From Cantaloupe Music via ALL ARTS: ” ‘The Mile-Long Opera’ Winds Its Way Up the High Line”

Cantaloupe Music is the recording arm of Bang On a Can, the original New Music DIY organization.

From Cantaloupe

via

ALL ARTS

August 15, 2018
Britt Stigler

At 7 p.m. every night from October 3 to 7, a mega-chorus of 1,000 singers from 40 individual choirs around New York City will take to the High Line to perform The Mile-Long Opera: A Biography of 7 O’clock. Composed by Pulitzer Prize-winner David Lang, the “opera” is an immersive performance that invites audience members to walk (at their leisure) the length of the High Line, starting at Gansevoort Street and stretching the one and half miles up to West 34th Street, while performers sing micro-stories inspired by life in the city.

David Lang, © Peter Serling

Singers rehearse “The Mile-Long Opera.” Photograph by Liz Ligon

The project, conceived six years ago by architect Elizabeth Diller (Diller Scofidio + Renfro), takes off from a simple question: What does 7 p.m. mean to New Yorkers? From there, the creative studio Peoplmovr sought to capture diverse stories from individuals across all five boroughs. Bits of these stories were then incorporated into the final libretto, written by poets Anne Carson and Claudia Rankine and transformed into a mosaic score by Lang.

“Opera is about using music to add emotion to character,” said Lang at a press preview on Wednesday morning. He went on to explain that participants will experience this music in two ways throughout the performance: first as a generalized “buzz,” created by the cumulative voices of the choir, then as individual stories sang by the performers. The goal of this intimate experience is to eliminate the distance that some audience members might inherently feel toward opera or classical music. “I tried really hard not to make a scary piece,” said Lang, adding that he sees the project as a “wide invitation” to the public.

While the community engagement aspect of the project looms large, the changing landscape around the High Line also informs the piece. “We’re actually using this as an opportunity to think hard about the present. And about the speedy transformation of the city,” said Diller about the conceptual framework behind the piece. “Of course, there are winners and losers in all of this, but ultimately this project is a celebration of New York. And we wanted to make a piece that was of New York, in New York, with real talent.”

Singers rehearse “The Mile-Long Opera.” Photograph by Matthew Johnson.

Joining Lang and Diller, “The Mile-Long Opera” is co-directed by Lynsey Peisinger and led by Donald Nally. While the performances are free and open to the public, audience members must RSVP for tickets ahead of time.

See the full article here .

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

John Schaefer

For new music by living composers

newsounds.org from New York Public Radio

https://www.wnyc.org/
93.9FM
https://www.wqxr.org/
105.9FM

Home

For great Jazz

88.3FM http://wbgo.org/

WPRB 103.3FM

Dan Buskirk Spinning Jazz Mondays 11:00AM-1:00PM
Will Constantine Jr, Blues Bop and Beyond Thursdays 11:00-2:00 featuring Latin Jazz
Jerry Gordon Serenade to a Cookoo Frdays 11:00AM-2:00PM with Jerry’s Room at 1:00Pm
Jeannie Becker Sunday Jazz 10:00AM-1:00Pm

Please visit The Jazz Loft Project based on the work of Sam Stephenson
Please visit The Jazz Loft Radio project from New York Public Radio

From Cantaloupe Music: “The Unchanging Sea”

Cantaloupe Music is the recording arm of Bang On a Can, the original New Music DIY organization.

The Unchanging Sea
by Michael Gordon & Bill Morrison

Pre-order of The Unchanging Sea. The moment the album is released you’ll get unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus a high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Available August 24 on CD+DVD and digital
Preorder now on iTunes and Bandcamp

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

John Schaefer

For new music by living composers

newsounds.org from New York Public Radio

https://www.wnyc.org/
93.9FM
https://www.wqxr.org/
105.9FM

Home

For great Jazz

88.3FM http://wbgo.org/

WPRB 103.3FM

Dan Buskirk Spinning Jazz Mondays 11:00AM-1:00PM
Will Constantine Jr, Blues Bop and Beyond Thursdays 11:00-2:00 featuring Latin Jazz
Jerry Gordon Serenade to a Cookoo Frdays 11:00AM-2:00PM with Jerry’s Room at 1:00Pm
Jeannie Becker Sunday Jazz 10:00AM-1:00Pm

Please visit The Jazz Loft Project based on the work of Sam Stephenson
Please visit The Jazz Loft Radio project from New York Public Radio

From New Sounds: “Dispatches From the Bang on a Can Summer Festival 2018: Part 1”

From New Sounds
Hand-picked music, genre free. 24/7 radio from New York City.

7/24/2018
John Schaefer

The Bang On A Can collective, which has championed new music since 1987, decamps every summer to Mass MoCA, the vast complex of former industrial buildings in North Adams, Massachusetts that now houses one of the country’s largest contemporary art museums. Since 2002, Bang On A Can has hosted Fellowship programs for emerging composers and musicians – a way of allowing a younger generation of creators and performers to essentially grow up together. This year, for the first time, they included a Fellowship program for aspiring music writers, and invited me and the writer/musicologist Will Robin to serve as the faculty.

This week, we are reporting back from the Berkshires with our writing Fellows’ impressions of the concerts, rehearsals, and unusual concert settings they’re experiencing. It all leads up to the big event this weekend – the Bang On A Can Marathon at Mass MoCA, this year featuring composer Steve Reich. Follow our writers as they follow the musicians and composers who may be the next generation to change the sound of contemporary music.

-John Schaefer

Folk Songs from the Bang on a Can Festival
By Maggie Molloy

Ailie Robertson loves a good folk tale—and the spookier, the better. One of her favorites is The Two Sisters, a Scottish murder ballad recounting the tale of a girl who drowns her sister in the river. When the sister’s body washes ashore, a townsperson crafts a harp from her bones and strings it with her golden hair.

A Scottish harpist and composer, Robertson was inspired by that very piece of folklore when she began writing music for this year’s Bang on a Can Summer Festival. Robertson is one of nine composers from around the world who was selected to attend the annual festival this year in North Adams, Massachusetts. Last night’s concert featured world premieres from each of them, an explosion of wide-ranging works that embodied the eclectic nature of the festival.

For three weeks each July, the experimental music collective Bang on a Can brings together some of the most innovative young performers and composers in the field for an immersive three weeks of outside-the-box music-making. The festival is housed at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), a sprawling complex of 19th-century mill buildings whose rich history is beautifully contrasted against the bold and brazenly modern art that now fill its rooms.

Robertson’s new premiere was perfectly at home in this setting: the piece, titled Binnorie, draws connections between a 400-year-old Scottish folk tune and a modern day news story of a UK woman who murdered her sister last year. Conducted by faculty member Brad Lubman, the performance featured a mixed ensemble of voice, winds, strings, percussion, and a haunting sound collage of recordings from the UK police case.

“Often the things we think of as folklore are actually still so relevant today,” Robertson said in an interview following the concert. “The themes in folk music are basically love and jealousy and war—and they always come around no matter what age we live in.”

Binnorie captured the immediacy of these folk music themes but employed a more intricate timbral palette. Two female singers evoked the sisters on stage, singing the text of the original ballad in a ghostly modal melody amid a sea of string harmonics and quarter tones. Jet whistles and breathy murmurs in the flutes suggested the sister’s desperate gasps for air, and musicians bowed the strings of two grand pianos with long yellow strands of twine that were reminiscent of her hair. Along the back of the stage four percussionists bowed marimbas and dunked cymbals in bowls of water. Woven throughout this gripping sound world were wailing police sirens, news reports, laughing children, river waves, and radio calls from the police. The result was a fresh take on a ballad that has inspired a number of modern reincarnations, including Bang on a Can co-founder Julia Wolfe’s Cruel Sister and Nico Muhly’s The Only Tune.

An earlier concert in the MASS MoCA galleries that afternoon featured another of Robertson’s pieces: a string trio titled The Black Pearl that was inspired by Bach’s Goldberg Variations and another folk tune called The Pretty Maids of Galway. Performed in a dark room next to the muted landscape of a Patrick Bermingham oil painting, the piece evoked a similarly somber mood. Short melodic fragments of Bach’s three minor key variations emerged from the rhythmic, circular bowing of the violin and viola, with the cello plucking a steady bass ostinato throughout. The effect was that of a distant memory, brief flashes of recognition shining through from just beyond our reach.

“I like music to have a narrative,” Robertson said. “It doesn’t have to be melodic, it doesn’t have to directly tell a story, but there has to be some type of emotional thread that the audience can latch onto.”

