“The Global Salon: New Orleans, U.S.A. will be the climactic season finale where reflections from each previously imagined region offer up a magical, spiritual energy of renewal and empowerment. Host Eddie Robinson, a native of the Gulf region, will lead audience members on an explosive journey of music, culture, arts, and film as the city’s rebuilding, environmental initiatives, and recovery efforts become the foundation for the salon.

Conversation and Performance with Terence Blanchard, Golden Globe nominee/Grammy-winning film composer, musician — A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem For Katrina) (2007); Red Tails (2012) and The Terence Blanchard Quintet”

Terrance Blanchard

Tickets: $30.00
Duration: 1 hour, 30 minutes
Venue: The Greene Space
44 Charlton Street, New York, NY
(corner of Varick Street)

Nico Muhly Provides Personalized Introductions to his Key Works
Friday, June 17, 2011

Nico Muhly

“Joining us from the BBC studios in London in advance of the world premiere of Two Boys, Nico Muhly also takes time to conduct us through a tour of the kaleidoscopic influences behind his already prodigious catalog.

From his musical awakenings as a boy chorister singing English verse anthems to throwing together dinners for close friends to the tone rows of Webern’s Op. 24, all manner of inspiration, both timeless and contemporary, sacred and secular, finds expression in his music. Through the ensemble of these exclusive introductions, we begin to appreciate the complexity of a compositional voice that is searching to define itself as both uncompromisingly modern and distinctive but also steeped in tradition and indebted to such elder statesmen as Steve Reich, John Corigliano, Philip Glass, David Lang, Christopher Rouse and David Rakowski.

Hear these introductions preceding the piece in question in Olivia Giovetti’s interview with Nico Muhly Monday at noon and throughout the entire five-day festival, ENO Does Nico, beginning Monday, June 20.”

Listen to over thirty tracks here at the web page.

Olivia Giovetti

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!

Pierre Colombet (violin), Gabriel Le Magadure (violin),
Mathieu Herzog (alto), Raphael Merlin (violoncello)

“April 4, 2011

It’s a rare ensemble that can play Haydn and Debussy with complete command and then shift gears to offer a jazz set of Miles Davis and Chick Corea with equal authority.

The Ebène Quartet, from Paris, has made that its trademark, adding spice to a traditionally fusty corner of classical music. Yet in doing so, it hasn’t been shunted to a dubious corner of the crossover market, but instead catapulted into major venues, including Carnegie Hall, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Vienna’s Konzerthaus and London’s Wigmore Hall.

The Ebène’s fluency in styles is born out of firsthand experience. At one point, all of the members played in non-classical bands: The cellist was a pianist in a jazz quartet, the first violin was a bass player, the second violin a drummer and the violist a funk guitarist….”

Visit the web page to see the whole article and stream the concert.

Ensemble ACJW.

Ensemble ACJW appears to be based on the acronym of “The Academy—a program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and the Weill Music Institute. I could not find one nice neat description. Maybe that is by design? There is a web site.

Anyway, does anyone recognize the violist?

Here is what NPR says:

“Ensemble ACJW had a genesis quite unlike any that of any other chamber group. A collective of about 20 hand-selected graduates of major conservatories, the members receive mentorship and professional development while working as music teachers in New York City Public Schools. The two-year fellowship is a partnership of the Juilliard School, Carnegie Hall and the Weill Music Institute in association with the public school system. The ensemble varies in size and instrumentation, depending on the repertoire.

Since its launch in 2007, Ensemble ACJW has played in small clubs and schools as well as New York’s prominent venues. “The ability to really jump between [classical and contemporary] is something that’s unique to our ensemble,” violinist Joanna Frankel, a former member, is quoted as saying on the group’s website. Frankel will perform Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello as part of the chamber music series this week at WQXR’s Greene Space.

[I am going to be a pain here. It is not WQXR's Greene Space, it is New York Public Radio's Greene Space, presenting live programming by both WQXR and WNYC]

A quick review of the Ensemble’s most recent performances points to a balance that has kept listeners on their toes. At a recent gig at Le Poisson Rouge, a small downtown club in New York, members of the ensemble delivered works by Mozart, Jonathan Dawe, Gyorgy Kurtag and Charles Ives (The Unanswered Question and the Piano Trio). Another recent program mixed Rameau, Ligeti and Richard Strauss.

During a trip to Abu Dhabi in March, the Ensemble teamed up with Emirati opera singer Sara Al Qaiwani at the debut of the Zaha Hadid Pavilion for a program of Schubert’s Shepherd on the Rock, Mozart’s Kegelstatt Trio, Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello and Schumann’s Piano Quartet in E-flat Major. The Emirates News Agency WAM called the night “a dazzling blend of Western and traditional Emirati culture.”

Also on the Greene Space bill is composer David Bruce’s Steampunk, a brand-new work commissioned by Carnegie Hall for the group. Bruce recently told reporter Jeff Lunden how the piece was inspired by the quirky science-fiction genre. ‘Steampunk is a kind of an alternative reality of Victorian sci-fi, if you like,’ Bruce said. ‘So people often are kind of dressed in Victorian garb, but have these futuristic things, but there’s no electricity there. It’s all kind of steam-powered. The music I love is classical and folk music. Both don’t usually involve electricity. It’s usually just the sound of, you know, people scraping bows or puffing on their instruments.’ “

So, I have to assume that the videocast will be at the Greene Space web page.