Posts Tagged ‘John Cage’
Posted by Sam Reising »
Add Comment »New York Festival of Song (NYFOS) 25th Anniversary Celebration
The program will feature South American songs (“Odeon” by Nazareth, “Pra que discutir com Madame” by Haroldo Barbosa, “Carinhoso” by Pixinguinha); American popular song (“I’m Going to Make You Beautiful” by Maltby and Shire, “Just Like a Man” by Vernon Duke); and vocal music by Spanish, Russian, and German composers, ranging from Montsalvatge to Kurt Weill.
Monday, May 13 at 7:30 PM
Tickets: $25
DiMenna Center for Classical Music
450 West 37th Street between 9th and 10th Avenues
..:: Website
Music for Guitar and Organ
The first half of the program will include solos and duos for acoustic guitar and portative organ (a miniature pipe organ), including the Concerto for Lute in F Major by Karl Ignaz Augustin Kohaut the Austrian lutenist and composer of Czech descent who is considered one of the last important composers for Baroque lute. The second half of the concert will offer new works and transcriptions featuring the weightier combination of electric guitar and organ. Performers: Mak Grgic, acoustic and electric guitar, and Paul Vasile, organ.
Tuesday, May 14 at 8 PM
Tickets $25, $20 Students/Seniors
Park Avenue Christian Church, 1010 Park Avenue at 85th Street, New York, NY
..:: Website
Original Music Workshop (OMW) presents Strings and Borders
Cornelius Dufallo – Photo by Jill Steinberg
Featuring experimental violinists Dr. Johannes Rosenberg (Australia), Cornelius Dufallo (US) and Mari Kimura (japan). The concert will begin with brief solo performances by Dufallo and Kimura, followed by a trio improvisation featuring them and Rosenberg. Rosenberg will also perform an approximately 40-minute set accompanied by video of his Great Fences of Australia project.
Wednesday, May 15 at 7:00 PM
Free but reservations must be made via email at rsvp@o-m-w.org.
The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space at WQXR, 44 Charlton Street, Manhattan
..:: Website
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Posted by Sam Reising »
Add Comment »Brooklyn Youth Chorus & Kronos Quartet
Brooklyn Youth Chorus – Photo by Joshua Simpson
Enjoy cocktails and light supper at the stylish Green Building followed by a performance featuring BYC with Kronos Quartet at Roulette. The evening honors longtime board member Hillary Richard. The program presents BYC commissions, including a world-premiere by Julia Wolfe and works by Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond). New York premieres by Aleksandra Vrebalov and Richard Reed Parry (Arcade Fire), and works by Bryce Dessner (The National, Clogs) are also featured as part of a new series of BYC co-commissions with BAM.
Tuesday, May 7 at 8 PM
Tickets $45
Roulette, 509 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY
..:: Website
Acqua Alta (High Water) | Jenny Q Chai
Jenny Q Chai
Acqua Alta (High Water) will be the anchor of a month-long programming focus on global warming at Spectrum, with sound and video installations based on data curated by Ian Fenty, whose doctoral dissertation at MIT addressed ’s new studied of global warming and its effects on our oceans. John Cage’s athletic Water Walk (see schematic attached/above) is the centerpiece of the program. Written in 1959, John Cage’s Water Walk is scored for a number of objects, including bathtub, rubber duck, prepared piano and five radios. It was originally premiered on the Italian TV show Lascia O Raddoppia. Ninnananna from Marco Stroppa’s Miniature Estrose—a lullaby in which its out of worldly tremors creates a gentle watery shimmer and explores the two relations between two states of mind, with initiated knowledge one might trace hidden lullabies by Brahms, Schubert, Stravinsky and an Italian lullaby Stroppa’s mother used to sing to him. Scarlatti and Gibbons provides the sensation of traveling back in time in Italy, while Debussy and Ravel adds their watery imagery. Three world premieres by Nils Vigeland, Milica Paranosic and Michael Vincent Waller reflect contemporary composers’ take on global warming. To complete the experience, the stage and the hall are transformed with projections of Italian Renaissance paintings, which stunningly portray the luminous beauty of Italy.
Tuesday, May 7 at 8 PM
Tickets $15, $10 students/seniors
Spectrum, 121 Ludlow St., 2nd floor, New York, NY
..:: Website
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Posted by Thomas Deneuville »
Add Comment »On April 2, Symphony Space will celebrate John Cage’s centenary with this rare performance of Cage’s 1989 How To Get Started, a collaborative experiment exploring improvisation and the origin of ideas. We asked 5 questions to Laura Kaminsky, composer and Artistic Director of Symphony Space.