A Museum That Opens The Eyes And the Ears
By Stan Tymorek

Scat singing rarely takes center stage. For the most part it tends to be a substitute for lyrics that a jazz singer resorts to after singing the words of a few verses. That’s one reason why Stephanie Orlando’s composition Scatterbrain, consisting entirely of scat singing, was a bold move. It was performed by a theatrical soprano and underscored almost syllable for syllable by a soaring flute.

Lunch Recital under Spencer Finch’s light sculpture meant to evoke the Milky Way.
(John Schaefer/ NYPR)

Then there was the performance space: we heard this music below 150 specially fabricated LED fixtures suspended from the ceiling over an expanse of an 80-foot long gallery in the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. According to the MASS MoCA website, in this installation by artist Spencer Finch titled Cosmic Latte, lights are “arranged in the gently arching shape of the Milky Way as it is observed in the Northern Hemisphere in March.” Now scat was thrust into the cosmic spotlight.

These are the types of multimedia dynamics that happen at the North Adams museum every summer when the music collective Bang On a Can comes to town for a three-week festival of new music, presented by their Faculty and Fellows. MASS MoCA and Bang On a Can both specialize in large-scale experimentation: the museum in its 16-acre campus of the vast brick buildings of a former electrical plant. and the musicians with their signature 12-hour marathons and limits-pushing, seemingly limitless repertoire. When the composer and musician fellows select one of the galleries available to them, to present their work, the sheer scale and audacity of the art can’t help but affect how the audience hears their music.

Sol LeWitt’s wall art is the backdrop for a work by Tim Hansen, “Banglewood” 2018
(John Schaefer/ NYPR)

After the single 30-minute slot in which Scatterbrain was performed, the museum-goers who heard it were led to one of the three floors filled with Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawings, a quintessential part of MASS MoCA’s collection. There they heard North Head, by Tim Hansen, a piece for vibraphone and and bass clarinet commemorating, as vibraphonist Thea Hassen movingly explained in her introduction, the deaths of several gay men who had been murdered on a beach of that name in Australia. The duet sounded more contemplative than funereal, perhaps due to the spirit of LeWitt’s bold colored shapes—including a bull’s eye and a long wavy line that suggested the ocean in this context.

Contemplation abruptly ended when the audience moved on to another take on young men’s spirit, as our Name Brand society, an electrified improvisation performed on synthesizers and drums that did its damnedest to fill Mass MoCA’s largest gallery—almost a football field in size with 18-feet-high catwalks. This was the site of The Archaeology of Another Possible Future, by Liz Glynn, a sprawling collection of pyramid-shaped caves formed by factory pallets, multi-colored shipping containers and hospital-type gurneys. When the trio stopped playing we could hear a soprano perched on a catwalk, singing words on sheets of paper that she blithely tore in pieces and cast down. If the exhibit was a scene from the future, an audience member might think, the howling music was a valid protest against it, and why even bother to recycle the torn-up paper?

Having a Bang On A Can staffer lead the viewers to the widely dispersed gallery performances created a kind of indoor pilgrimage promising new discoveries. Our final way station was the Lure Of The Dark exhibit, a variety of artists’ responses to the mysteries of the night displayed in dimly lit galleries. The art pilgrims trekked all the way to the farthest one, where a string trio played The Black Pearl, by Ailie Robertson, which drew inspiration from Goldberg Variation #25 and a Scottish folk tune.

The Scottish-tune influence conjured up the image of a cottage dimly lit by a peat fire. And if you got close enough to one of the gallery painting’s placards, you could read that Patrick Bermingham’s scene of a moonlit path is titled Midway on our path in life— a reference to the first line of Dante’s Inferno. For a museum visitor without a Bang On a Can staffer to guide them through the maze-like MASS MoCA, a follow-up line in the poem would be more apt: For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

In Search Of Dan Rhode
by Sarah Lindmark

With my last bit of crumbling dessert, I sat down at a small round table in MASS MoCA’s café, Lickety Split. The man I assumed to be composer Daniel Rhode sat across from me, clean shaven, wearing a dark blue button-down shirt, with slick hair and a genuine smile.

He reached out to shake my hand. “Hi, I’m Philip Snyder.”

At that moment, it dawned on me that not only had I mistakenly asked the wrong person for an interview, but that I had somehow managed to start the interview before realizing it. At the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival each July, MASS MoCA is teeming with bright, young musicians from around the world. They’ve all gathered to make friends and new music under the guidance of the Bang on a Can organization, a group of established musicians that have been writing, performing, and recording experimental music for over twenty years. I hadn’t considered the possibility that in the process of meeting everyone as quickly as I could in between concerts, rehearsals, and seminars, I might accidentally mix two of them up. Yet there I was, trying to be as pleasant as possible, talking to the wrong person.

In my defense, I had experienced quite the myriad of colors, sounds, and people earlier that day. MASS MoCA is packed with the work of some of the best in visual art (Liz Glynn, James Turrell, Natasha Bowdoin, and Sol LeWitt just to name a few), and combining it with a diverse array of music can be a little overwhelming. One of the concerts I attended had the audience walk to a different gallery space between each piece, making the hour and a half show feel similar to an art walk or a musical scavenger hunt. Called a lunch time recital, this type of multimedia experience is not new to either MASS MoCA or Bang On a Can. Nor is it new to composer Daniel Rhode, whose piece titled As Our Name Brand Society was performed at the recital.

Featuring drum set, keyboard, and synthesizer, Rhode’s As Our Name Brand Society had a distinct punk rock flavor that stopped suddenly when a vocalist appeared out of thin air on a raised metal platform – part of Glynn’s installation – around which the performance took place, reading something in a severe, urgent tone. She later tore her sheet of lyrics to shreds and sprinkled them onto the heads of the bemused audience. Although it was difficult to make out most of the vocalist’s text from my position below, her timbre blended well with the ensemble and added a distinctly human element to an altogether cold and hardcore piece. The only line I was able to make out occurred at the very end: “right in the middle of it comes a smiling mortician.” I was left both bewildered and fascinated – the piece stopped just as suddenly as it began, and I couldn’t keep myself from laughing.

The second of the two Rhode works was introduced by the composer: in pre-performance remarks, he stated that he’s particularly fascinated by the Liz Glynn gallery and “how our humanity changes as we go from working with physical objects to swimming in some digital ether.” His words clarified some of my suspicions about As Our Name Brand Society, and the piece that unfolded after his short preface continued to pull back the curtain. Titled Zero System, the piece is about “human movement.” He said, “I’m using some of the ideas from my electronic music, but really trying to make it human. You’re going to hear a lot of these mechanical rhythms that come together in some giant human, robot whole.” With driving, interwoven rhythmic lines punctuated intermittently by the piccolo and xylophone, the composer’s mechanical influence in Zero System is unmistakable. The ensemble dropped out periodically, leaving the pianist alone with a repeated polyrhythmic figure. The human element fought back in the low tones of the bass, but was eventually swallowed by the rest of the ensemble once again. Despite having little programmatic context outside of a single forty-five second pre-concert talk by the composer, Rhode’s two works felt thematically linked. Both grapple with hard-hitting subject matter – our dependence on technology and our materialistic culture – and both are musically drawn from noise rock. This link led me to my desire to interview him and spend more time engaged with his work this week, even if it meant handling a few bumps along the way.

After fifteen minutes or so of excellent conversation from flutist Philip Snyder, I decided to close out the interview with, “One last thing – I’m looking for a composer by the name of Daniel Rhode for another interview, do you know where he might be?”

His ears decide what we are hearing: amplifying the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival
by Lasse D. Hansen

“Okay, what do you guys need to be different?,” sound engineer Andrew Cotton asks from the back of the empty hall as soon as the ensemble stops playing. The time is 3:30pm, Monday afternoon, and it’s the first day of the final week of the three-week Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival.

For the past two weeks, the musicians have worked intensively with the festival’s nine composition Fellows at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art campus to realize nine new works written for the occasion.

Right now, eight of the Musician Fellows are on stage, rehearsing Zero System – a groovy piece by composition Fellow Daniel Rhode consisting of waltzing melodic fragments – for the last part of the process: the sound rehearsal for the World Premiere Composer Concert in just one hour.

Cotton’s fingers rest on ten of the 32 faders on the extensive mixer desk at which he is seated. On a small monitor screen he can follow the sound levels of all the individual instruments and with a microphone he is able to speak directly to the musicians on stage. Most of the time, however, he shouts through the hall. It works perfectly fine.

