I CARE IF YOU LISTEN

Our Spring 2013 Mixtape is out!

Our 7th seasonal mixtape—the Spring 2013 Mixtape—is out!

Featured artists are:

• Nat Evans
• The Guidonian Hand performing music by Jeremy Howard Beck
• Goodbye the Band
• Ashley Paul (the album will be out on March 26 on REL Records)
• Butchers & Bakers
• Luke Gullickson
• Leah Kardos
• Michael Laurello
• Streifenjunko
• an excerpt from David T. Little’s Soldier Songs featuring David Adam Moore and Newsspeak/Todd Reynolds
• Peter Van Zandt Lane

Thank you for all the submissions we’ve received! Submissions are now open for the next Summer 2013 Mixtape!

Visit the Spring 2013 Mixtape page to download it.

The House I Live In: American Art Songs of the 20th and 21st Century. Blandy & Lister

Can gnarly, upmarket mid-century modernism really make nice with the populist mores of the “alt-classical” trend? What can the Williamsburg School hipsters possibly have in common with an older generation of bespectacled composition professors, whose creative paradigm they’ve seemingly rendered obsolete? Has any sense of stylistic continuity actually been preserved in American composition over the last seventy-five years, or did early minimalism — no matter the constant assertions that style no longer matters and that the Downtown/Uptown binary “is so eighties” — truly represent an irrevocable breach, separating “academic” serialism and vernacular-inspired neo-romanticism by an unbridgeable chasm? These were just some of the riddles posed by an utterly fascinating, one-of-a-kind song recital given on February 16 at the Lower East Side’s Spectrum by tenor Charles Blandy and pianist-composer Rodney Lister, where rarely-heard cycles by Virgil Thomson, Arthur Berger, and Lister himself were juxtaposed with a welcome array of newer cultivars by Stephen Feigenbaum, Jefferson Friedman, David T. Little, Nico Muhly, and Randall Woolf.

Charles Blandy

[Read more →]

David T. Little’s Soldier Songs: The Composer as War Correspondent

I have uncles who fought in the Vietnam War, and I’ve never once talked to them about their wartime experiences. In fact, I grew up being actively discouraged from bringing up their service to the United States in conversation. But does this respectful yet evasive approach toward veterans aid us as citizens in understanding the sacrifices of war and those who readily made them?

Composer David T. Little’s hour-long 2006 opera Soldier Songs emphatically answers that question, and delves deeper still, with a narrative that follows the “every-soldier,” so to speak.

David T. Little – Photo by Merri Cyr

[Read more →]

NYC premiere of David T. Little’s Soldier Songs at PROTOTYPE Festival

Classical music and warfare have always been covert bedfellows. Mozart’s forgeries of the Alla turca manner of eighteenth-century Ottoman military bands, Wagner’s public gloating in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, and Debussy’s Ode à la France, written during Verdun’s darkest days: whatever its claims to “purity” and “universality”, all examples of music’s inability to remain above the fray of worldly affairs, of mass bloodletting, scorched earth tactics, and the baldest Realpolitik. Today, our composers seem to know a little better: there haven’t exactly been many jingoistic, flag-waving Iraq pieces, have there? David T. Little’s Soldier Songs, a dramatic cantata for baritone soloist and the Newspeak Ensemble, indeed takes the opposite tack, hoping to provide a measure of musical healing after more than a decade of IED-inflicted casualties and under-attended homecomings. A number of years in the making, it’s being presented as part of the PROTOTYPE Festival at The Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University in an ambitious staging by Yuval Sharon, complete with a sizable video component. (I saw the January 13 evening performance.) Unfortunately, Soldier Songs falls well short of its praiseworthy goals, despite a highly committed solo turn by Christopher Burchett.

Soldier Songs (Christopher Burchett) – Photo credit Jill Steinberg

[Read more →]

MATA’s 15th Annual Benefit Gala

On Tuesday, October 16, MATA held its 15th annual benefit gala at the Tibet House in New York City. After a short welcoming speech from Jim Rosenfield, David T. Little and Yotam Haber, some exciting news were announced.

David T. Little, Yotam Haber, and Jim Rosenfield – Photo Thomas Deneuville

[Read more →]

Brooklyn Village at Roulette, by the Brooklyn Philharmonic (Est. 1857)

Last March, and for two nights only, Brooklyn Village was performed in Downtown Brooklyn. Advertised as a “multimedia spectacular,” the show took the audience on a time travel to honor the cultural heritage of Downtown Brooklyn, and showcased the trifecta of what some people call Brooklyn’s cultural renaissance: the newly “rebooted” Brooklyn Phil, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus (BYC) and Roulette.

Alan Pierson and the Brooklyn Philharmonic – Photo by Joshua Simpson

From the very beginning, the retro, era-bending tone was set since the program itself came in the form of a fake issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle whose date had been carefully smeared to remain intentionally vague. The “articles” introduced the pieces, the performers and the composers in a mockingly sensational way (Brooklyn Indie Rock Musician Sufjan Stevens Detained by NYPD). The dramatic dimension was introduced by Alan Pierson who greeted the entire hall with great enthusiasm (I’m paraphrasing): in these uncertain times of crisis, what Brooklyn needs is more music! Pierson thanked the people who bravely crossed the frozen east river on a sled, and the audience seemed to enjoy the good-natured, humorous atmosphere.

[Read more →]