aworks :: "new" american classical music

aworks list :: tommasini highlights upcoming performances

In the New York Times, Anthony Tommasini  highlights some upcoming contemporary performances:

• Interventions. Elliott Carter. To be played on Carter's 100th birthday.
• Rhapsodies. Stephen Stucky. On the night after the NY Philharmonic's gala.
• August 4, 1964. Stephen Stucky. On that day, the Gulf of Tonkin incident and civil rights works killed in Mississippi.
• The World in Flower. Peter Lieberson. The premiere was delayed due to the death of the composer's wife and his own battles with cancer.
• new work. William Bolcom. Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's "Coming Home".
• new work. George Tsontakis. same.
• Doctor Atomic. John Adams. "Though not a premiere, “Doctor Atomic” signals an emerging interest in new opera at the Met. It’s about time."

aworks list :: grate and great

Here's what's on my musical mind:

• Whom Do You Work For? Ornette Coleman. Apparently if I am going to listen to Ornette, I want it to be as outrageous as possible. lala
• Who Knows Where the Time Goes? Fairport Convention. From a BBC live recording that I generally find grating, this song still staggers me. lala
• Blues for New Orleans. An Ellington album new to me. The opening with organ, piano and then the band is fine. lala
• Escapisms in a Comedic Form. From a John Fahey tribute album that was disappointing, this track by "Lichens" begins to get at the depth of feeling Fahey himself could express. Overcome ("I didn't mean it...") on the other hand is too over the top for me. I'm not sure why only the supremely talented are capable of being outrageous. amazon
• Short & Sweet. Charlemagne Palestine & Terry Jennings. I've heard of the late Jennings for a long time but I think this is the first time I've actually heard his music. Worth the wait. What might have been new ag-ish somehow has substance for repeated listening. The chanting/drony voice on a later track took some getting used to (a la Terry Riley's Chorale). From a recent release. mimaroglu
• Nocturne from Symphony No. 2. John Corigliano. Given I've always liked Corigliano's First Symphony, it's strange that I've only now heard about his second. lala
• Sea Change. Jeff Parker. Some lyrical jazz guitar I stumbled upon. emusic's post-millennial jazz page

aworks list :: quotes from the latest Wire Magazine

• "I just happen to think it's easy to misrepresent John Cage, and that his work represents a core of ideas and values that's worth defending." :: Philip Clark in a letter to the editor responding to a complaint about Clark's review of George Lewis' AACM book.
• "In order for the neophyte, uneducated, naive listener to get something out of something, he or she has to want to get that something, and has to bring something to that wanting." :: trumpeter Bill Dixon
• "Few if any composers have done as much to expand and revise the obdurately stuffy lexicon of opera as Robert Ashley." :: David Stubbs in a review of Ashley's Concrete.
• "There's been previous discussion in The Wire about accuracy when Braxton plays standards or compositions by the likes of Charlie Parker and Lennie Tristano, and it's pertinent that the GTM series manages to sidestep the possibility of note-specific mistakes." :: Philip Clark in a review of Anthony Braxton's Quartet (Ghost Trance Music) 2006.
• "Among the three archive tracks collected on this CD, part of Alga Marghen's Golden Research strand dedicated to unearthing the early work of Charlemagne Palestine, a beautiful example of Jennings's art has been restored to the public domain, in a piano/soprano sax duo recorded at CalArts in 1974." :: Rob Young in a CD review mentioning the late Terry Jennings.
• "The recurring loping modal rhythm effectively conjures up the image of Riley's cosmic dromedary as he guides it through a pulsating psychedelic soundscape that is flickering with Back-like organ flourishes, improvisational jazz and the disciplined vocal vibrations he was introduced to when studying with Pandit Pran Nath." :: Edwin Pouncey in a review of Terry Riley's The Last Camel in Paris.
• "This confirmed to Cage that, for all its modernity, Boulez and his music, like Schoenberg, belonged to an older, stuffier European tradition." :: David Stubbs in a book review of David Nicholls' American Composers: John Cage, describing how Cage reacted to being in a restaurant when Pierre Boulez ranted about the food and service.

Wire issue #293

aworks list :: feeds of the month

Here's my May list of notable feeds with an aesthetic bent:

• BAGnewsnotes
  • Michael Shaw. (Technically a political blog but the effort to understand the visual meaning is interesting).
• Brian Dickie
  • Life as General Director of Chicago Opera Theater
• mellysblog
  • Ramblings and Rantings on Sex, Feminism, Tech gadgetry, Music, Sexism, and I wash it all down with numerous cups of coffee..... Mellissa Hughes
• Miss Music Nerd!
  • ...because nerd is the new cool. Linda Kernohan
• Musical Assumptions 
  
  • Music is a mystery for people who play it, write it, listen to it, and write about it. The only thing I can really do when I try to say something about music is assume. Elaine Fine
• Orange Crate Art
  • Orange crate art was a place to start. Michael Leddy
    
• Out West Arts
  • Performance at the End of the World.
• Reverberate Hills
  • Or the Apotheosis of the Narwhal. Patrick Vaz
• We Are All Mozart
• Blog and Commentary. Dennis Báthory-Kitsz
• What I Listened To On My Way To Work Today
  • The iPod shuffles. My mind shuffles. Here are the results.