Mission control – where Sound Engineer Andrew Cotton works the audio magic
(John Schaefer/ NYPR)

The sound engineer has been working with the Bang on a Can All-Stars since 1996, and he is introduced as “the seventh member of the band” by Bang on a Can co-founder Julia Wolfe. “It’s a long-term relationship,” she points out.

“A lot less guitar, please,” one of the percussionists answers. “And if possible, can I get a little more bass clarinet?” At this time, it’s not so much about actually rehearsing the pieces as it is about setting the right levels of amplification for the musicians on stage.

“We should probably kill the monitors for this,” the clarinetist and faculty member Ken Thomson suggests as they decide to move on to the next piece on the program, Heron and the Bell by composition fellow Guusje Ingen Housz. This means that Andrew Cotton gets a brief but much needed break on a very long work day.

The piece is about simplicity, stillness and movement, according to the Dutch-born Housz, and for the entire piece the two percussionists are moving calmly and almost processionally across the stage. One is playing a singing bowl, the other is playing shackles.

The piano and bass players join by adding simple, meditative harmonies to the percussion, quickly followed by woodwinds playing short two-note melodies. The piece is slowly assembled from these musical elements, both free floating and structured like planets in a solar system.

In a brief moment of silence an unexpected creaking sound appears. First, it is not clear where the sound comes from, but it quickly turns out that it is the stage floor that creaks, amplified through the microphones on stage. The musicians interrupt music to discuss different solutions, and Cotton is called to the stage to help. So much for that break.

The solution, he says, is to move the percussionists to the floor in front of the stage, along with the strings that are taped to the floor to guide the musicians’ walk. “Can we move the stairs?,” one of the musicians shouts through the room, and three stage hands quickly enters to move it.

“I just broke my golden rule,” Andrew Cotton says walking across the room to take his seat again with the audience now entering the room. “I changed something five minutes before the concert.”

Now another unexpected sound appears, this time from above. From the roof, a deep and soft rumble moves down the walls, amplified by the whole room. The musicians are looking up. A member of the audience turns to me, saying “Wow, the rain on the roof sounds amazing!” There is no way to fix that. It will be part of the concert.

See the full article here .

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

NewSounds.org infuses the eclectic spirit of the radio show into a full online and live event experience. Combining the New Sounds radio show, WNYC’s Soundcheck podcast and the adventurous spirit of WQXR’s Q2 Music, NewSounds.org will be a place for discovery, conversation, insights into the creative process, and of course 24/7 music.
The centerpiece is New Sounds Radio, an online station hosted by New Sounds founder and long-running host John Schaefer, but infused with new, emerging voices including experimental musicians Kelly Moran, Eliza Bagg and Lora-Faye Åshuvud, and tastemakers Gamall Awad and Matt Werth, along with WQXR’s Helga Davis and Terrance McKnight, and composer-guitarist Phil Kline. The station will feature an array of styles and genres – from singer Courtney Barnett to contemporary classical music ensemble Kronos Quartet, from jazz icon Henry Threadgill to the Nordic folk music of Wardruna, from electronic composer and bandleader Anna Meredith to the stunning vocals of Puerto Rico’s Ileana Cabra.
“With almost everything ever recorded anywhere now available online, where do you start? New Sounds might be the place,” said John Schaefer. “We try to be friendly and jargon free, and gleefully oblivious of genre. Our goal is to find the artists, the songs, and the sounds that you might love – if only you get a chance to hear them. And we believe that algorithms won’t give you the same experience as a set of recommendations from real people. A friendly guide is the best way to discover new music, or music that defies easy categorization; and some of that music just might change your life.”
“For three decades, New Sounds was one of the last bastions of free form FM programming; completely genre-free and dictated solely by the impeccable and irresistible tastes of its host,” said Alex Ambrose, Senior Producer, New Sounds. “NewSounds.org will usher that sense of discovery and unpredictability into the digital age, drawing on the best of New York’s curatorial and taste-making power.”

John Schaefer

For new music by living composers

newsounds.org from New York Public Radio

https://www.wnyc.org/
93.9FM
https://www.wqxr.org/
105.9FM

Home

For great Jazz

88.3FM http://wbgo.org/

WPRB 103.3FM

Dan Buskirk Spinning Jazz Mondays 11:00AM-1:00PM
Will Constantine Jr, Blues Bop and Beyond Thursdays 11:00-2:00 featuring Latin Jazz
Jerry Gordon Serenade to a Cookoo Frdays 11:00AM-2:00PM with Jerry’s Room at 1:00Pm
Jeannie Becker Sunday Jazz 10:00AM-1:00Pm

Please visit The Jazz Loft Project based on the work of Sam Stephenson
Please visit The Jazz Loft Radio project from New York Public Radio

From NEWMUSICUSA and Bang on a Can: “Artists at Noguchi | Bang on a Can: String Noise”

From NEWMUSICUSA

and

Bang On a Can the original DIY New Music Organization

Sunday, August 12, 2018
at 3:00 PM

The Noguchi Museum
9-01 33rd Road
Long Island City, NY 11106

Free Event
https://www.noguchi.org/programs/public/bang-on-a-can-string-noise-august-12-2018

Bang on a Can and The Noguchi Museum continue their 2018 monthly summer concert series with String Noise, presented in the Museum’s outdoor sculpture garden. In case of rain, the concert will take place in the galleries.

Blurring the lines of classical and avant-garde, String Noise (violinists Conrad Harris and Pauline Kim) will perform music by Georg Friedrich Haas, David Lang, Pauline Kim Harris, Jessie Cox, Paul Reller, and Richard Carrick. The performance also features punk covers and the title work of their debut album on Northern Spy Records, The Book of Strange Positions, by 2018 Guggenheim fellow Eric Lyon.

String Noise
New York City, NY

“TRAILBLAZING DUO” – (TIME OUT NY)

“THE ENTERPRISING DUO, STRING NOISE… LIGHTNING FAST REFLEXES AND WARMLY MATCHED SOUNDS” – (NEW YORK TIMES)

“FORMIDABLE DISPLAY OF VIRTUOSITY”- (NEW MUSIC BOX)

“THEY WERE GREETED WITH A THUNDERING OVATION, MORE COMMON FOR AMERICAN IDOLS” – (HUFFINGTON POST)

“NEW YORK’s MOST DARING VIOLIN DUO” – (TIME OUT NY)

String Noise is an “enterprising violin duo” in NYC comprised of “two of the most focused and lustrous-toned avant stalwarts.” Channeling “all the sweetness of Mantovani’s 1001 strings into just eight,” Conrad Harris and Pauline Kim Harris, who are married, break down barriers and expand the traditional boundaries of the two violin repertoire, redefining the possible.

String Noise is a classical, avant-punk violin duo comprised of violinists Conrad Harris and Pauline Kim Harris. Since its inception in 2011 at Ostrava New Music Days, they have expanded the two violin repertoire in over 50 new works to include larger collaborations with multimedia art, electronics, video projections, opera and dance.

Their first feature album The Book of Strange Positions was released on NORTHERN SPY RECORDS in November 2015. Tiny Mix Tapes describes this collection of original works and arrangements by Eric Lyon of punk covers by Bad Brains, Violent Femmes, Deerhoof, Radiohead, and Black Flag as a “mix of classic punk covers and ZERO APOLOGIES.” Their 7” inch EP Covers produced by Deerhoof drummer and composer Greg Saunier is also available on Northern Spy Records.

String Noise was highlighted in Performa 2011 with artist Will Cotton and was the featured ensemble for the launch of composers collective Indexical (David Kant, Andrew Christopher Smith, Mustafa Walker and Beau Sievers). Premieres by String Noise include works by Christian Wolff, John King, Phill Niblock, Caleb Burhans, David Lang, Petr Kotik, Du Yun, Annie Gosfield, Bernhard Lang, Spencer Topel, Derek Hurst, Jerome Begin, Elizabeth Hoffman, John Zorn, Greg Saunier, Alex Mincek, Yoon-Ji Lee, Catherine Lamb, Petr Bakla, Richard Carrick and Alvin Lucier, to name some. String Noise has performed at Issue Project Room, Czech Center, Roulette, EXAPNO, Rockwood Music Hall and the Stone and has been heard on WNYC, WKCR and WFMU.

Co-concertmasters of Wordless Music Orchestra, Ensemble LPR and the S.E.M. Ensemble, String Noise has collaborated in special projects with artists such as Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead), John Cale (Velvet Underground), Billy Martin (Martin, Medeski, Wood), Mica Levi (Micachu and the Shapes), Jon Brion, Laurie Anderson, Jason Moran, Roscoe Mitchell, Max Richter and and Rostam (Vampire Weekend).

