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Cover of John Cage
Well played, Amazon...
Ok, so I bought the new Lady Gaga album for .99 and then go on to buy kuniko plays reich, the reich remixed 2x5 album, music by Philip Jeck, Chry-ptus by Eliane Radigue, John Cage music by Zeitkratzer and John Cage: 26' 1.1499'' for a String Player and 45' for a Speaker.
Cover of William S. Burroughs
Starting tomorrow at Fort Mason in San Francisco:
Based on William Burroughs' landmark autobiographical novella, Queer follows Lee and the object of his lust and love on a search through the jungle for the mystical and mythified Ayahuasca.
Ives image via Wikipedia
And now an even newer work by Timothy Andres:
The third in a series of pieces having to do with Charles Ives and the tradition of musical Americana, At the River is an old-school piano “fantasy” on the American hymn Shall we Gather at the River?. The tune is first exploded into a long, quasi-improvised “strumming piece”, whose repetitive figurations pay homage to the minimalist juggernauts of Alvin Curran and Charlemagne Palestine. After a gradual ascent to the top of the keyboard, a distant chorale takes up; more recognizable bits of the hymn are heard in far-flung keys.
At the River is dedicated to Ingram Marshall, whose work merges sacred and secular in mysterious and beautiful ways.
Palo Alto image via Wikipedia
I mentioned I was bored and so the local ten-year-old typed "new composers of 2011" into google to help me. This led to an article in New York by Justin Davidson that I somehow missed:
Three recent, overlapping festivals—Ecstatic Music at Merkin Concert Hall, Tune-In at the Park Avenue Armory, and Tully Scope at Lincoln Center—offered a portrait of a new New York School, high on amped-up minimalism, percussion-heavy beats, shimmering textures, loops, drones, and washes of electronic color. These composers in their thirties worry less about categories, narrative, and originality than about atmosphere, energy, and sound.
This takes me back to Timothy Andres' It takes a long time to become a good composer, for piano. And in turn, here's an aworks post from 2004 where I noted Andres was to play the Ives' Concord Sonata and that he was born in Palo Alto.
The Library of Congress has a new web-based National Jukebox. The classical selection is mostly by European composers although I did find this piece by Charles Wakefield Cadman (Wikipedia entry of the song here):
And someone named S.R. Henry wrote Your picture says 'remember' though your letter says 'forget'.
It's a rare thrill to come across new music as exciting, vivacious and downright gorgeous as these two string quartets by young New York composer Jefferson Friedman...For the club set, the disc also includes an electronic remix of each piece by the duo Matmos; for the graybeards among us, the originals are already plenty funkalicious on their own.
This graybeard downloaded the album from Amazon tonight (MP3 of the first movement here). My first take is that these may be substantive works well played by the Chiara String Quartet but I'm not particularly enthused, yet. I also like the idea of classical remixes in theory but I'm not sure about these. All in all, music I need to assimilate...
Eddie S. Meadows in Bebop To Cool: Context, Ideology, and Musical Identity:
Burrell notes that "Monk was influenced by Ellington as a pianist and as a composer. That's without question. You can hear it, and he even states it himself." Like Ellington, Monk liked to sustain notes as long as possible and explore the lower register of the piano. Also like Ellington, he was a composer who played the piano, and therefore he treated the piano as a harmonic rather than a linear instrument.
Ok, this explains why Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington is so good.
