From Nadia Sirota at Q2: “Composers-Who-Like-Other-Composers”

Nadia Sirota on Q2 streams weekdays at 12:00 noon and midnight at Q2

“We hear a lot of composers, and artists in general, bemoaning their being lumped into some category or another. Some are irate over some genre classification that sounds trite or inappropriate, or frustrated at being mentioned in the same breath as colleagues of theirs with whom perhaps they are less-than-thrilled to be associated.

This kind of complaint is in fact so common that I find myself being curiously drawn to those composers who actively display community, associating themselves strongly with other musicians, even other composers! This week is all about composers-who-like-other-composers, and we’re devoting programming to the Composers Collective.

Performing is inherently a community-based endeavor. I like working with other musicians and I like the kind of elegant interpretations that are only possible after hashing things out grittily in rehearsal. Composing, on the other hand, can seem to be a lonely practice; one must, at some point sit down in solitude and put notes on paper. Many, many composers are very happy to work in relative isolation (think Xenakis). From time to time, though, composers seek out or stumble upon a sort of community (think Les Six). We’ll explore a bunch of different composer collectives this week, namely Bang On a Can, the NOW Ensemble, Sleeping Giant, Ears Open!, and Common Sense.”

See the full article here.

Nadia Sirota

From The New York Times: yMusic Brings Its Versatility to Ecstatic Music Festival

This article is copyright protected, so just a few notes.

By WILLIAM ROBIN
February 3, 2012

“Over an eight-day stretch in December members of the chamber sextet yMusic finished a Midwest tour with the folk band Bon Iver; accompanied the indie-rock acts My Brightest Diamond and the National at the Beacon Theater; played with the New York Philharmonic; performed in the Radio City Christmas Spectacular; and participated in recording sessions for the singer and songwriter Beth Orton, the band Dirty Projectors and Trey Anastasio, the frontman of Phish.

For yMusic the difference between hip-hop and classical music is more an issue of performance practice than of impassable boundaries, a shift of style rather than genre. As members of Generation Y — hence the group’s name — the players grew up with the Internet, whose breakdown of artistic barriers has informed the ensemble’s outlook. Its versatility serves not only unclassifiable composers like Mr. Lott but also more conventional ones who weave pop idioms into their music.

yMusic

Rob Moose, violin
CJ Camerieri, trumpet
Clarice Jensen, cello
Alex Sopp, flute
Hideaki Aomori, reeds
Nadia Sirota, Viola

Nadia Sirota

This approach intersects with that of the Ecstatic Music Festival, which is in its second season at Merkin Concert Hall. Judd Greenstein, the festival’s curator, prizes yMusic’s open ears.”

See the full article here.

From Q2 Music: “Jherek Bischoff & Wordless Music Orchestra: Live from Merkin Concert Hall”

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

Just Announced: A Live Webcast of the Ecstatic Music Festival’s SOLD-OUT Opening Concert
Saturday, February 04, 2012

Jherek Bischoff

“This Saturday, February 4 at 7:30 pm ET, Q2 Music presents a live audio Webcast of the Ecstatic Music Festival’s sold-out opening concert, featuring Seattle-based producer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist Jherek Bischoff. The concert marks the first-ever collaboration between Wordless Music Orchestra and the Ecstatic Music Festival.

Saturday’s show will feature Bischoff in collaboration with a number of A-list “rock” innovators, including David Byrne, Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier, Zac Pennington of Parenthetical Girls, singer/songwriter Mirah, Carla Bozulich of the influential alt-country band the Geraldine Fibbers, composer/performer Charlie Looker, and fellow Dead Science member Sam Mickens.”

Listen to Bischoff discuss Saturday’s upcoming performance in a recent interview with host Nadia Sirota.

See the full article here.

From Q2 Music: “Michael Tilson Thomas and John Adams in The Greene Space” in March 2012

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.

From Nadia Sirota on Q2: “China in New York”

Nadia Sirota on Q2 streams weekdays at 12:00 noon and midnight at Q2

New Music in New Places: Celebrating the China in New York Festival on Q2 Music

“Kung Hei Fat Choi! When I was in kindergarten, my super awesome teachers Ms. Danielson and Ms. Doane had us bring in paper bags, in which we cut holes three holes (a big one in the very bottom and two smaller ones on the sides), adorned with construction paper scales, and pulled over our heads to march down the hallway of our school as a giant, kindergartener-fueled Lunar New Year dragon. It was pretty much the best day of kindergarten.

It’s now the year of the DRAGON, an especially lucky year, and Q2 Music is going to help you ring it in with TONS of new music by Chinese and Chinese-American composers. Our parent station, WQXR, is hosting the China in New York Festival this week, and it is chock full of amazing radio events, from Greene Space concerts to the New York Philharmonic’s Chinese New Year performance. Over here, true to our goal of learning about new works straight from the artists’ mouths, we are featuring special guest, composer Huang Ruo, each weekday at the top of my show (12 to 1 pm), to interview some of his favorite colleagues. You won’t want to miss this!!

Xin Nian Kuai Le! Happy New Year! Come celebrate with Q2 Music and WXQR!”

Nadia Sirota

From Nadia Sirota at Q2: “Titans of Polish Music: Past, Present, and Future “

Nadia Sirota on Q2 streams weekdays at 12:00 noon and midnight at Q2

“It may sound kind of obvious, but one of the perks of working at this station is constantly being exposed to new music. This week, we are celebrating Polish music from the past 50 years or so in our Muzyka Nowa festival, and I’m happy to say that aside from the heavy hitters (cough, Penderecki, Górecki, cough) this music is basically all completely new to me! Not just new, but both awesome AND new. Yay. So now that we’ve established my relative ignorance with regards to new-music from Poland, I will admit that I’ve received a TON of help from people more well-informed than myself (Polish people! And non-Polish people!) and this festival is shaping up splendidly.