As curators, String Noise presented Drawing Sound: Part II at the Drawing Center – a three night mini-festival featuring artists Alvin Lucier, Greg Saunier and Jad Fair and is a co-curator for Carnegie Hill Concerts in New York.

Static Strands and String Noise by Annie Gosfield

Harvestworks, in partnership with Composers Now Festival presents Annie Gosfield – Jammed Radios, Flying Signals, and String Noise.

See the full article here .

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Bang On A Can David Lang- Michael Gordon- Julia Wolfe © Peter Serling

Bang On A Can All-Stars Members Ashley Bathgate, cello
Robert Black, bass
Vicky Chow, piano
David Cossin, percussion
Mark Stewart, guitars
Ken Thomson, clarinet

Bang on a Can is dedicated to making music new. Since its first Marathon concert in 1987, Bang on a Can has been creating an international community dedicated to innovative music, wherever it is found. With adventurous programs, it commissions new composers, performs, presents, and records new work, develops new audiences, and educates the musicians of the future. Bang on a Can is building a world in which powerful new musical ideas flow freely across all genres and borders. Bang on a Can plays “a central role in fostering a new kind of audience that doesn’t concern itself with boundaries. If music is made with originality and integrity, these listeners will come.” (The New York Times)
Bang on a Can has grown from a one-day New York-based Marathon concert (on Mother’s Day in 1987 in a SoHo art gallery) to a multi-faceted performing arts organization with a broad range of year-round international activities. “When we started Bang on a Can, we never imagined that our 12-hour marathon festival of mostly unknown music would morph into a giant international organization dedicated to the support of experimental music, wherever we would find it,” write Bang on a Can Co-Founders Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe. “But it has, and we are so gratified to be still hard at work, all these years later. The reason is really clear to us – we started this organization because we believed that making new music is a utopian act – that people needed to hear this music and they needed to hear it presented in the most persuasive way, with the best players, with the best programs, for the best listeners, in the best context. Our commitment to changing the environment for this music has kept us busy and growing, and we are not done yet.”

Formed in 1992, the Bang on a Can All-Stars are recognized worldwide for their ultra-dynamic live performances and recordings of today’s most innovative music. Freely crossing the boundaries between classical, jazz, rock, world and experimental music, this six-member amplified ensemble has consistently forged a distinct category-defying identity, taking music into uncharted territories. Performing each year throughout the U.S. and internationally, the All-Stars have shattered the definition of what concert music is today.

Together, the All-Stars have worked in unprecedented close collaboration with some of the most important and inspiring musicians of our time, including Steve Reich, Ornette Coleman, Burmese circle drum master Kyaw Kyaw Naing, Tan Dun, DJ Spooky, and many more. The group’s celebrated projects include their landmark recordings of Brian Eno’s ambient classic Music for Airports and Terry Riley’s In C, as well as live performances with Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Don Byron, Iva Bittova, Thurston Moore, Owen Pallett and others. The All-Stars were awarded Musical America’s Ensemble of the Year and have been heralded as “the country’s most important vehicle for contemporary music” by the San Francisco Chronicle.

Current and recent project highlights include the touring performances and recording of Julia Wolfe’s Pulitzer Prize winning Anthracite Fields for the All-Stars and guest choir, the record release of Wolfe’s acclaimed Steel Hammer, featuring Trio Mediaeval, plus a moving theatrically staged collaboration with SITI Company and director Anne Bogart; Field Recordings, a major multi-media project and CD/DVD now featuring 30 commissioned works by Tyondai Braxton, Mira Calix, Anna Clyne, Bryce Dessner, Florent Ghys, Michael Gordon, Jóhann Jóhannsson, David Lang, Christian Marclay, Steve Reich, Todd Reynolds, Julia Wolfe, and more; the Lincoln Center Festival 2017 world premiere of Cloud River Mountain, a new collaboration featuring Chinese superstar singer Gong Linna; the world premiere performance and recording of Steve Reich’s 2×5 including a sold-out performance at Carnegie Hall, and much more. With a massive repertoire of works written specifically for the group’s distinctive instrumentation and style of performance, the All-Stars have become a genre in their own right. The All-Stars record on Cantaloupe Music and have released past recordings on Sony, Universal and Nonesuch.

At NEWMUSICUSA we see ourselves first and foremost as advocates. Our mission is to support and promote new music created in the United States. We do that in many ways, fostering connections, deepening knowledge, encouraging appreciation, and providing financial support. In recognition of the possibility and power inherent in the virtual world, we’ve worked to build a strong internet platform to serve our constituency. And that constituency is broad and diverse, from composers and performers to presenters and producers, casual listeners to die-hard fans. We’re truly committed to serving the WHOLE new music community.

As we go about our work, we make a point of not defining too precisely what we mean by new music. To define is to limit. It’s a spectacular time for musical creativity in part because so much music is being made that isn’t bound by conventional limitations of style or genre or background. The music that we hear being created in such abundance all around us is definition enough. We simply want it to flourish.

We’re fortunate to have as our legacy the history of previous decades of good works done by the American Music Center and Meet The Composer, the two great organizations that merged to form us in 2011. Their legacies have also brought a small financial endowment that mostly helps support our grantmaking. But we’re not a foundation. We depend decisively each year on the generosity of so many institutions and individuals around the country who are dedicated as we are to the advancement of new music and are devoted to supporting our work.

New Music USA is part of an international community of advocates for the arts. We’re members of the Performing Arts Alliance, the International Association of Music Information Centres, and the International Society for Contemporary Music. Those partnerships help us represent the interests of our constituents at every level.

No matter how far ranging our networks, our focus is always solidly on what brings these many constituents and communities together in the first place: the music. When someone uses our platform to listen to something new, recommend a favorite to a friend, or to seek financial assistance or information to support the creation or performance of new work, the whole community is strengthened. Together we’re helping new music reach new ears every day.
Our Vision

We envision in the United States a thriving, interconnected new music community that is available to and impactful for a broad constituency of people.
Our Mission

New Music USA supports and promotes new music created in the United States. We use the power of virtual networks and people to foster connection, deepen knowledge, encourage appreciation, and provide financial support for a diverse constituency of practitioners and appreciators, both within the United States and beyond.

Our Values
We believe in the fundamental importance of creative artists and their work.
We espouse a broad, inclusive understanding of the term “new music.”
We uphold and embrace principles of inclusivity and equitable treatment in all of our activity and across our nation’s broadly diverse population in terms of gender, race, age, location, national origin, sexual orientation, religion, socio-economic status and artistic practice.

John Schaefer

For new music by living composers

newsounds.org from New York Public Radio

https://www.wnyc.org/
93.9FM
https://www.wqxr.org/
105.9FM

Home

For great Jazz

88.3FM http://wbgo.org/

WPRB 103.3FM

Dan Buskirk Spinning Jazz Mondays 11:00AM-1:00PM
Will Constantine Jr, Blues Bop and Beyond Thursdays 11:00-2:00 featuring Latin Jazz
Jerry Gordon Serenade to a Cookoo Frdays 11:00AM-2:00PM with Jerry’s Room at 1:00Pm
Jeannie Becker Sunday Jazz 10:00AM-1:00Pm

Please visit The Jazz Loft Project based on the work of Sam Stephenson
Please visit The Jazz Loft Radio project from New York Public Radio

From NEWMUSICUSA: “Bang on a Can: Judith Berkson at The Jewish Museum”

From NEWMUSICUSA

Judith Berkson

Thursday, July 19, 2018
at 7:30 PM

The Jewish Museum
1109 5th Ave
New York, NY 10128

$12—20

Tickets

Bang on a Can and the Jewish Museum’s 2018-2019 concert season, pairing innovative music with the Museum’s exhibitions and showcasing leading female performers and composers, begins with a performance by Judith Berkson. An innovative Brooklyn-based composer, pianist, and vocalist, Berkson will perform a dynamic set featuring her unique blend of cantorial music, Hebrew liturgy, and her indie-contemporary composed songs, in conjunction with the Jewish Museum’s exhibition Chaim Soutine: Flesh.

Mezzo soprano, pianist and composer Judith Berkson uses voice along with analog and digital keyboards to create pieces that cross the boundaries of classical, electronic and experimental music. She has collaborated with Kronos Quartet, City Opera, and has performed works by Chaya Czernowin, Joe Maneri, Rick Burkhardt, Gerard Pape, Julia Werntz, Aleksandra Vrebalov, and Milton Babbitt. She has presented solo works at the Picasso Museum Malaga, Le Poisson Rouge, Roulette and the Concertgebouw. Called “an intriguing young singer-pianist,” her solo album Oylam (ECM Records, 2010), was described as “standards and Schubert and liturgical music, swing and chilly silences. I can’t get enough of it,” by the New York Times. In 2012 she completed The Vienna Rite, a chamber opera based on the friendship between Franz Schubert and Viennese cantor Salomon Sulzer. She is currently working on a recording of pieces for voice and electronics.

