“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.
For a full week (March 20 to March 27, 2013), the Park Avenue Armory opened its 2013 season with a ritualization by Rirkrit Tiravanija of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s OKTOPHONIE. The piece was staged as the composer originally intended: in outer space. Well, kind of.
Karlheinz Stockhausen’s OKTOPHONIE at Park Avenue Armory – Photo by Stephanie Berger
On Monday, April, 22, Cantaloupe Records inaugurated its Cantaloupe Café series at The Strand in NYC. It took the form of an evening of music and conversation around Shelter—a collaboration between Bang on a Can co-founders Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe and David Lang.
Martha Cluver, Mellissa Hughes, and Caroline Shaw (known together as Va Vocals) performed “I Want to Live.”
On April 19, 2013, the Cypress Quartet will perform its 2013 Call & Response program, featuring a world premiere by Grammy and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Jennifer Higdon: “In the Shadow of Sirius,” based on poetry by W. S. Merwin. We asked 5 questions to Jennifer Kloetzel, cellist of the Cypress String Quartet.
What is the idea behind your Call & Response series?
Call & Response is a multi-disciplinary program performed by the Cypress String Quartet each spring. By asking the question “What inspires composers to write music?”, the project features three aspects of the quartet’s interests: Performance, Commissioning and Education. Each year the quartet chooses a theme and a few works from the standard quartet repertoire and puts out a “call” to a living composer to “respond” to this theme with a new work for string quartet. Past themes have included Literature, Exoticism, Art and Inspiration by Example. The program includes a large educational outreach program throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, with at least two dozen free performances in schools and cultural centers including libraries and cafes. The culmination of the Call & Response program is a concert which features the world premiere of the commissioned work, and includes many of the students from our outreach in the audience, along with a regular chamber music concert goers. The purpose of Call & Response is to create new and diverse audiences for chamber music, to heighten and enliven the concert experience for all, to commission fabulous new music and to show that music is an ongoing process of inspiration. This year is our fourteenth annual Call & Response, and we are very proud of the program. It’s a highlight of our year!
Few would deny that the latest internet sensation is goats—screaming goats—and it didn’t take long for video mashups to come out on YouTube (one of the most popular being I Knew You Were A Goat When You Walked In by Taylor Swift). The classical vocal repertoire needed some and here are 5 videos of goats screaming classical music that we find particularly effective:
1. Schoenberg’s “Moonstruck” from Pierrot Lunaire Op. 21 (Patricia Rideout)
Pierrot Lunaire [Goat Edition]
2. Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma” from Turandot (Luciano Pavarotti)
Founded in 2009 by composers Jakub Ciupinski and Cristina Spinei, Blind Ear Music is a software/concept that brings a new way to compose and perform music. We met with Jakub Ciupinski, Cristina Spinei, Adam Reifsteck, and Darren Solomon as they were preparing for their upcoming Eavesdropping concert at the Tank on Thursday, April 4, 2013.
Blind Ear Music at Big Foote Studio | Hang #6
Embedding is cool. Crediting is really cool.
Video + Editing: Thomas Deneuville | Opening animation: Daniel Thompson at DTWebart (http://www.dtwebart.com)
For a full week (March 20 to March 27, 2013), the Park Avenue Armory opened its 2013 season with a ritualization by Rirkrit Tiravanija of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s OKTOPHONIE. The piece was staged as the composer originally intended: in outer space. Well, kind of.
