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

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

“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 fearless Kathleen Supové.

By Kathleen Supové

‘…When one thinks of American Mavericks, several names immediately come to mind: John Cage, Lou Harrison, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams, and a few others. In my series, I tried to focus on artists other than these, some of whom are underplayed, some young and not yet well known and some I believe to be Mavericks in ways that perhaps you don’t expect…..’”

Read all about it here.

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

Exploring Brooklyn-based composer Ryan Francis‘s box of musical toys

Ryan Anthony Francis

“Among diverse cast of characters informing Brooklyn-based composer Ryan Anthony Francis’s musical language are author Haruki Murakami, artist M.C. Escher and poet Wilhelm Muller. Hear what they’ve told him this week at 11 am and pm on Hammered!.

You can hear Escher in the interlocking motivic infinities in Francis’s Etude Jacob’s Ladder, Murakami’s polished elegance in the Wind-Up Bird Preludes, and Muller’s prophetic solemnity in Consolations.

This is to say nothing of the musical personalities sitting on his other shoulder, a lineup of composers beginning with Frederic Chopin and filing through Henri Dutilleux and Richard D. James of Aphex Twin. Each of these voices are considered, adapted and synthesized by Francis into an aggressively original musical language that uses nuance, precision and stylistic-variance to create music that is at once lush, probing and inventive.

Accompanying Hammered!’s week-long survey of his piano music are works that interact with Francis’s language in especially intriguing ways. You’ll hear songs by Franz Schubert, movements from Harrison Birtwistle’s Harrison’s Clocks, a recent work from Arlene Sierra and, to balance Francis’s mammoth Moonlight Fantasy, a remarkable performance from pianist Sergei Babayan of Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit.

See the full article here.

Hammered! is hosted by Conor Hanick

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

Honoring Philip Glass’s recent 75th by exploring the fertile ground of his influence
Monday, February 06, 2012

“The champagne may be flat but we’re still riding the celebratory wave of birthday boy Philip Glass’s 75th by exploring the fertile genre of post-minimalism that he helped inspire. Tune in this week at 11 am and pm for reworkings, reinventions and revampings of Glass-brand minimalism.

Philip Glass

Last week there was a nice cross-current of influence here at Q2 Music. We celebrated Glass’s birthday with a premiere Webcast of his Ninth Symphony and also hosted a preview concert for the second annual Ecstatic Music Festival live at the Greene Space. Hearing that performance at the Greene Space is in many ways hearing the far-reaching impact of Glass’s most rudimentary musical tenets, but what’s remarkable is how uniquely these tenets have been recast.

This is the music you’ll hear this week. We’ll frame each program with a brief piano piece from Glass and quickly turn to music that is related to, but almost unrecognizable from, the Glass style. Kind of like distant third cousins. Possibly half removed. On Monday we’ll hear music of Marti Epstein, Stephen Scott (a bowed piano piece Music One for Bowed Strings that is not to be missed!) and an enormous work by William Duckworth called The Time Curve Preludes.

Later in the week catch post-minimalist masterpieces by Ingram Marshall, Kyle Gann and John Luther Adams, along with up-and-comers Jacob Cooper, Andy Akiho and Eliot Britton.

See the full article here.

Hammered! is hosted by Conor Hanick

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

Surveying the Past, Present and Future of Piano Music from Poland

“Despite the immense stylistic variety of Polish music from the last fifty years, many of these works demonstrate a keen sense of historical context, nodding appreciatively through the centuries. Tune in for the piano course to this week’s Muzyka Nowa smorgasbord and explore the keyboard music of Polish modernism. In context.

Franz Liszt said of Frederic Chopin, one of Poland’s great cultural ambassadors, that “the anguished cries of Poland lend to his art a mysterious, indefinable poetry.” Perhaps the same can be said of the composers on this week’s program, if not specifically because of their common cultural context than perhaps more generally because the pathos and melancholy that’s so often expressed in these works is tinged with the same mysteriousness and indefinability that shrouds Chopin’s music.

Chopin was also a true modernist. Listen to the unnerving, relentlessly minimalist center section of his Polonaise in F-sharp minor, Op. 44, or the unstable, often “rule-breaking”, harmonic language of his late Mazurkas. Hear how these traits are expanded and reinvented by Karol Szymanowski, the under appreciated torchbearer of Polish late Romanticism.

Of course we also have the great modern masters of Polish pianism, Henryk Gorecki and Witold Lutowslawki (no solo piano music from Krzysztof Pendericki), and offer — among other things — piano concertos by both composers (the Lutoslawski brilliantly performed by Leif Ove Andsnes). Grazyna Bacewicz, a contemporary of Penderecki, is also hardly known in the States, and thanks to a recent album from Krystian Zimerman you’ll hear her Second Sonata and two piano quintets.

Rounding out the timeline are recently written works by the extraordinary Pawel Szymanski, Jan Radzynski, Roger Przytulski, and Jakub Cuipinski, who will host two specially curated episodes this week.”

See the full article here.

Hammered! is hosted by Conor Hanick

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

Newly (Re)discovered Sounds from the Composers and Pianists that Shaped Our 2011

“New-music junkies thrive on hearing new sounds, on experiencing novel, sonic worlds. Really, is there anything more exciting than listening to a piece for the first time? This week on Hammered! we’re reacquainting you with some of those experiences and playing our favorite discoveries of 2011.

Of course the week is overflowing with new composers and recently written music. Monday begins with one of the most striking additions to our library in 2011, Sleeping Giant Ted Hearne’s Parlor Diplomacy for solo piano in a scary-good performance by fellow Giant Timothy Andres. (Apropos of these topics, do yourself a favor and revisit last month’s Sleeping Giant invasion.)