Bang on a Can
Brooklyn, NY

Bang on a Can is dedicated to making music new. Since its first Marathon concert in 1987, Bang on a Can has been creating an international community dedicated to innovative music, wherever it is found. With adventurous programs, it commissions, performs, presents, and records new works, develops new audiences, and educates the musicians of the future. Bang on a Can is building a world in which powerful new musical ideas flow freely across all genres and borders.

It all started with the first Marathon back in 1987. Three young composers – Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe and David Lang – noticed that great “art” music was coming from all sorts of interesting new places.

Bang On A Can David Lang- Michael Gordon- Julia Wolfe © Peter Serling

So they created the concert of their dreams…the come-as-you-are informal sampling of everything innovative, exciting and/or unusual – The Bang on a Can Marathon.

The ethos and energy of the Marathon proved unstoppable. In the coming years, we addressed the need to commission new work (People’s Commissioning Fund), create and nurture top-notch ensembles (Bang on a Can All-Stars, Asphalt Orchestra), record outstanding performances of pieces both new and under-heard (Cantaloupe Music), inspire the next generation (Summer Festival at MASS MoCA) and produce and present visionary new multi-media works on major stages.

Bang on a Can All-Stars Group, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Evan Ziporyn, Michael Gordon, Mark Stewart, Robert Black, Lisa Moore, Steven Schick. © Stephanie Berger

Asphalt Orchestra, Stephanie Berger/Courtesy photo

Recently, we honed a mobile-studio approach to bringing digital music-making to the streets, to the schools, and around the world through an educational recording approach we call Found Sound Nation (FSN). From this venture, we partnered with the State Department to create OneBeat, an international cultural exchange designed to bring creative, socially engaged musicians together from all corners of the globe.

Today, the very phrase “Bang on a Can” connotes a thorough and fearless vision of music without prejudice, and of contemporary composition as a vital and powerful part of the cultural landscape. Our performances, recordings, broadcasts and videos are heard and seen by millions annually.

1. The Bang on a Can Marathon, our original and signature program, bringing dozens of composers and hundreds of musicians to the stage for a day-long informal FREE concert in NYC each year.

2. The annual People’s Commissioning Fund (PCF) Week featuring performances of new works by mid-career composers commissioned for the BoaC All-Stars by hundreds of our supporters.

3. Our frequent NYC concerts, from BAM to Lincoln Center to smaller, funky venues all over town.

4. Our Touring schedule, which includes more than 30 from L.A. to Latvia, from Kansas to Kyrgystan.

5. Regular Commissions, new Record Releases and featured Broadcasts.

6. Our annual Summer Festival of Music at MASS MoCA, the first national residency program for gifted young composers and performers interested in experimental music.

7. Our audacious marching project – Asphalt Orchestra – a 12-person, virtuosic mobile ensemble.

8. A new initiative blending music and technology in public schools and beyond, called Found Sound Nation. Its OneBeat intiative, in partnership with the Dept of State, is an experiment in cultural diplomacy, bringing 60+ musicians from far-flung corners of the globe for a monthlong residency and tour.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings
Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

At NEWMUSICUSA we see ourselves first and foremost as advocates. Our mission is to support and promote new music created in the United States. We do that in many ways, fostering connections, deepening knowledge, encouraging appreciation, and providing financial support. In recognition of the possibility and power inherent in the virtual world, we’ve worked to build a strong internet platform to serve our constituency. And that constituency is broad and diverse, from composers and performers to presenters and producers, casual listeners to die-hard fans. We’re truly committed to serving the WHOLE new music community.

As we go about our work, we make a point of not defining too precisely what we mean by new music. To define is to limit. It’s a spectacular time for musical creativity in part because so much music is being made that isn’t bound by conventional limitations of style or genre or background. The music that we hear being created in such abundance all around us is definition enough. We simply want it to flourish.

We’re fortunate to have as our legacy the history of previous decades of good works done by the American Music Center and Meet The Composer, the two great organizations that merged to form us in 2011. Their legacies have also brought a small financial endowment that mostly helps support our grantmaking. But we’re not a foundation. We depend decisively each year on the generosity of so many institutions and individuals around the country who are dedicated as we are to the advancement of new music and are devoted to supporting our work.

New Music USA is part of an international community of advocates for the arts. We’re members of the Performing Arts Alliance, the International Association of Music Information Centres, and the International Society for Contemporary Music. Those partnerships help us represent the interests of our constituents at every level.

No matter how far ranging our networks, our focus is always solidly on what brings these many constituents and communities together in the first place: the music. When someone uses our platform to listen to something new, recommend a favorite to a friend, or to seek financial assistance or information to support the creation or performance of new work, the whole community is strengthened. Together we’re helping new music reach new ears every day.
Our Vision

We envision in the United States a thriving, interconnected new music community that is available to and impactful for a broad constituency of people.
Our Mission

New Music USA supports and promotes new music created in the United States. We use the power of virtual networks and people to foster connection, deepen knowledge, encourage appreciation, and provide financial support for a diverse constituency of practitioners and appreciators, both within the United States and beyond.

Our Values
We believe in the fundamental importance of creative artists and their work.
We espouse a broad, inclusive understanding of the term “new music.”
We uphold and embrace principles of inclusivity and equitable treatment in all of our activity and across our nation’s broadly diverse population in terms of gender, race, age, location, national origin, sexual orientation, religion, socio-economic status and artistic practice.

John Schaefer

For new music by living composers

newsounds.org from New York Public Radio

https://www.wnyc.org/
93.9FM
https://www.wqxr.org/
105.9FM

Home

For great Jazz

88.3FM http://wbgo.org/

WPRB 103.3FM

Dan Buskirk Spinning Jazz Mondays 11:00AM-1:00PM
Will Constantine Jr, Blues Bop and Beyond Thursdays 11:00-2:00 featuring Latin Jazz
Jerry Gordon Serenade to a Cookoo Frdays 11:00AM-2:00PM with Jerry’s Room at 1:00Pm
Jeannie Becker Sunday Jazz 10:00AM-1:00Pm

Please visit The Jazz Loft Project based on the work of Sam Stephenson
Please visit The Jazz Loft Radio project from New York Public Radio

From NEWMUSICUSA: “Artists at Noguchi | Bang on a Can: Elena Moon Park and Friends”

From NEWMUSICUSA

Sunday, July 8, 2018
at 3:00 PM

The Noguchi Museum
9-01 33rd Road
Long Island City, NY 11106

Free Event
Tickets

Bang on a Can and The Noguchi Museum continue their 2018 monthly summer concert series with Elena Moon Park and Friends performing in the Museum’s outdoor sculpture garden. In case of rain, the concert will take place in the galleries.

Elena Moon Park is a Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist with a passion for the preservation of diverse music and cultures in the United States. Joined by Akiko Hiroshima (vocals), Kaoru Watanabe (taiko and fue), and Gamin (piri), this special performance will feature interpretations of songs from her album Rabbit Days and Dumplings — all-ages music featuring reimagined folk and children’s songs from East Asia, including Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan and Tibet — plus original tunes and improvisations by these powerhouse musicians.

Bang on a Can
Brooklyn, NY

Bang on a Can is dedicated to making music new. Since its first Marathon concert in 1987, Bang on a Can has been creating an international community dedicated to innovative music, wherever it is found. With adventurous programs, it commissions, performs, presents, and records new works, develops new audiences, and educates the musicians of the future. Bang on a Can is building a world in which powerful new musical ideas flow freely across all genres and borders.

It all started with the first Marathon back in 1987. Three young composers – Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe and David Lang – noticed that great “art” music was coming from all sorts of interesting new places.

Bang On A Can David Lang- Michael Gordon- Julia Wolfe © Peter Serling

So they created the concert of their dreams…the come-as-you-are informal sampling of everything innovative, exciting and/or unusual – The Bang on a Can Marathon.

The ethos and energy of the Marathon proved unstoppable. In the coming years, we addressed the need to commission new work (People’s Commissioning Fund), create and nurture top-notch ensembles (Bang on a Can All-Stars, Asphalt Orchestra), record outstanding performances of pieces both new and under-heard (Cantaloupe Music), inspire the next generation (Summer Festival at MASS MoCA) and produce and present visionary new multi-media works on major stages.

