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

Live from Merkin Concert Hall’s Ecstatic Music Festival 2012

“On Tuesday, March 20 at 7:30 pm ET, Q2 Music and New Sounds Live present a live audio webcast of composer and indie heavyweight Dan Deacon from Merkin Concert Hall’s Ecstatic Music Festival. Following on last year’s collaboration with So Percussion, Dan Deacon now teams up with NOW Ensemble and the Calder Quartet to present a series of world premiere works for chamber ensembles.”

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

A live Webcast of the Ecstatic Music Festival

“On Wednesday, February 8 at 7:30 pm ET, John Schaefer of WNYC’s New Sounds Live hosts a live audio Webcast on Q2 Music of Son Lux, Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry, and new-music heavyweights yMusic as part of the Ecstatic Music Festival‘s continued collaboration between classical and indie musicians.

John Schaefer

yMusic

Multi-instrumentalist and composer Richard Reed Parry, of the Grammy-winning rockers Arcade Fire, is also a founding member and producer of the Montreal-based instrumental group Bell Orchestre. Ryan Lott, who as Son Lux melds elements of electronica, indie rock, and classical composition, has earned accolades for his two LPs, At War with Walls & Mazes and We Are Rising, a record composed during a single month in response to an NPR challenge.

yMusic, a sextet of classically-trained New York-based composers, released their debut album, Beautiful Mechanical last fall. The record was rated the number-one classical release of 2011 by The New York Times and included compositional contributions from Son Lux along with indie rock luminaries St. Vincent and Shara Worden as well as from composer and Ecstatic Music Festival curator Judd Greenstein. The ensemble’s collaborative spirit is a microcosm for that of the festival: its members have collaborated with Grizzly Bear, The National, Björk and others.”

See the full article here.

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.

You cannot get more “today” than Ben Frost, member of Bedroom Community. What? You don’t know Bedroom Community? Check them out with the supplied link.

If Brian Eno is your guy, you are in good company.

Thanks, John, for 30 great years. I just caught PGM 2067, the 20th anniversary show, on my Zune. It used to be a lot of work to get those shows, recording them. Now, with RSS feeds to tell us what is going on, and downloads, it is a snap.

JS-30: CELEBRATING THREE DECADES OF JOHN SCHAEFER
Friday, December 2 at 8 PM

Come celebrate Soundcheck and New Sounds host John Schaefer, as he marks 30 years on the air at WNYC.
Join us for an evening of live music with special guests and heartfelt memories, emceed by Grammy Award-winning singer Angelique Kidjo. With special guests Laurie Anderson, ETHEL String Quartet, Simone Dinnerstein and others.

The Greene Space at WNYC
44 Charlton St. (at Varick)

A more recent photo

Tickets: $30 at thegreenespace.org
Includes access to the after-party

“On Wednesday, March 17 at 7 pm, Q2 and New Sounds Live team up once again to bring you a live audio and video Webcast from The Greene Space. Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble and the Todd Reynolds Quartet perform tracks from Monk’s newest album, Songs of Ascension. Join New Sounds’ host John Schaefer for performance and conversation with Monk and featured musicians, including Q2′s own Nadia Sirota.”

John Schaefer

See the full article here.

Be there or be square.

All About Jazz – For all of the news of the Jazz world

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/

American Mavericks – A history of serious music in America from Minnesota Public Radio

http://www.musicmavericks.org/

American Composers Forum – Fostering artistic and professional development

http://www.composersforum.org/

Bang On A Can – At the heart of the Downtown New York New Music scene

https://www.bangonacan.org/

Blue Note Records – an iconic Jazz label still putting out great recordings

http://www.bluenote.com/

Cantaloupe Music – the recording arm of Bang On a Can

http://www.cantaloupemusic.com/

Classical Discoveries – Marvin Rosen’s Wednesday survey of great new music and the avantgarde on WPRB, Princeton, NJ

http://classicaldiscoveries.org/

Cuneiform Records – great taste in new music

http://www.cuneiformrecords.com/

ECM – possibly the finest recording company in the world

http://www.ecmrecords.com

The GreeneSpace, the live presentation space of New York Public Radio with programming from WNYC, WQXR, and Q2

http://www.wnyc.org/thegreenespace/

Hearts of Space – Stephen Hill’s great weekly mix of music for relaxation, contemplation, mediation, and…
This is a paid service.

