Hammered! is a focused keyboard program at Q2. The program streams weekdays at 11AM and 11PM on Q2.

Our second pianists-in-residence curating weeklong programs of piano music for American Mavericks

“This month on Hammered! we invite three pianists to curate episodes focused on the diverse body of keyboard music generated by some of the twentieth and twenty-first century’s most revolutionary musicians. Listen in 11 am and pm all this week for episodes hosted by the innovative Lisa Moore.

By Lisa Moore

‘I’m thrilled to be curating a week of American Maverick episodes for Q2 Music’s Hammered!. My programs celebrate ‘maverick’ piano music – often with roots in song, ragtime, blues and jazz. Examples are sourced from historic live recordings, hot-off-the-press takes and composers’ private collections. There’s the straight-up 88 keys, player-pianos, prepared pianos, multiple pianos, a harpsichord, an accordion, organs and also marimbas. There’s detuned, well-tuned, and perhaps a little out of tune…(can’t blame us).

Daily from Monday to Thursday Hammered! explores a mix of 20th century examples – from early to late. There’s some Eubie Blake, Scott Joplin, Henry Cowell, George Gershwin, Charles Ives, Conlon Nancarrow, Ruth Crawford Seeger, John Cage, Steve Reich, Frederic Rzewski, Philip Glass, John Adams, Ingram Marshall, Martin Bresnick, William Albright, Jerome Kitzke, Julia Wolfe, Annie Gosfield, Don Byron and more.

On Friday March 23rd I wrap things up with the next new (somewhat younger) 21st century generation of voices – composer such as Daniel Wohl, Paul Kerekes, Hannah Lash and Missy Mazzoli. Alas, it was impossible to include all the beautiful and worthy examples in just 5 hours so my apologies to those not included (next time!).

See the full article here.

This week Hammered! is hosted by Lisa Moore

Q2 is the 24/7 New Music Stream from New York Public Radio

March Madness: Q2 Music Undergoes a Maverick Makeover

“Q2 Music celebrates America’s great iconoclastic composers this March, when San Francisco Symphony music director Michael Tilson Thomas brings his American Mavericks tour to New York. For three full weeks (March 8–30), Q2 Music presents a wide range of special programming — from a trinity of new-music hosts to live concerts to composer profiles to treasures from the WQXR and WNYC archive— with a crowning live event American Mavericks: Music and Conversation with Michael Tilson Thomas on March 26 at The Jerome L. Greene Performance Space.

Maverick John Cage

“MTT”

The festival also includes Tilson Thomas hosting a weekday show, contemporary music icons such as David Byrne and Zoe Keating sharing their own “American Mavericks” playlists, and select American Mavericks concerts – including Alarm Will Sound and JACK Quartet – recorded for on-demand listening.

AMERICAN MAVERICK HOSTS

MTT AT THE TURNTABLES
Weekdays at 10am and 5pm ET

Each weekday, Michael Tilson Thomas will host twice daily at 10am and 5pm ET. Focusing on the San Francisco Symphony’s featured line-up of 17 game-changing composers including Charles Ives, Lou Harrison, Aaron Copland, Morton Feldman, John Cage, and John Adams, Tilson Thomas’s hosted hours present the pioneering conductor’s own insights alongside exclusive archival recordings from the San Francisco Symphony’s storied history of promoting adventurous, cutting-edge American composers. Also included will be freshly-minted live concert recordings from this year’s American Mavericks tour.

PHIL KLINE
Weekdays from 8-10am (repeats 6-8pm)

MARY ROWELL
Weekdays from 12-2pm (repeats 9-11pm)

FRED SHERRY
Weekdays from 3-5pm (repeats midnight-2am)

I have just hit the high spots. Please visit the complete web page here to know (almost) everything that is going to happen

Cued Up On Q2 streams Sundays at 2PM on Q2; encores Tuesdays at 8PM and Thursdays at 4PM on Q2

Live performances by NOW Ensemble, Victoire, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and More

“As Q2 Music prepares to go all-American Mavericks all the time next month, we’ve been doing a lot of listening to Varèse, Copland, Harrison, Cage, Monk and more. But while we’ve been excited to see the return of a concert series given in 2000 by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, we can’t help but think of the new mavericks.

So taking as a springboard the styles of our 20th-century Mavericks, we’re looking today at in-concert recordings from composers who in this century challenge and redefine the way music is created and consumed.