Bang on a Can All-Stars Group, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Evan Ziporyn, Michael Gordon, Mark Stewart, Robert Black, Lisa Moore, Steven Schick. © Stephanie Berger

Asphalt Orchestra, Stephanie Berger/Courtesy photo

Recently, we honed a mobile-studio approach to bringing digital music-making to the streets, to the schools, and around the world through an educational recording approach we call Found Sound Nation (FSN). From this venture, we partnered with the State Department to create OneBeat, an international cultural exchange designed to bring creative, socially engaged musicians together from all corners of the globe.

Today, the very phrase “Bang on a Can” connotes a thorough and fearless vision of music without prejudice, and of contemporary composition as a vital and powerful part of the cultural landscape. Our performances, recordings, broadcasts and videos are heard and seen by millions annually.

1. The Bang on a Can Marathon, our original and signature program, bringing dozens of composers and hundreds of musicians to the stage for a day-long informal FREE concert in NYC each year.

2. The annual People’s Commissioning Fund (PCF) Week featuring performances of new works by mid-career composers commissioned for the BoaC All-Stars by hundreds of our supporters.

3. Our frequent NYC concerts, from BAM to Lincoln Center to smaller, funky venues all over town.

4. Our Touring schedule, which includes more than 30 from L.A. to Latvia, from Kansas to Kyrgystan.

5. Regular Commissions, new Record Releases and featured Broadcasts.

6. Our annual Summer Festival of Music at MASS MoCA, the first national residency program for gifted young composers and performers interested in experimental music.

7. Our audacious marching project – Asphalt Orchestra – a 12-person, virtuosic mobile ensemble.

8. A new initiative blending music and technology in public schools and beyond, called Found Sound Nation. Its OneBeat intiative, in partnership with the Dept of State, is an experiment in cultural diplomacy, bringing 60+ musicians from far-flung corners of the globe for a monthlong residency and tour.

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings
Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

At NEWMUSICUSA we see ourselves first and foremost as advocates. Our mission is to support and promote new music created in the United States. We do that in many ways, fostering connections, deepening knowledge, encouraging appreciation, and providing financial support. In recognition of the possibility and power inherent in the virtual world, we’ve worked to build a strong internet platform to serve our constituency. And that constituency is broad and diverse, from composers and performers to presenters and producers, casual listeners to die-hard fans. We’re truly committed to serving the WHOLE new music community.

As we go about our work, we make a point of not defining too precisely what we mean by new music. To define is to limit. It’s a spectacular time for musical creativity in part because so much music is being made that isn’t bound by conventional limitations of style or genre or background. The music that we hear being created in such abundance all around us is definition enough. We simply want it to flourish.

We’re fortunate to have as our legacy the history of previous decades of good works done by the American Music Center and Meet The Composer, the two great organizations that merged to form us in 2011. Their legacies have also brought a small financial endowment that mostly helps support our grantmaking. But we’re not a foundation. We depend decisively each year on the generosity of so many institutions and individuals around the country who are dedicated as we are to the advancement of new music and are devoted to supporting our work.

New Music USA is part of an international community of advocates for the arts. We’re members of the Performing Arts Alliance, the International Association of Music Information Centres, and the International Society for Contemporary Music. Those partnerships help us represent the interests of our constituents at every level.

No matter how far ranging our networks, our focus is always solidly on what brings these many constituents and communities together in the first place: the music. When someone uses our platform to listen to something new, recommend a favorite to a friend, or to seek financial assistance or information to support the creation or performance of new work, the whole community is strengthened. Together we’re helping new music reach new ears every day.
Our Vision

We envision in the United States a thriving, interconnected new music community that is available to and impactful for a broad constituency of people.
Our Mission

New Music USA supports and promotes new music created in the United States. We use the power of virtual networks and people to foster connection, deepen knowledge, encourage appreciation, and provide financial support for a diverse constituency of practitioners and appreciators, both within the United States and beyond.

Our Values
We believe in the fundamental importance of creative artists and their work.
We espouse a broad, inclusive understanding of the term “new music.”
We uphold and embrace principles of inclusivity and equitable treatment in all of our activity and across our nation’s broadly diverse population in terms of gender, race, age, location, national origin, sexual orientation, religion, socio-economic status and artistic practice.

John Schaefer

For new music by living composers

newsounds.org from New York Public Radio

https://www.wnyc.org/
93.9FM
https://www.wqxr.org/
105.9FM

Home

For great Jazz

88.3FM http://wbgo.org/

WPRB 103.3FM

Dan Buskirk Spinning Jazz Mondays 11:00AM-1:00PM
Will Constantine Jr, Blues Bop and Beyond Thursdays 11:00-2:00 featuring Latin Jazz
Jerry Gordon Serenade to a Cookoo Frdays 11:00AM-2:00PM with Jerry’s Room at 1:00Pm
Jeannie Becker Sunday Jazz 10:00AM-1:00Pm

Please visit The Jazz Loft Project based on the work of Sam Stephenson
Please visit The Jazz Loft Radio project from New York Public Radio

From Cantaloupe Music via Sound Streams: “The World of David Lang”

From Cantaloupe Music the recording arm of Bang On a Can, the original New Music DIY organization.

Sound Stream

David Lang, © Peter Serling

Sunday June 3, 2018 at 3:30 p.m. The Gladstone Hotel, 1214 Queen Street West, Toronto

Schedule
Doors Open 3 p.m.
Discussion and Performance 3:30 P.M.

TICKETS
Save a Seat – $PWYC: Reserve a regular seat with a donation of any amount, so that you aren’t left standing.
General Admission – Free: Free as always! Seating is first come, first served.
Register now

No list of pieces to be performed has been included.

“Music always sounds better with a drink in your hand.” —David Lang

Grab a drink and join David Lang as we dig into this Pulitzer Prize-winning composer’s unique sound world. Bring your adventurous spirit to our final Encounters of the season, Sunday, June 3, at the Gladstone Hotel Melody Bar.

David Lang was the one-time enfant terrible of the new music community, beginning his career as a founding member of the ground-breaking Bang on a Can, (“the country’s most important vehicle for contemporary music,” San Francisco Chronicle) and is still its artistic director. Lang is also one of the mentors for the Soundstreams’ 2018 Emerging Composer Workshop. He joins us, days ahead of the opening of his The Little Match Girl Passion at Crow’s Theatre, for a late afternoon discussion, Q&A and musical interlude.

Adanya Dunn, soprano and Stephanie Chua, keyboard, will be performing various David Lang compositions.

Adanya Dunn. No image credit

Stephanie Chua. No image credit

Related Events

The Little Match Girl Passion June 6 & 7, 2018, 8:00 PM Crow’s Theatre, Toronto

(Cory Weaver)

See the full article here .

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

John Schaefer

For new music by living composers

newsounds.org from New York Public Radio

https://www.wnyc.org/
93.9FM
https://www.wqxr.org/
105.9FM

Home

For great Jazz

88.3FM http://wbgo.org/

WPRB 103.3FM

Dan Buskirk Spinning Jazz Mondays 11:00AM-1:00PM
Will Constantine Jr, Blues Bop and Beyond Thursdays 11:00-2:00 featuring Latin Jazz
Jerry Gordon Serenade to a Cookoo Frdays 11:00AM-2:00PM with Jerry’s Room at 1:00Pm
Jeannie Becker Sunday Jazz 10:00AM-1:00Pm

Please visit The Jazz Loft Project based on the work of Sam Stephenson
Please visit The Jazz Loft Radio project from New York Public Radio

From ETHEL: “ETHEL’s +Factor Award Benefit”

From ETHEL

Join us for ETHEL’s

20th Anniversary Celebration!

Wednesday June 20, 2018

Honoring peerless new music champions

and Bang on a Can founders

Michael Gordon, David Lang

and Julia Wolfe
with our annual ETHEL +Factor Award

Hosted by John Schaefer

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

280 Broadway

New York, New York 10007

Please visit the full article web page for ticketing as there is no link for tickets.

See the full article here.

ETHEL

ETHEL is: Ralph Farris (viola), Kip Jones (violin), Dorothy Lawson (cello) and Corin Lee (violin).

ETHEL was established in New York City in 1998, quickly earning a reputation as one of America’s most adventurous string quartets—heirs to the likes of the Kronos Quartet and Soldier String Quartet, and part of a generation of young artists blending uptown, conservatory musicianship with downtown genre-crossing—by playing with the intensity and accoutrements of a rock band. The New York Times has described them as “indefatigable and eclectic,” and The New Yorker has deemed them “vital and brilliant.” Nearly two decades into their singular career, ETHEL has in turn become seminal in its own right, a path-breaker for countless new genre-spanning ensembles, and a prolific commissioner of new music.