How did you choose the three pairs of performers?
We wanted, initially, people who knew each other well, or admired each other greatly. I wanted people who had a close personal and/or professional relationship with each other, and who harkened from different disciplines, as I thought it would enliven the evenings by adding a level of intimate interactivity to the post-performance conversation. Wendy Lesser of The Threepenny Review, who was to moderate, suggested Wallace and Allen Shawn because who could know each other better than two brothers? This evening was incredible in that Wallace, the writer and actor, filled his ten thought layers with lots of words and really began to tell a story. Allen, who chose to answer some of his ten questions by performing musical fragments of his own and other composers’ music at the piano, actually seemed to be composing in real time. It seemed that he was truly listening to the layers and inserting either his spoken or musical answers very much in dialogue with the prior layers as they were re-played. And because they had a shared family history, they were able to parse each other’s answers in quite insightful and intimate ways…it was profoundly interesting to watch them be the audience for each other and then to see what themes each picked up from his brother’s performance.
Robert Pinsky and John Wesley Harding are good friends and share a love of words and music, so they, too, made a good pairing. Wendy Lesser knows both of them, so was able to draw them out in the post-performance conversation. Harding brought his guitar yet only used it once, if I recall, making for a less musical performance than Allen’s.
Laura Kaminsky
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Posted by Thomas Deneuville »
Add Comment »From the Make Music Winter website:
“Inspired by the collaborations of John Cage and Lou Harrison, So Percussion’s Jason Treuting and Josh Quillen will create a new piece for a chorus of pitched copper pipes in the streets of Greenwich Village. Led by percussionists Amy Garapic and Matt Evans, each participant will receive a length of pipe along with simple instructions for how and when to play it, and how to interact with the NYC percussionists who will join the proceedings at spots along the way.”
More info: http://makemusicny.org | http://sopercussion.com
Embedding is cool. Crediting is really cool.
Video + Editing: Thomas Deneuville | Opening animation: Daniel Thompson at DTWebart (http://www.dtwebart.com)
Posted by Andrew Lee »
1 Comment »Randy Gibson is a composer and performer living and working in New York City. He is the co-founder of Avant Media, and produces the Avant Media Festival, which showcases experimental music from the last 100 years and today. The Fourth Annual Avant Media Festival will take place February 15-23.
As has been mentioned in other interviews, you left the traditional university education route to go to NYC, eventually becoming a student of La Monte Young. Could you talk a bit about the circumstances that prompted the move away from academia?
Well, I’ve always had a difficult relationship with organized education, even from a very early age. I attended Montessori school, and I think the self-guided nature of that was extremely beneficial for me. In high school, I was in a sort of unique situation in that the town where I grew up had this amazing University, and a program where, as long as it wasn’t offered by the high school, you could take classes there. So I took full advantage of that, I studied theory and ear training, I took a fantastic class in 20th Century theory where I was one of only three students, and I took an interdisciplinary performance class helmed by my then composition teacher, Michael Theodore. This was a truly extraordinary class, and I met some amazing people and learned how to collaborate. I founded Avant Media with Ana Baer-Carrillo who I met in this class.
When I went to the university full-time, this freedom was suddenly gone, and I couldn’t pursue the things that I truly wanted to pursue. It was actually an incredibly easy decision for me to leave the composition program there and move to New York and just see what happened.
Randy Gibson
Posted by Kelsey Walsh »
3 Comments »
I just finished reading Joel Sachs’ new book, Henry Cowell: A Man Made of Music for the third time. I had previously read it for my own pleasure, and I was delighted to be asked to review it. I’ve read an enormous amount of material on Henry Cowell (although nowhere near as much as Sachs has!), and I must say, this book is by far the best comprehensive biography available. Sachs speaks of the “indigestion” that followed reading every piece of paper associated with Henry Cowell plus background information on San Francisco history, 1920s politics, and so forth. Perhaps it took a while to digest all that information, but the resulting book is well worth the wait. It is a wonderful read, both accessible and informative, full of information and stories so vivid you can’t help but be drawn into Cowell’s life. From Cowell’s humble beginnings at the Menlo Park of the late nineteenth century—then a muddy stretch of nothing worlds from the Silicon Valley suburb it is today—the book chronicles a life so full of adventures it could be a novel.
Henry Cowell
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