---

April list

aworks list :: berkeley book shopping

I went on a book run to Berkeley yesterday. Although I still love my kindle, not all titles are available.

I also wanted to see the new and sole remaining Cody's. University Press Books and Moe's proved most fruitful:

• Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices. Michael Broyles and Denise Von Glahm. I'm hoping it answers the question about what resulted from John Coltrane attending Ornstein's music school in Philadelphia for a year. And Broyles' book on American mavericks was excellent.
• Ellington: The Early Years. Mark Tucker. The pages I read via Google Book made this seem like the definitive description of Ellington's early music.
• The New Grove: Stravinsky. The Kindle is not good for rapidly flipping through lists and I needed a definitive record of what Stravinsky wrote here in the US.

aworks list :: 10 from the amazon classical blowout store

amazon classical blowout

aworks list :: charles ives according to google

1. Symphony No. 2. Redlands Symphony performance. web:63,700 blog:21 news:2
2. Symphony No. 4. Those who insist that all classical music is dull and lifeless will find a challenge in this work. web:36,300 blog:17 news:0
3. Symphony No. 3. web:33,400 blog:19 news:0
4. Symphony No. 1. Maazel delved into the iconoclastic Charles Ives. web:29,700 blog:18 news:2
5. Sonata No. 2. 20,700:web  blog:12 news:0.
6. Central Park in the Dark. Tim Pfaff reviews a Dallas Symphony CD on Hyperion. web:17,900  blog:18 news:2
7. Ann Street. It might interest you to know that there is a famous song about an Ann Street by the composer Charles Ives. You should look it up. web:3,460 blog:6 news 0
8. Like a Sick Eagle. Last night I was in rapture listening to baritone Gerald Finley and pianist Julius Drake on a recent Hyperion recording with an impressively chosen group of 31 (of the 114 that exist), including outstanding versions of Memories (1897), Ich Grolle Nicht (1898), Like a Sick Eagle (1920) and the rarely done Slugging a Vampire (1902). web:2,720 blog:4 news 0
8. The Children's Hour. web:2,720 blog:1 news 0.
10. Gyp the Blood’ or Hearst - Which is Worst?. Sigh, aworks is the top web link on a favorite Ives work. Worse, my trivial last.fm tag is the twenty-ninth result. web 438 blog:1 news 0:
    

aworks list :: musicovery graded

It's another web music discovery gadget -- musicovery.com. You pick the intersection of dark/positive mood and energetic/calm and then it plays tracks that match that combination (in low-fidelity for the free version). I chose 100% dark and 50% energetic/calm:

• Baby Please Don't Go. Al Kooper. Worst song I've heard in awhile. d
• Missing. Everybody but the Girl. Worst song I've heard since the previous one. d
• Let's Go to Bed. The Cure. Ok, a little bit catchy even though Robert Smith's voice and hair aren't. c
• All Along the Watchtower. Bob Dylan. Prefer the Hendrix version. I hate to say it but I can see a path from Dylan to Smith in these back-to-back songs anyway, beyond the hair and voice that is. a
• Heart Full of Soul. Chris Isaak. Rockers don't sound so good in lo-fi but still. b
• Four Days. Counting Crows. Is this the UC Berkeley guy? How come I can never remember my Bay Area rock stars? Is that Third Eye Blind guy still around? How is Carlos doing these days? d
• Mrs. Potter's Lullaby. Counting Crows. A bit of country guitar helps. b
• Tainted Love. Soft Cell. Beep beep. a
• Johnny & Mary. Robert Palmer. Low-key for Robert Palmer; very much meets the criteria. b.
• Etudes tableaux op. 39 no. 1. Rachmaninoff. Classical music included and not ghettoized. Wow. Don't like this one so much, although maybe that's because of the mundane piano timbre compared to what proceeded it. c

Oh, I see, you can filter by genre. Classical and jazz mode follows:

• Passion St Matthieu. Bach. It feels odd to give the music of Bach a grade but anyway. a
• Passion St Jean - Introduction. Bach. a
• Delta Mood. Duke Ellington. Never heard this before but it has an edge to it. b
• Messe in ut : Kyrie. Mozart. En francais. Got it. Oh no, I just clicked on le diagram and scrambled the path and Mozart has disappeared.
• Symphony No. 4 - 3rd movement. Schumann. I prefer the Schuman with one "n" I suppose. c
• Unrequired. Brad Mehldau. b.
• Moments musicaux D780 No. 4. Schubert. How I lost my love for Schubert, I'll never know. c
• Winterreise - gute nacht. Schubert. Ok, not completely. a
• Desert Winds. Kenny Burrel [sic] and Illinois Jacquet. More tasteful than I was expecting. c.
• Lonely Woman. Ornette Coleman. Ok, I skipped around to find this track. It was between Liszt and Chopin of all people. a

aworks list :: web 2.0 - genius or inane?

