I CARE IF YOU LISTEN

These Dreams: ICE and Carla Kihlstedt at Ecstatic Music Festival

Do you dream? I do. My dreams are like bizarre television shows, and, unfortunately, I only sometimes remember to hit record. Some of the happiest, and most terrifying, moments of my life have been rudely interrupted by my morning alarm. Carla Kihlstedt’s composition At Night We Walk in Circles and Are Consumed by Fire (2012) unabashedly ruminates on the complicated subject of dreams and dreaming. The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) gave the world premiere of Kihlstedt’s nine-part song cycle on January 26, 2013, at Merkin Concert Hall in the Kaufman Music Center as a part of the Ecstatic Music Festival, anchoring an epic and nearly flawless concert.

Carla Kihlstedt and members of the International Contemporary Ensemble (photo credit: Will Roane)

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Matthias Pintscher at The Phillips Collection

Like the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, or the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia before it got stolen, Washington, D.C. has an important art museum well outside the zone of culture shopping on the National Mall. It’s called The Phillips Collection, in the Dupont Circle neighborhood, grown from the collection of Duncan Phillips. Distinct from the aim of larger institutions to show a cross-section of art, The Phillips Collection represents the peculiar tastes of its namesake, with stories to tell for many of his acquisitions. Around that personal character, it also hosts public concerts in an intimate Music Room surrounded with paintings by the like of Goya and El Greco, with acoustically resonant wooden walls framing a massive stone mantle. It’s quite a place to experience chamber music; I had the pleasure of filming a performance there once, lavishing over the space as much as the music.

Matthias Pintscher

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Third Annual New Music Bake Sale at Roulette

On Sunday, March 11, 2012 the Third Annual New Music Bake Sale took place at Roulette in Brooklyn: great music, nice people, and tons of baked goods. We were happy to modestly sponsor the event, and also had a table there. In between two handshakes, we let the camera roll. Here it is…

Embedding is cool. Crediting is really cool.

Video + Editing + French accent: Thomas Deneuville
Opening animation: Daniel Thompson at DTWebart (http://www.dtwebart.com)

© 2012 I Care if You Listen

An earthly abode for ethereal sounds: Claire Chase’s “Terrestre” release party

On January 17^th, Claire Chase celebrated the arrival of her new CD, Terrestre (earthly in French, Ed.). The setting was Le Poisson Rouge, and the ambience was set smoothly before a single note was played, as the room was lit primarily by swaths of cool blue lights and warm red ones, in a jagged pattern. The house was packed, and the crowd was eclectic, as twenty-somethings, hipsters, and the baby-boomers were all well represented.

Starting the evening off was Glacier, a minimalist piece written by Dai Fujikura for solo bass flute. The bass flute is not often seen or heard, and after seeing and hearing Chase play it, one wonders where this magnificent instrument has been hiding. The piece opened mysteriously on an open fifth, and proceeded like a soliloquy with great expressive range. While the timbre began gently, warm, and with an airy vocal quality, even approaching a plainchant, there was soon much more vigor, with multiphonics, trills, warbling sounds, even honking and blasting at times. The music was divided nicely by carefully measured periods of silence. It ended on a repeating descending tritone, fading away.

Claire Chase - Photograph by Stephanie Berger

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SONiC Festival – ICE @ The Kitchen

For the unfamiliar, it’s often easier to describe what the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) does, rather than what it is.  They function, in their words, “as  performer, presenter, and educator,” and their 33 member-roster enables them to program anything from a solo or duet to a medium-sized chamber orchestra, even on the same program.  They are, basically, a one-stop new music shop, seemingly omnipresent throughout the creative process, from commissioning and workshopping through performance, production, and recording.

All that would make ICE seem to be a composer’s dream collaborator, but they’ve gone and done themselves one better with ICElab, an en masse composers-in-residence program which pairs six emerging composers with different subsets of ICE’s available instrumentation.  Throughout their year in the program, the ICElab composers work closely with the musicians to create and workshop their new works, which are then featured in ICE’s twenty-plus concerts each season.  Thursday night at The Kitchen,  the legendary experimental arts venue in far-west Chelsea which happens to be celebrating its 40th birthday this year, a full four ICElab 2011 commissions were on the program.

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SONiC – Sounds of a New Century A Festival of 21st Century Music by Composers Age 40 and Under

One of the most anticipated New Music events of this season has started yesterday night (David Pearson’s review of the opening night should be up soon…).

SONiC, a production of the of American Composers Orchestra (ACO) and The Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, co-curated by composer Derek Bermel and pianist Stephen Gosling, is a festival that will feature, over the span of 9 days,  music by more than 100 composers age 40 and under.

Sarah Lipstate – Photo by Louis Caldarola

Ensembles performing include ACO, eighth blackbird, ICE, Alarm Will Sound, JACK Quartet, NOW Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, the Imani Winds, PRISM Saxophone Quartet, the Young  People’s Chorus of New York City, Argento Ensemble, Ensemble Klang (Netherlands), Camerata Aberta (Brazil), Either/Or, and many more. Venues where SONiC concerts take place include Carnegie Hall, Miller Theatre, Symphony Space, 92YTribeca, Joe’s Pub, Roulette, Joyce SoHo, The Kitchen, Americas Society, The Stone, and the World Financial Center.

Imani Winds – Photo by Chris Carroll

Some unique features really ground this festival in the 21st Century. Indeed, SONiC:Interact offers three interactive tools to interact/discover/share beyond the concert hall. Thicket: SONiC is a FREE app for iPad and iPhone that allows users to create original, kaleidoscopic audio and art. The Thicket app is a mobile audiovisual world of texture, movement, line and tone that is part art piece and part toy.

UrbanRemix is a FREE app for both iPhone and Droid systems, that allows anyone to record found sounds in their environment and submit them for archiving on the UrbanRemix site, available via an interactive map. The found sounds can be manipulated and mixed online at UrbanRemix.com. Sounds submitted through UrbanRemix will be showcased by the electronic duo exclusive/or in their original compositions performed during Electronic SONiC at Roulette. In addition, UrbanRemix is the focus of several in-school workshops as part of ACO’s Music Factory education initiative.

Finally, through Re:Sound, audience members will have the opportunity to comment and vote online or via mobile phone for the piece they would most like to hear again. New York Public Radio’s Q2 will broadcast recordings of the pieces that receive the most votes during a special program dedicated to SONiC on October 19 and 26, 2011. For more information: www.wqxr.org/q2

SONiCpasses for the entire festival provide discounts of at least 20% on all ticket prices, reserved or preferred seating at the free events, and other free items and perks. SONiCpasses are $25 and are available at www.SONiCfestival.org or 212.977.8495.

Haven’t made your mind yet? Watch this and see you there!

Alright. If you really can’t make it, we’ll cover most of the festival on I care if you listen… Stay tuned.