http://www.hos.com

Innova – creating an environment for new compostion and musical maturation.
The recording arm of American Composers Forum

http://innova.mu

Live365 – niche audio streaming – any genre or sub-genre you want. This is a paid service.

http://www.live365.com

New Amsterdam Records – “…a non-profit-model record label and artists’ service organization that supports the public’s engagement with new music by composers and performers whose work grows from the fertile ground between genres….”

https://www.newamsterdamrecords.com

NPR/music – Jazz, Classical, interviews, news, concerts, “first listens”, artist profiles

http://www.npr.org/music

Q2 on the internet, “for the new music we crave” the home of New Music

http://www.wqxr.org/q2

WBGO bringing Jazz from Newark, NJ to the world

http://www.wbgo.org

WNYC – the home of John Schaefer’s Soundcheck and New Sounds programs

http://www.wnyc.org

WPRB, Community Radio, Princeton, NJ
For the most serious presentation of Classical music and the most erudite presentations of Jazz

http://www.wprb.com

by John Schaefer

“There is music, and there is noise. That statement, uninteresting in itself, becomes less so when you try to determine the boundary between the two. Sound exists as a spectrum, and the bar between music and noise exists in very different places along that spectrum for each listener. At one extreme, you can still find, say, a diehard Bach fan who says that all rock music sounds like noise. This may not be just a dismissive opinion, but a genuine experience of amplified music as being disorganized and grating. In other words, noise. At the other end, you have someone like the late John Cage, who famously said that everything we do is music, and who loved to listen to the sounds of the world coming through the window of his Sixth Avenue apartment in Manhattan. Even Cage, though, was initially repulsed by the dense blocks of sound created by Glenn Branca in his symphonies for electric guitars. The point is, “music” and “noise” are in the ear of the beholder, and the ways we divide and organize the sounds around us are as unpredictable as we are.

This kind of thinking seems to reside at the heart of the Unsound Festival. It has certainly been a part of my thinking in programming New Sounds, the long-running WNYC new-music show that was distributed by NPR for much of the 1980s and ’90s. Sounds that may not seem musical at first can become musical in context, and sounds that some people have deep emotional and physical responses to may not be recognizable as “music” to many others. Examples: Train whistles and spoken voices become not just musical, but melodic in Steve Reich’s Different Trains. Listening to Ben Frost’s By the Throat can be genuinely unsettling, and nowhere more so than in the moments where the recognizable instruments fall away, leaving the whistling Arctic wind, wolf howls and blocks of distorted sound. These are the types of artists who have appeared, both on recordings and in person, on New Sounds over the years, and both will be represented in the Unsound Festival this year, as well.

Brian Eno (right) and his protege, composer Ben Frost, are featured at this year’s Unsound Festival in New York City.

See John’s full article here. And take a lokk at “New Sounds’ “Unsound” Playlist” at the end of the page. Wow!

One of the best things to ever happen for Music in the USA was the 1982 birth on WNYC of John Schaefer’s program New Sounds.

J.S.

During its long time on the air, New Sounds has brought forward all sorts of music, musicians and composers. While there are sometimes guests in the studio, this program sticks pretty much to the presentation of the music.

So, guess what? If you visit the show page at the WNYC web site, and scroll down, on the right you will see a calendar which can lead you to probably every New Sounds program ever broadcast. This is the current incarnation of the New Sounds Archive, long may it live.

Give yourself a treat. Access the archive, dig around and find what you might enjoy hearing.

You can also hunt stuff up by just doing a search on the WNYC web site. Just search on the name of the composer, musician, genre, group, whatever.

“There is so much Q2 on Q2 this week! Monday, Tuesday, and Friday on the show, we explore music that was written during composers’ salad days. We’re focusing on the early works that catapulted some of our favorite composers into their careers. For some, these are voice-defining pieces, and for others, these works were composed in styles long-discarded.

Wednesday and Thursday’s shows are devoted to our Web cast of the Kaufman Center’s Ecstatic Marathon, an event that took place three weeks ago. Having participated in the marathon, I can say that I was blown away by the quality and diversity of the performers, the craft of the music and, honestly, the rabid devotion of the audience! If you missed the marathon, or simply live elsewhere, this is your chance to virtually attend a wonderful show.

Make sure to listen to Q2 Thursday evening at 7:30 p.m. for the Ecstatic Music Festival’s Bang on a Can People’s Comissioning Fund Concert. This concert is the first of four New Sounds Live Web casts hosted by WNYC’s John Schaefer.”

Bang On A Can All-Stars