Other highlights (what’s a highlight among highlights?) include new-to-us works by Benjamin Broening (the Recombinant Nocturnes for multiple pianos and electronics), accordionist Guy Klucevsek (the Well-Tampered Accordion), Marco Stroppa (Tangato Manu for solo piano) and pianist composer Eric Wubbles (This Is This Is This).

Friday includes works that we rediscovered through the earlier rediscovery of some of the great new-music pianists alive. Seriously, is there any man / woman / child that can / could / will achieve Alan Feinberg’s contrapuntal clarity in the thorny scores of Milton Babbitt? What about the microscopic detail and pianistic clarity of Fredrik Ullen’s performances of Gyorgy Ligeti?

Enough about us though. What keyboard wizardry do you want to hear in 2012?”

Please visit the page here and by all means leave comments.

Hammered! is hosted by Conor Hanick

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

“Hammered! welcomes the New York-based composer collective Sleeping Giant for a month-long December residency. Composer-pianist Timothy Andres hosts and curates each Monday episode while the rest of the week is filled in with specially curated episodes by the five other Sleepy Gs: Christopher Cerrone, Jacob Cooper, Ted Hearne, Robert Honstein and Andrew Norman.”

See the full Hammered! post here. for the complete schedule.

Monday December 26, Hammered! is hosted by Timothy Andres

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

“Every week as part of Sleeping Giant’s December residency on Hammered!, Q2 Music offers an exclusive audio download of solo piano music written by members of the Brooklyn-based collective performed by its own composer-pianist Timothy Andres.

Week Three Download | Clifton Gates by Jacob Cooper
performed by Timothy Andres, piano

Jacob Cooper

Timo Andres

The first piece I ever heard Timo Andres perform—on an overnight concert in 2006—was John Adams’s Phrygian Gates. Adams named his composition after the sudden shifts of “gates” in electronics (and electronic music), which provided inspiration for the work’s abrupt modulation of keys. Clifton Gates employs—among other digital effects—actual audio gates, creating a rhythmic alteration out of sudden shifts in amplitude. The gating effect is especially audible as the work begins, processing music whose tonality and texture are reminiscent of the slow middle section of Adams’s piece.

Clifton Gates was workshopped in Timo’s apartment on Clifton Place in Brooklyn, NY. “

Visit the page to read more, listen, and, if you like, download the music.

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

Hammered! welcomes the New York-based composer collective Sleeping Giant for a month-long December residency. Composer-pianist Timothy Andres hosts and curates each Monday episode while the rest of the week is filled in with specially curated episodes by the five other Sleepy Gs: Christopher Cerrone, Jacob Cooper, Ted Hearne, Robert Honstein and <strong>Andrew Norman.

This week, Hammered! is hosted by Timothy Andres

Visit this page for a preview of tyhe week’s events with these imporant and emergent composer musicians.

This article is copyright protected, so just a couple of notes.

“…the world of young, inventive and often populist composers is exploding…These young composers may hold the key to classical music’s future, and the future they create might not be what you expect. Increasingly they have come to consider the machinations of the big-ticket musical organizations — and debates about how to get them to accommodate new music — as beside the point….”

This article is an in depth look at the new serious music universe. This universe includes the new composers themselves, their record labels (or the lack of them) and the venues which they find amenable to their musical pursuits. Among the labels mentioned are “…New Amsterdam, Cantaloupe and Tzadik, all composer run and stylistically freewheeling….” To this list, I might add Innova, from American Composers Forum, St Paul, MN.

Among the venues we find Le Poisson Rouge, Cornelia Street Café, Galapagos, The Stone, Issue Project Room, Roulette, all in New York City. Composers noted in the article include Nico Muhly, Missy Mazzoli, Du Yun, Judd Greenstein, Caleb Burhans, and Bryce Dessner. The only groups I saw noted were ETHEL and Victoire. But others which might have been included are ACME, ICE, yMusic, eighth blackbird, and itsnotyouitsme.

Not at all mentioned in the article (if I missed it, I hope that someone will correct me), is New York Public Radio’s 24/7 New Music web stream Q2. This stream takes these and other composers and musicians out to a wide world, with an international listenership. A stand-out at Q2 is the work of Nadia Sirota. She hosts a four hour program which includes several themes, e.g, Hope Springs Atonal. Her program streams at noon and midnight. Two other standout focused programs are Hammered! which is concerned with keyboard music, and The New Canon.Also important to the success of what has been called “New Music” are two programs on WNYC, New York Public Radio’s original outlet service. For thirty years, John Schaefer has been bringing new composer to the public on the nightly program New Sounds. For a somewhat shorter time, we have been able to hear them on John’s other program, Soundcheck.

Something that I personally would like to see added into the mix for New Music would be the advent of long form music videocast. The best examples I can cite for this are three videos produced by and for ICE, which were made available at Q2. Just to give one example, the music of Steve Lehman in a 46 minute video can be found here. I just actually searched this up also at Google Video here. Both of these examples are free to the public.But, I would personally like to see these videos made available at the music groups’ web sites, based upon a membership fee for a user id and password, and then some sort of fee, maybe $5 or $10 as a “ticket” price. This would greatly universalize the availability of musical experience to populations living no where near to actual concert events. To whit: ICE just did a heavily promoted concert in Chicago. But, I am in New Jersey. I might be very interested in that musical experience. So, if it were made available from a videocast archive, and if I was registered with ICE, I could pay a small “ticket” price and have that experience.

This is a huge and important article. The items I note as missing from the article do not in any way diminish its thesis or importance. See the full article here.