After reviewing some old aworks posts on this stuff (here and here), an update:

• lala - Here's my CD collection as seen by lala. I've logged 812 CDs that I admit I own, I covet 71, I've shipped 13 and I've received 10. Lala also logs what I play on my computer. The site has the obligatory web community features as well e.g. members with collections similar to mine don't seem to have collections all that similiar.
• last.fm - I seemed to have stopped using it to play music although it still logs what I play on my computer. The artists I have played the most, on my computer anyway, are Radiohead, Miles Davis, Boards of Canada, Leo Kottke, Alan Hovhaness, Four Tet, Philip Glass, Gordon Lightfoot, Alan Feinberg, and the Academy of Ancient Music. The site also has the obligatory web community features e.g. the people who play music most similar to me seem to be young, male Europeans.
• pandora - I seemed to have stopped using it to play music although here's what I bookmarked. If you use pandorafm, it logs what I play on Pandora but over on last.fm. Don't remember if it has web community features.
• mog - This reminds me of LiveJournal for music fans as the site has more obligatory community features than any other site. It doesn't log what I play on my computer because for some reason I uninstalled "mog-o-matic." I think I was uncomfortable uploading my 70 Mb iTunes music library file but I don't remember for sure. Here's my page although the "Mog Meter" characterizes me as "chilled." The site also now bills itself as a "musical nudity colony." No idea what that means or if that's why I am chilled.
• spotdj - This site is either genius or inane and here's my page to prove either case. You record short audio messages that get added to a community library. Then, you set up iTunes to automatically play from the library a short message (aka spot) that matches the artist or track just played. It's like a radio DJ except much, much stranger due to the lack of continuity since the spots can come from anyone. It also turns out talent is helpful; my William Grant Still spot has been played the most but deservedly has the lowest rating as I was basically reciting the Wikipedia entry. I thought my John Cage The Flowers spot clever, although my written responses to the "A Bit About Me" section of my page may be too clever.
• twitter - Also genius or inane, this is not a music site per se but I am experimenting by hijacking it for my own purposes. Twitter is a social community site that allows you to send 152 character (or less) messages via instant messenger, cell phone or browser for others to see. I'm using it to record my real-time thoughts as I listen to music. It's like blogging except all discretion and intelligence have been removed. Here's my page of posts so far.

aworks list :: he's back and he's listin'

Hey, is this thing still on? Smack, smack... Ok, we're back. Some pent-up random comments:

• I know next to nothing about Keith Fullerton Whitman but I am starting to think he is the long lost son of Terry Riley, in his pure keyboard pieces anyway, starting with Stereo Music for Farfisa Compact Duo Deluxe, Drum Kit. I think I discovered him at the Harvard radio orgy earlier this year.
• I found lots of interesting stuff at Tower Mountain View tonight including Jack DeJohnette's Music in the Key of Om. Not sure what it's about yet as I am still ripping (even if iTunes thinks the one, long track is Morton Feldman's String Quartet). And for all my analog legacy tendencies, I always rip before listening.
  
• Speaking of Tower, a big sign on the outside indicates Rasputin will open a branch in the soon-to-be-vacated store. For those who don't know Rasputin, it's like a scruffier, smaller version of Amoeba. The Berkeley Rasputin is reasonably good, I've found some good stuff at the San Francisco version even if the elevator requires an attendant, the one in San Jose is so-so, the one in Newark is not so good, and to be honest, I have no idea where in the Bay Area one might find Pleasant Hill. Still, for those of us who prefer to browse in analog, it's a nice surprise.
• I listen to music for the sound rather than the meaning as does Frank Oteri.
• I hadn't thought of Nancy van de Vate in awhile.
• My William Duckworth recommendation for modernclassical would be Imaginary Dances. This idea and the previous post ultimately via Kyle Gann.
• loreto martin points out Peter Greenaway's Four American Composers series is up on ubuweb.
• 1941 proto-minimalism via Howard Who?
• Radiohead's Everything in Its Right Place on that Rockabye Baby: Lullaby Renditions of Radiohead CD still sounds cool.
• Gable families mostly lived in Pennsylvania and Ohio in 1840, all hundred or so of us.