At the heart of ETHEL is a collaborative ethos—a quest for a common creative expression that is forged in the celebration of community. The quartet creates and tours rich, often multimedia, productions including the evening-length ETHEL’s Documerica, inspired by the tens of thousands of images shot as part of the Environmental Protection Agency’s decadelong Project Documerica, launched in 1971; The River, a collaboration with Taos Pueblo flutist Robert Mirabal (album released June 2016); the introspective Grace, featuring ETHEL’s arrangements of music by Ennio Morricone and Jeff Buckley; and Blue Dress, which pays homage to women making their musical mark on the 21st century.

ETHEL has collaborated with artists including David Byrne, Bang on a Can All Stars, Kaki King, Todd Rundgren, Joe Jackson, Ursula Oppens, Juana Molina, Tom Verlaine, STEW, Andrew Bird, Thomas Dolby, Jeff Peterson, Laurence Hobgood, Jake Shimabukuro and Vijay Iyer.

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

John Schaefer

For new music by living composers

newsounds.org from New York Public Radio

https://www.wnyc.org/
93.9FM
https://www.wqxr.org/
105.9FM

Home

For great Jazz

88.3FM http://wbgo.org/

WPRB 103.3FM

Dan Buskirk Spinning Jazz Mondays 11:00AM-1:00PM
Will Constantine Jr, Blues Bop and Beyond Thursdays 11:00-2:00 featuring Latin Jazz
Jerry Gordon Serenade to a Cookoo Frdays 11:00AM-2:00PM with Jerry’s Room at 1:00Pm
Jeannie Becker Sunday Jazz 10:00AM-1:00Pm

Please visit The Jazz Loft Project based on the work of Sam Stephenson
Please visit The Jazz Loft Radio project from New York Public Radio

From Cantaloupe Music- Pulitzer Finalist: “Sound from the Bench, by Ted Hearne”

Cantaloupe Music is the recording arm of Bang On a Can, the original New Music DIY organization.

Recording released on March 24, 2017 by The Crossing, a five-movement cantata for chamber choir, electric guitar and percussion that raises oblique questions about the crosscurrents of power through excerpts from sources as diverse as Supreme Court rulings and ventriloquism textbooks.

Sound from the Bench
By Ted Hearne

“Sound From the Bench” is a 35-minute cantata for chamber choir, two electric guitars and drums, with a libretto by Jena Osman. It was co-commissioned by Volti and The Crossing.

why these texts?

Sound From the Bench is a reaction to Jena Osman’s incredible book Corporate Relations, a collection of poems that follows the historical trajectory of corporate personhood in the United States. The five movements combine language taken from landmark Supreme Court Cases with words from ventriloquism textbooks.

I was instantly drawn to Osman’s work because of its rich intertextuality: she appropriates a variety of texts from diverse sources and assembles them into a powerful bricolage. I strive toward a similar polyphony of oppositional voices and perspectives in my music, and to bring the chaotic forces of life into the work itself. It was this impulse, and the unabashedly political tone of Osman’s poetry, that made me want to set some part of “Corporate Relations” to music.

why electric guitars?

Sound From the Bench is built around the tension between the human voice and electric guitar. The electric guitar can sound like literally anything. Through circuitry, programming, and analog and digital manipulation, the pitches and rhythms a guitarist plays can be utterly transformed, erasing all human touch. It speaks through an amplifier and could easily drown out any voice. These cyborg-esque qualities contrast the human voice, both in its inescapable limitations and the complex differences found in every individual vocal timbre.

what does “no mouth” mean?

No mouth is Osman’s paraphrase of the central reasoning behind the majority in Bellotti v. First National Bank, the 1978 case upon which Citizens United is based: because corporations don’t have a literal mouth, they cannot literally speak, therefore advertising is their only available method of communication and must be considered speech (and is entitled to First Amendment protections as such).

The phrase the very heart, also found in the second movement, is excerpted from Justice White’s dissent in this case: “It has long been recognized, however, that the special status of corporations has placed them in a position to control vast amounts of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only the economy but the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process.”

about the third movement

The central movement sets words from the oral argument to Citizens United. My brain started firing when I realized this poem of Jena’s was a literal erasure of the Supreme Court document – every phrase appeared in order, and in a position approximating the horizontal spot it appeared on the page. When I printed out the full 83-page oral argument and blacked out every phrase that Jena hadn’t included, the remaining words jumped out at me and started to take on new meanings and inferences. That strange, new energy helped propel the decontextualized text into music.

The time at which the phrases appear approximate and in some way preserve the place at which they appear in the original document. The music between Osman’s text, that which fills the “blank pages,” sometimes includes a quote from Thomas Tallis’s motet Loquebantur Variis Linguis (the text is: “The Apostles spoke in different tongues – Alleluia.”) Aside from loving this music, I liked the image of our Justices as apostles.

“personhood”

What could this word even mean when it is applied to non-human things? The courts have systematically granted constitutional rights to corporations since the Civil War – we concede that a corporation can “speak” even though it has no mouth – and these rights have come at the expense of both the private citizen and the government.

a corporation is to a person as a person is to a machine

friends of the court we know them as good and bad, they too are sheep
and goats ventriloquizing the ghostly fiction

a corporation is to a body as a body is to a puppet

putting it in caricature, if there are natural persons then there are those
who are not that, buying candidates. there are those who are strong on
the ground and then weak in the air. weight shifts to the left leg while
the propaganda arm extends.
(Jena Osman, from Corporate Relations)

• program notes by Ted Hearne, with passages after Eric Howerton’s review of Corporate Relations for The Volta Blog

— from the composer’s website

Biography

Composer, singer and bandleader Ted Hearne (b.1982, Chicago) draws on a wide breadth of influences ranging across music’s full terrain, to create intense, personal and multi-dimensional works.

The New York Times has praised Mr. Hearne for his “tough edge and wildness of spirit,” and “topical, politically sharp-edged works.” Pitchfork called Hearne’s work “some of the most expressive socially engaged music in recent memory — from any genre.”

Hearne’s newest theatrical work, The Source, sets text from the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs, along with words by Chelsea Manning (the U.S. Army private who leaked those classified documents to WikiLeaks), and was premiered to rave reviews last October at the BAM Next Wave Festival in Brooklyn. The New York Times called The Source “a 21st Century masterpiece,” and included it on its list of the best classical vocal performances of 2014 and best albums of 2015, noting that the work “offers a fresh model of how opera and musical theater can tackle contemporary issues: not with documentary realism, but with ambiguity, obliquity, and even sheer confusion.” During the 2016-17 season, the original production of The Source (directed by Daniel Fish) was presented by both the LA Opera and San Francisco Opera.

Hearne’s piece Katrina Ballads, another modern-day oratorio with a primary source libretto, was awarded the 2009 Gaudeamus Prize in composition and was named one of the best classical albums of 2010 by Time Out Chicago and The Washington Post. A recent collaboration paired him with legendary musician Erykah Badu, for whom he wrote an evening-length work combining new music with arrangements of songs from her 2008 album New Amerykah: Part One.

Law of Mosaics, Hearne’s 30-minute piece for string orchestra, will see performances this year by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and San Francisco Symphony. His album of the same name, with Andrew Norman and A Far Cry, was named one of The New Yorker’s notable albums of 2014 by Alex Ross.

A charismatic vocalist, Hearne performs with Philip White as the vocal-electronics duo R WE WHO R WE, whose debut album (New Focus Recordings, 2013) was called “eminently, if weirdly, danceable and utterly gripping.” (Time Out Chicago). Two albums of vocal music, The Source and Outlanders, were recently released on New Amsterdam Records.

Ted Hearne was awarded the 2014 New Voices Residency from Boosey and Hawkes, and recently joined the composition faculty at the University of Southern California. Recent and upcoming commissions include orchestral works for the San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New World Symphony, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and A Far Cry, chamber works for eighth blackbird, Ensemble dal Niente and Alarm Will Sound, and vocal works for Volti, The Crossing and Roomful of Teeth.

See the full article here .

