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Feb
Posted by Sam Reising » 3 Comments »
“Don’t Even,” Contemporaneous at P.S. 142 for Neighborhood Classics
On Monday, February 12, 2013, the new music ensemble Contemporaneous presented Don’t Even, a concert at P.S. 142 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan as part of Neighborhood Classics, a concert series to benefit New York City public schools. In this, their second outing with Neighborhood Classics, Contemporaneous worked earlier that day with P.S. 142 students, talking to them about music, demonstrating their instruments, and showing them that anything can be used as a musical instrument—even parts of a car. All proceeds from the concert went to directly benefit P.S. 142’s music program.
Contemporaneous, a new music ensemble based in New York City (photo credit: www.contemporaneous.org)
Igor Stravinsky once said that “A good composer does not imitate; he steals.” In Histories, a new piece by Brooklyn-based composer collective Sleeping Giant and commissioned by the Deviant Septet ensemble, they do just that, stealing from the bad boy of music himself in what becomes a revisionist and exhilarating look at history, artistic influence, remix culture, and the process of creation.
As this season was drawing to an end, the Metropolitan Museum was announcing the next, a couple of weeks ago, in the beautiful Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. Curated by Limor Tomer, this new season will feature some edgy shows, some new music performed on historical instruments from the Sau Wing Lam Collection, and a year-long partnership with Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky.
Any concert of recently composed orchestra music by young composers, as the American Composers Orchestra presented Saturday at the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center as part of SONiC Festival, is guaranteed to provide a clear impression of how young composers are thinking about the orchestra. It is also perhaps doomed to provide a similarly clear impression of how young composers are thinking about the orchestra. That high-wire act lends an excitement, a danger, to new music concerts that standard-rep love-fests just don’t have, and can’t have.