over the years thanks to extended techniques, electronic processing, and the constantly shifting ways in which composers and performers approach music-making. New York’s W4 New Music explored this relationship between composer and instrument in their New Music for Old Instruments concert on April 5, 2013, at the South Oxford Space in Brooklyn.

W4 New Music collective with guest composers (photo credit: w4newmusic.com)

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This week: concerts in New York (May 20 – May 26, 2013)

Conrad Tao

Pianist Conrad Tao performs the music of Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Meredith Monk, and himself at (le) poisson rouge.
Tuesday, May 21 at 7:30 PM
Tickets $15 advance, $20 day of show
(le) poisson rouge, 158 Bleecker Street, New York, NY
..:: Website

Mivos Quartet

Mivos Quartet – Photo by Ralf Puder/Nana Fran

Mivos joins a stellar cast of musicians in this 10-day exhibit of Elliott Sharp’s Foliage. Tuesday night they offer their own interpretation of Sharp’s epic graphic score piece, with video by Janene Higgins.
Tuesday, May 21 at 8 PM
Tickets $10
REVERSE 21 Frost St, Williamsburg, Brooklyn NY
..:: Website

Iktus Percussion: The Interactive Ideal | Ear Heart Music

Iktus Percussion, with guest artists Denise Filion and Julia Den Boer, explore the interaction of both electronic, acoustic, and instrumental theater of the Darmstadt era via a constellation of works for piano, percussion, and electronics. In his 1960 Kontakte, Karlheinz Stockhausen takes the analog electronic world as his primary palette, spreading colors on an acoustic canvas of piano and percussion sound. Luigi Nono’s 1976 Sofferte Onde Serene for piano and electronics turns inward, focusing less on exploration of sound and more on cultivation of dialogue. Nono involves us in an intimate, and at times beguiling, conversation between piano and the pre-recorded improvisations of Maurizio Pollini. Finally, Mauricio Kagel challenges conventional western musical tradition in his 1977 work, Dressur. Scored for over 50 wooden instruments and non-instruments, Kagel combines the visual and auditory to draw his audience into a whirlwind of absurdist and unorthodox musical theater. This piece may (or may not) contain partial nudity.
Tuesday, May 21 at 8 PM
Tickets $15, $10 members/students/seniors
Roulette, 509 Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn, NY
..:: Website
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5 questions to Donnacha Dennehy (composer, artistic director of Crash Ensemble)

Until I heard Alarm Will Sound perform scenes from The Hunger, your work-in-progress about the Great Irish Famine of 1845-1852, my idea of traditional Irish music was the Clancy Brothers! The sean-nós (“old style”) recordings you incorporate are at once uplifting and haunting, but Rachel Calloway’s rendition of Annals of the Famine had me a little choked up. How did you go about setting such an unusual and emotion-laden source of text?

The Hunger will ultimately be an evening-length piece concerning itself with the topic of the Great Famine in Ireland in the 19th century. I’m not interested in this story for some nationalist reason, but because it is a profound and human focus for looking at the question of laissez faire economics (the free market) versus the responsibility of governance. That was the ideological battle at the heart of government in London (at that time Ireland was part of the British Empire, then the wealthiest entity in the world, possessing 40% of the world’s wealth). The famine was definitely an avoidable disaster. The free market does not always behave morally, as we know. And this is a kind of catastrophic instance of the impact of not interfering with its workings until too late. The second part of the piece will involve interviews with economists (in a great kind of babble of verbal sound) which will be interleaved with the more personal voices of Asenath Nicholson’s first-hand accounts and that of sean-nós song which basically is a signifier of the sufferer in this context. I concentrate on this story because it irrevocably changed Ireland, and it is something I know on an emotional level. I wanted to also explore it on an intellectual and artistic level.

Donnacha Dennehy – Photo by Sophie Dennehy

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Corigliano Stimulates the Mind in Fulcrum Point’s “Altered States”

Movie composer John Williams turned 81 in February, and no orchestra stepped up to celebrate the passing of his perfect nine square birthday. Perhaps they were all exhausted by the  Tanglewood celebration of his 80th last year. Williams may be America’s most successful movie composer; his music revels in the film’s narrative, loudly commenting on it, and telling the audience how to feel. But he hardly gives any deference to the thinking mind. At the other end of the genre, where artists come from outside of Hollywood and work within stifling budgets, a more challenging creative process occurs. The artistry such a process can yield was in full display on April 23, 2013, when Fulcrum Point New Music Project accompanied a screening of Ken Russell’s Altered States with a live performance of John Corigliano‘s stunning score at Chicago’s Harris Theater.

Composer John Corigliano (photo credit: johncorigliano.com)

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