There are nods to the greats of the past (such as Sergei Prokofiev’s grandson, Gabriel Prokofiev), but the present has a mightily different face. We’ll hear from Missy Mazzoli’s rockstar quintet Victoire live at Chelesea’s Look and Listen Festival, blending the lines between rock and classical (we’ll hear more to that end with music from Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood). And we’ll hit up the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center for a trio by juggernaut composer Kevin Puts.

There will also be hints of social consciousness in by the NOW Ensemble of Judd Greenstein’s Change and Ensemble 212 of Tahrir by Mohammed Fairouz, and selections from concert series like the Ecstatic Music Festival and SONiC. All told, various threads of the contemporary zeitgeist will weave together in two hours of musical bliss.”

This edition of Cued Up is hosted by Olivia Giovetti

Olivia Giovetti

I wish to again remind readers that rthey can still access, enjoy and learn from the original American Public Media radio project American Mavericks.

While Minnesota Public Radio has taken down most of the audio, you can still access the text materials.

The New Canon streams Fridays at 1PM on Q2 Music; encore presentations Wednesdays at 10AM and Sundays at 8PM on Q2.

Bringing the “M” Word Back to Music

“On The New Canon this week, we gear up for American Mavericks with the festival’s featured violinist Jennifer Koh, asking: What makes a maverick?

Jennifer Koh

Twelve years ago, Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony presented twelve concerts honoring American composers who pushed the boundaries of classical music in the 20th Century, redefining the parameters of American sound and our contribution to a European-born genre. Twelve years later, as the SFS celebrates its own centennial, American Mavericks is back with a vivacious vengeance starting in the Bay Area before docking at Carnegie Hall.

We welcome to The New Canon Maverick violinist Jennifer Koh, who has no small relationship to some of the featured composers (from Adams to Cage), indulging in a sonic star-spangled banner of daring musicians that have forged our national sonic identity. As we listen to some of these composers in action, we invite you to join us in asking Koh, What makes a maverick? And who are our 21st-century mavericks?”

See the full article here, complete with some interactive utilities.

Q2 did not mention the American Public Media project inspired by MTT’s SFS and also named American Mavericks, a 13 week radio project guided by MTT and hosted by Suzanne Vega. While some of the audio features are no longer available, there is a vast treasure trove of material still available. Pease visit the site to learn more.The thirteen essays by Kyle Gann give quite a history of all of American music.

The New Canon on Q2 is hosted by Olivia Giovetti

Olivia Giovetti

Q2 is the 24/7 New Music Stream from New York Public Radio

“On Monday, March 26 at 7 pm, Q2 Music welcomes San Francisco Symphony music director Michael Tilson Thomas, composer John Adams and the St. Lawrence String Quartet to The Greene Space for an evening of music and conversation about America’s great iconoclastic composers. WQXR’s David Garland and Q2 Music’s Nadia Sirota host the event.

Michael Tilson Thomas

John Adams

David Garland

Nadia Sirota

Tilson Thomas’s appearance in The Greene Space comes during a four-city tour by the San Francisco Symphony, which focuses on American Mavericks, the orchestra’s ongoing multimedia initiative that started in 2000 with an acclaimed summer festival and later evolved into a public radio series and Web site. Composers covered in the series include John Cage, Steve Reich, Edgard Varèse, Terry Riley, Meredith Monk, John Adams and others. The series has raised questions about what — and who — exactly defines the maverick spirit in American music throughout history.

Michael Tilson Thomas became Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony in September 1995; he’s received numerous accolades including 10 Grammy Awards, a Peabody for Radio Programming in 2008 for The MTT Files (a co-production with American Public Media), and in 2010, a National Medal of the Arts from President Obama.”

See the full article here.

The American Mavericks web site is still up and functioning. If you want to learn about the history of American music and the history of music in general, the context within which the project is set, you can still take advantage of all of the audio interviews in The Listening Room. Caveat: you will need RealPlayer. There is a free version.

As much of the main list as I could squeeze. You probably can’t read any of the names, but, you get the idea, there are a lot of interviews of composers young and not so young

Audio Archives

Composers’ Voice Interviews – Very much like the above two lists – composers speaking about their work

If you have decent .mp3 recording software, you can record these interviews for your own listening. I am told that one can still listen to the radio programs if one has an early version of Real Player. I have only a current version, in which the programs would not play. I have suggested that the programs be re-formatted to .mp3.