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

John Schaefer

For new music by living composers

newsounds.org from New York Public Radio

https://www.wnyc.org/
93.9FM
https://www.wqxr.org/
105.9FM

Home

For great Jazz

88.3FM http://wbgo.org/

WPRB 103.3FM

Dan Buskirk Spinning Jazz Mondays 11:00AM-1:00PM
Will Constantine Jr, Blues Bop and Beyond Thursdays 11:00-2:00 featuring Latin Jazz
Jerry Gordon Serenade to a Cookoo Frdays 11:00AM-2:00PM with Jerry’s Room at 1:00Pm
Jeannie Becker Sunday Jazz 10:00AM-1:00Pm

Please visit The Jazz Loft Project based on the work of Sam Stephenson
Please visit The Jazz Loft Radio project from New York Public Radio

From Bang On a Can via Red Bull Music Festival: “Tristan Perich: Drift Multiply, Lesley Flanigan”

Bang On a Can is the original DIY New Music Organization

Red Bull Music Festival New York 2018

Thursday 3 May- Friday 25 May, 2018

Various Venues, New York

May 09, 2018

The Cathedral of St. John the Divine
1047 Amsterdam Ave
New York, NY 10025
Find Tickets →

Tristan Perich
Lesley Flanigan

As part of Red Bull Music Festival New York, renowned modern classical composer and sound artist Tristan Perich will premiere his most ambitious project yet: A piece for 50 violins and 50 self-built 1-bit speakers. Perich investigates the spaces where the physical world meets the abstract world of computational electronics, writing intricate arrangements that blend lo-fi 1-bit sound – the lowest possible digital representation of audio – with cascading melodies performed by classically trained musicians. Also performing will be Lesley Flanigan, the experimental electronic musician known for her work with handmade speaker feedback instruments and voice. Flanigan takes a sculptural approach to sound design, and will present a new project for subwoofers and solo voice.

Tristan Perich 1 Bit Symphony 2010 Credit D Yee.

An ambitious, experimental piece for 50 violins and 50 speakers.

Tristan Perich (born 1982)is a contemporary composer and sound artist from New York City who focuses on electronic one bit sound.

Perich composed a series of compositions as well as sound art installations with 1 bit electronics, which Perich describes as being music that never has more than one bit of information being played at any given time. In Denmark he was an artist in residence, where he built a series of sculptures called Interval Studies consisting of large amounts of small speakers all sending out their own frequency. The blending of all of these independent frequencies caused a white noise, or other forms of colored noise. Other works by him include Machine Drawings and 1-bit Video.

Together with Kunal Gupta and Katie Shima he forms the group Loud Objects. This group performs electronic music by soldering.

Perich has performed on Blip Festival and SxSW. Works by Perich have been commissioned for Bang on a Can festival held at Lincoln Center in New York City.

In February 2010 he won, with his Loud Objects collective, third prize in the Guthman Instrument Competition at Georgia Tech with a circuit bent electronic system. Works of Perich have been performed by the Bang on a Can-ensemble, Calder Quartet and Meehan/Perkins. His work has been reviewed by The Wire. He received the Prix Ars Electronica in 2009 and was a featured artist at Sónar 2010 in Barcelona.

Perich was the Edward E. Elson Artist-in-Residence of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, serving as a composer, musician and visual artist.

In 2013, Perich was artist-in-residence at MIT’s Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST), presenting public performances and lectures.

Lesley Flannigan

Lesley Flanigan, an experimental electronic musician, is performing her new piece Hedera at the venue National Sawdust in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY. First, there is a repetitive scratching, like an analog camera advancing at 110 beats per minute. Within this beat are hints of other sounds: the simultaneous striking of many drums, slowed down machine gun fire, children’s noisemakers. Flanigan sits on the floor behind MIDI controllers and sings into a mic, turning her loops on and off.

“Hedera” transforms slowly over its 20-minute duration, but its beat never fully lets up, even when Flanigan’s layers of vocals nearly wash it away. This beat is the scaffolding of the piece: a distorted clicking noise which Flanigan held onto for months, adjusting the frequencies and precisely placing the wordless vocals that weave around it. Its pace feels like a panic attack, a racing heartbeat.

This work is the result of a big new presence in Flanigan’s life – her first child. After years of making work centered around speaker feedback created with her homemade instruments, Flanigan says that, after the birth of her daughter, those reliable noises just didn’t sound right. “My ears just didn’t want to listen to those sounds,” she says, sitting in the studio in Williamsburg where she works with her husband. “But I was singing a lot to my daughter. I was thinking a lot about voice.”

Voice, to Flanigan, can mean many things. Growing up in Tampa, Florida, she sang in a church choir before attending art school for sculpture. Though she was untrained, she’d always been interested in creating music, whether with her high school band or the group she started after moving to Denver to escape her hometown. That brief stint in Colorado ended as soon as Flanigan saved enough money to make it to New York City, in 2002.

After spending four years working as a video editor, Flanigan decided she needed to get back to working with her hands. “On some level I always pictured myself on a ladder in my future,” she says. “I never really enjoyed sitting behind a computer.” Still, unsure of what she was interested in, Flanigan applied to the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University, a two year program that allows students to explore new creative applications for technology. There, she discovered physical computing and spent her time building simple circuits. ITP also gave her access to their wood shop, renewing a love of carpentry from when she was in school for sculpture. When she realized that she could build a simple speaker that amplified a sound circuit, something clicked. Or rather, screeched.

Flanigan still has that first speaker. She brings it over to where we’re sitting and flips the switch. The attached contact mic elicits a small explosion of noises, squeals, drones and thrums. “I heard a sound like that,” she says, “and I was like, ‘Holy shit, that’s beautiful!’”

See the full article here.

Bang On A Can David Lang- Michael Gordon- Julia Wolfe © Peter Serling

Bang On A Can All-Stars Members Ashley Bathgate, cello
Robert Black, bass
Vicky Chow, piano
David Cossin, percussion
Mark Stewart, guitars
Ken Thomson, clarinet

Formed in 1992, the Bang on a Can All-Stars are recognized worldwide for their ultra-dynamic live performances and recordings of today’s most innovative music. Freely crossing the boundaries between classical, jazz, rock, world and experimental music, this six-member amplified ensemble has consistently forged a distinct category-defying identity, taking music into uncharted territories. Performing each year throughout the U.S. and internationally, the All-Stars have shattered the definition of what concert music is today.

Together, the All-Stars have worked in unprecedented close collaboration with some of the most important and inspiring musicians of our time, including Steve Reich, Ornette Coleman, Burmese circle drum master Kyaw Kyaw Naing, Tan Dun, DJ Spooky, and many more. The group’s celebrated projects include their landmark recordings of Brian Eno’s ambient classic Music for Airports and Terry Riley’s In C, as well as live performances with Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Don Byron, Iva Bittova, Thurston Moore, Owen Pallett and others. The All-Stars were awarded Musical America’s Ensemble of the Year and have been heralded as “the country’s most important vehicle for contemporary music” by the San Francisco Chronicle.

Current and recent project highlights include the touring performances and recording of Julia Wolfe’s Pulitzer Prize winning Anthracite Fields for the All-Stars and guest choir, the record release of Wolfe’s acclaimed Steel Hammer, featuring Trio Mediaeval, plus a moving theatrically staged collaboration with SITI Company and director Anne Bogart; Field Recordings, a major multi-media project and CD/DVD now featuring 30 commissioned works by Tyondai Braxton, Mira Calix, Anna Clyne, Bryce Dessner, Florent Ghys, Michael Gordon, Jóhann Jóhannsson, David Lang, Christian Marclay, Steve Reich, Todd Reynolds, Julia Wolfe, and more; the Lincoln Center Festival 2017 world premiere of Cloud River Mountain, a new collaboration featuring Chinese superstar singer Gong Linna; the world premiere performance and recording of Steve Reich’s 2×5 including a sold-out performance at Carnegie Hall, and much more. With a massive repertoire of works written specifically for the group’s distinctive instrumentation and style of performance, the All-Stars have become a genre in their own right. The All-Stars record on Cantaloupe Music and have released past recordings on Sony, Universal and Nonesuch.

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

John Schaefer

For new music by living composers

newsounds.org from New York Public Radio

https://www.wnyc.org/
93.9FM
https://www.wqxr.org/
105.9FM

Home

For great Jazz

88.3FM http://wbgo.org/

WPRB 103.3FM

Dan Buskirk Spinning Jazz Mondays 11:00AM-1:00PM
Will Constantine Jr, Blues Bop and Beyond Thursdays 11:00-2:00 featuring Latin Jazz
Jerry Gordon Serenade to a Cookoo Frdays 11:00AM-2:00PM with Jerry’s Room at 1:00Pm
Jeannie Becker Sunday Jazz 10:00AM-1:00Pm

Please visit The Jazz Loft Project based on the work of Sam Stephenson
Please visit The Jazz Loft Radio project from New York Public Radio