There’s so much fun stuff this week! We’re having not one but TWO immersive days of Polish programming; special guest host, composer Jakub Ciupinski; EXCLUSIVE recordings of the highlights of over a decade of The Warsaw Autumn festival, music by everyone from Witold Lutoslawski to Paweł Szymański, and so much more. If you’ve ever been curious about the world of Polish new-music, boy howdy, you’re gonna want to tune in!

Jakub Ciupinski

So join me this week as we explore Polish music together! This is the kind of thing you will only find here on Q2 Music.”

See the full article here.

Nadia Sirota

From Nadia Sirota @Q2: “Composers Speak Out! “

Nadia Sirota on Q2 streams weekdays at 12:00 noon and midnight at Q2

A Kaleidoscope of Composerly Voices Joins Nadia Sirota

Wow!

“This is a really special week on the show. While I know you’ve become accustomed to my riffs on the providence of music written by people who are still alive, this week we get to hear about everything – from inspiration to circumstance to execution – right from the mouths of the creators. That’s right, this week I’ll be joined by a dozen or so composers who will guide us through the lion’s share of this week’s programming.

This is all part of a long-term Q2 Music project of gathering composer introductions. We’ve secretly been luring composers to our studios over the past couple years and asking them to contextualize all of the works of theirs we have in our database. At this point, we’ve got quite the library of voices and intros. I honestly think this is some of the most fascinating stuff on the planet! Imagine if we could listen to Beethoven describe his thinking when writing 59/1! Or Monteverdi, whilst penning the Vespers! Something about Monteverdi made me say whilst. And penning.

Ultimately, one of our goals is to have composers guiding you through their music even during un-hosted moments of the Q2 Music stream, effectively creating a sort of semi-hosted, radio-hybrid awesomeness. (There are other plans in the works, but more on that later!) For now, though, I’ll be guiding you through some of the cooler moments of our archive. You never know who may join us…

There’s a ton of amazing stuff to look forward to this week, so be sure to listen in! And let us know which other voices you’d like to hear in the coming months!”

The page is here.

Nadia Sirota

From Q2 Music: “Digging Deep “

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

This Week’s Webcast: Music of Wolfe, Glass, Gordon, and Gubaidulina
Thursday, January 05, 2012

“Each Thursday at 7 pm this winter, stream Q2 Music for weekly Webcasts of new-music shows as recorded live at premiere venues around New York City. This week’s concert is taken from the first evening of the 10th Anniversary Celebration of the annual Look & Listen Festival.

Recorded May 19th, 2011 at the Chelsea Art Museum and hosted by Q2 Music Host Nadia Sirota, the performance featured JACK Quartet performing works by Julia Wolfe and Philip Glass, percussionist Doug Perkins performing Michael Gordon’s XY, and pianist Tanya Bannister presenting Sofia Gubaidulina’s Chaconne. So Percussion offers a “virtual” performance of a work dedicated to the festival, and both Wolfe and Gordon offer insights into the compositional processes behind their respective pieces.

Nadia Sirota

The Look & Listen Festival, founded in 2002 by composer Michael Gordon, is an annual event presenting cutting-edge contemporary music in New York City’s most prestigious art galleries. Each year, the festival features composer and visual artist interviews, presentations of pre-recorded electronic works by the Look & Listen Festival Composers Collective, and live performances of works by both established and emerging new-music composers.”

The full article is here.

From Q2 Music: “Nowej Muzyka: An Overview “

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

A Weeklong Celebration of Contemporary Polish Music | January 16-22, 2012
Tuesday, December 20, 2011

“From January 16 to 22, 2012, Q2 Music presents Nowej Muzyka (or New Music in Polish) — an multifaceted immersion in the sounds of contemporary Polish new music, featuring two 24-hour marathons, live Warsaw Autumn Festival recordings, composer-curated shows, and a Webcast of In Memoriam Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, recorded live at Greenwich Village’s (Le) Poisson Rouge.”

See the full article for a complete listing of the events.

Hosted by Nadia Sirota

From Nadia Sirota on Q2: “Let’s Make CONTACT!”

Nadia Sirota on Q2 streams weekdays at 12:00 noon and midnight at Q2

“One of Alan Gilbert’s loveliest initiatives as the music director of the New York Philharmonic these past three seasons has been the CONTACT! series, dedicated to living composers and new works. This year’s series kicked off this past weekend with a concert devoted to the works of Alexandre Lunsqui, Phil composer-in-residence Magnus Lindberg, and HK Gruber, sixty-six percent of whom stopped by the station to chat about their music and their work (that is, Lunsqui and Gruber, not two-thirds of all three, which would be awkward. Like this sentence. Fragment.) This week will be Philtastic, with programming devoted to CONTACT!s past and present.

Maestro Gilbert

Tune in Monday at 12 for my interview with HK Gruber, which brushed on the finer points of kazoo-playing and the difference between Austrian, English, and American orchestral musicians, among other topics.

Also! Speaking of CONTACT!s, this past weekend’s show will be aired in FULL right here on Q2 Music thrice for your listening pleasure! Tune in Wednesday at 8pm, Saturday at noon, or Thursday the 29th at 8pm, or all three times! They are totally playing Frankenstein!!, a piece which shares an aesthetic similarity to the name of the concert series itself, at least insofar as mandatory and enthusiastic punctuation are concerned, which is, as they say, madcap. We’ll also re-air Nico Muhly’s hosting of music from the inaugural CONTACT! series, as well as additional concerts from all of the past seasons. CONTACT! is the secret. Is the moment. [Like, what does that mean, Sensei?]

Nadia Sirota