At the Features page

You can still read all of Kyle Gann’s 13 essays, one for each of the 13 episodes of the series Just scroll down the page a bit. Unfortunately, Minnesota Public Radio has seen fit to take down the actual audio files for the 13 radio programs. Philistines!!

But, at this same Features page, you can read the text interviews which are a part of the project.

I know you cannot read the names, but believe you me, they are worth reading, along with Kyle Gann’s wonderfully informative essays.

I took all of Kyle Gann’s essays and all of the text interviews and copied them into one file. I made a book, complete with Table of Contents. It is great reading while waiting for someone at the mall, on airplanes or at the dentist. The book printed out at 514 pages double sided in MS Word, 8-1/2″ x 11″, with nice wide borders where I could make notes about which composers’ music I wanted to purchase.

This is a great and important series. What MPR has left up is really at the core of the project. Check it out.

Edit 11.29.11 After a conversation with someone at MPR, I wish to point out that all of the material at the American Mavericks site is copyright protected. You can take any of my suggestions as to how to save out this material for your own use. However any dissemination of the material to anyone else would be in violation of those copyrights.

From the About Page, MTT, the creative force behind the project, and Suzanne Vega, the narrator of the 13 programs.

“For those who don’t know Michael, he’s Executive VP of Business & Legal Affairs at Atlantic Records. But on the 17th we honor him for his 20 years of brilliant leadership on our Board of Directors, featuring live performances by Bang’s cutting edge street band Asphalt Orchestra and excerpts from a new Michael Gordon piece played by the electric ensemble Mantra Percussion.

Michael Gordon

Asphalt Orchestra

Mantra Percussion

Each year we celebrate the world of challenging new music by making even MORE music possible. We can’t do our job- commissioning, presenting, producing, recording, teaching- without you. We ask you to dig as deep as you can, and in return, we’ll give you one fantastic night out! But even if you choose to simply make a donation or purchase a journal ad, we’ll send you a link to some fantastic new Bang on a Can” music. Here are the details:

$5,000 BANG BENEFACTOR: one premium table of up to 10 guests; recognition as a lead sponsor of the Benefit; a full-page ad in the Benefit Journal; season-long recognition as a lead sponsor of Bang on a Can at all our concerts and projects; up to 10 VIP passes for premium seating at the Bang on a Can Marathon (6/19/11).

$500 BANG BACKER: one ticket to the dinner and concert; 2 VIP pass for premium seating at the Bang on a Can Marathon; 2 complimentary tickets to the Bang on a Can Summer Marathon at MASS MoCA (7/30/11).

(we’ll also open the doors at 9PM for a special after-party – drinks and music for just $50 – stay tuned for more info!)

Feel free to purchase tickets or tables as gifts, and we will invite artists by lottery with your compliments!

Take out a Congratulatory Ad (you can make your own, or we’re happy to design one for you if you prefer) ($1,000 for full-page; $600 for half-page)

For tickets visit the Bang on a Can benefit page. Contact Tim Thomas at the below for more info.

Tim Thomas
tim@bangonacan.org
718-852-7755

Who among you remembers the American Mavericks project from American Public Media at Minnesota Public Radio?

Michael Tilson Thomas oversaw this project and it was wonderful.

So, now, MTT is bringing a series of concerts to Carnegie Hall. From The Blog at Carnegie Hall

“As Artistic Director of American Mavericks, Michael Tilson Thomas offers a thrilling chance to experience the music of Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, John Cage, John Adams, and other maverick composers in a series of concerts in March 2012, celebrating what he calls the “iconoclasts, moldbreakers, voyagers, pioneers of the American sound.”

Two performances by Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony form the cornerstones of American Mavericks, also featuring Emanuel Ax, Jessye Norman, Meredith Monk, and additional guest soloists. Other American Mavericks concerts feature Alarm Will Sound; Jennifer Koh, violin; Lisa Moore, piano; JACK Quartet; and So Percussion.

‘The mavericks are iconoclasts, moldbreakers, voyagers, pioneers of the American sound,’ says conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. ‘They imagined themselves as musical revolutionaries. And they were.’ As Artistic Director of American Mavericks, Tilson Thomas offers a thrilling chance to experience the music of Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, John Cage, John Adams, and other maverick composers. To hear this rarely heard, vibrant music live in concert is more than a revelation. It compels your attention.

Visit the Carnegie Hall web site for complete schedules.