sound expanse

The coming weeks are especially rich with concerts. Here's what I know so far:

Wednesday, January 27th
Basel
Gare du Nord
For the first time in Europe:
Ben Johnston: The Demon Lover's Doubles for trumpet and microtonal piano
Paul Huebner, trumpet - Clemens Hund-Goeschel, piano

Wednesday, January 27th
New York City
The Gershwin Hotel
The ai ensemble presents a night of solo and chamber works of Feldman & Lucier.

Friday, January 29
Berlin
Ultraschall
Tristan Murail: Contes cruels (2007)
Seth Josel, E-Gitarre - Wiek Hijman, E-Gitarre
Mathias Spahlinger: akt, eine treppe herabsteigend (1997/98)
Carl Rosman, Bassklarinette - Michael Svoboda, Posaune
Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Johannes Kalitzke, Leitung

Saturday, January 30
Berlin
Ultraschall
Clara Maïda: Shel(l)ter (2009), Zyklus für Ensemble und Elektronik
Ensemble L'Itinéraire, Jean Deroyer, Leitung

January 28, 29, 30
Montréal
Conservatoire de Musique de Montreal
alt:neu--Quatuor Bozzini plays Kagel, Brand, Walshe

Friday, February 5th
New York City
The Morgan Library and Museum
JACK Plays the complete Xenakis quartets

Saturday, February 6
Los Angeles
The Wulf
Music by Larry Polansky

Sunday, February 6th
Amsterdam
Muziekgebouw aan't IJ
Stockhausen + Kagel Retrospektive
MusikFabrik

Monday, February 8th
London
King's Place
Invisibility--ELISION ensemble (see the previous post and associated links)

Tuesday, February 9th-Wednesday, February 10th
New York City
Diapason Gallery
Over the course of the night that separates the 9th from the 10th of February, composer-musicians Jason Brogan, Sam Sfirri and Taylan Susam will take vigil in the relaxed, sympathetic setting of Diapason Gallery and incant the daybreak, performing pieces of their own composition and those by Wandelweiser composers such as Antoine Beuger and Michael Pisaro.

Saturday, February 13th
Düsseldorf
KaiserWellen, Lichtstraße 52
Performances and readings from Craig Shepard's Zu Fuss
Sandra Schimag, speaker - Antoine Beuger, flute - Jürg Frey, clarinet - Marcus Kaiser, cello - Tobias Liebezeit, percussion
In the 2005 sound project On Foot, Craig Shepard walked 250 miles across Switzerland. Every day he composed a new piece, wrote it down and performed it on the pocket trumpet at 6 p.m. All concerts took place out-of-doors in public spaces such as squares, harbors, intersections, sidewalks, and mountain-tops. The performance features pieces and readings from the book.

February 26, 27, 28
Austin
New Music Co-op at Ceremony Hall (with Greg Stuart and Michael Pisaro as guests)
Works by Pisaro, Keller, Malfatti, Weller, Hennies, Bridges, Fariss, Wolff

***

Let me know if I've missed something, and I'm likely to add it to the list. I've only included events between now and the end of February--the line has to be drawn somewhere. I have more information about most of these events, but didn't want to make the post overly long. Just send me a note if you have trouble finding any information that you need.

A number of days have gone by since my last post, and I've been hoping to write something substantial. But as it happens, some much-needed work has been keeping me very busy. If you'd like to read something like, say, an interview with a young and fascinating composer, complete with a score and sound excerpt, you could do no better than the inaugural post of Tim Rutherford-Johnson's 10 for '10 series on The Rambler. Included in that post is an interview with Evan Johnson, a complete score, and a sound excerpt from Apostrophe 2 (pressing down on my sternum), that will be performed by ELISION on February 8th at King's Place in London. Oh, and if you can make it to that concert, do. (See my earlier post for background or the rambler's recent plug for the relevant info.)

ELISION's November 20th performance of Richard Barrett's Opening of the Mouth is currently available on BBC's Hear and Now. It's the final broadcast of Huddersfield 2009, available through Saturday. Scroll directly to the 16:30 mark to start listening to the material about the piece. Following an interview with Barrett, the performance starts at 19:54.

1) In the very (very) near future, I will be adding an entry to my links page: Steven Kazuo Takasugi. There's one piece I love the most, but I'm not even going to tell you which. They are all astonishing.

Included at the end of his bio are instructions for listening:

Laptop (Computer) to Headphones = Not Ideal!
Laptop (Computer) to Stereo Amplifier to Headphones = Good!
(Volume and physicality of sound are of utmost importance)
Lights out.

2) I didn't know Jem Finer was a founding member of the Pogues when I came across Score for a Hole in the Ground. Now I want to go to this forest in Kent.

Finer is also involved in a thousand-year-long, multi-continental composition/trust/graphic score/assemblage of Tibetan bowls called Longplayer.



3) Eric Wubbels' excellent review of Nature/Culture, Peter Evans' latest solo CD.

4) One of the most interesting thinkers (and doers) in the sound arena shows up in the mainstream media. I was not expecting that. I'm not so sure that David Dunn would classify himself as an avant-garde composer as the subtitle does, but the content of this article, Beetle Mania, in The Atlantic is just fine, and actually quite funny at points.

5) A surprisingly engaging review in the LA Times of a Monday Evening Concert called "Mostly Californian."

6) A ticket. Boston to London, where I'll hear ELISION play a great program titled Terrain (after the Ferneyhough piece, which is included). Also on the program are works by Liza Lim, Aaron Cassidy, Bryn Harrison, Mary Bellamy, and James Dillon. Then from London on to Berlin for MaerzMusik, whose program has just been announced today.

I had two parallel experiences within the past month.

On the bus ride home from New York, I was tired and uncomfortable. Finally I realized the discomfort was of an aural sort. Someone a row ahead of me had decided to make all of her phone calls during the four-hour ride, and it was irritating me no end. I pullled out the CDs I had gotten the day before from Michael Pisaro after quite a wonderful performance of his new piece at Experimental Intermedia. Several of them involved quite a lot of silence, and that was not going to help me in this situation. But then there was hearing metal 1: three pieces, all made from sine tones woven in with recordings of a tam-tam played by Greg Stuart. I put it in my laptop, put on my (early Christmas present) Bose headphones, and in a moment realized I was not stuck on a bus hearing someone's conversation. I was traveling through one incredibly beautiful and complex sound world after another. The closest visual experience I can think of is walking through fresh snow. There is a sameness, but you can watch how it settles in different contexts and how the light hits it, and how you impact it by being in it. That afternoon on the bus, I fell asleep in this world (I really needed to sleep), woke up and listened with that special waking-listening, heard it through to the end, started over, and over, and stayed right there until we pulled in to South Station.

Last Tuesday, nothing was going smoothly. Everything that might have happened seemed blocked, or delayed, or just too difficult. Finally I had to leave the house in the mid-afternoon to drive to one meeting and then another. I brought a CD called Over Shadows. Rhodri Davies was playing his own piece on harp, using EBow throughout. Normally road noise is a huge obstacle to hearing what is happening in the music that interests me most. But these sounds carried beautifully, and made the drive (up Route 128 through rush hour traffic near Boston) totally beautiful and interesting. The ways that Davies layers the sounds, and pulls off them one from another and combines them towards other effects are really masterful. I put it on just now to try to find a better way to describe it and realized two things: that I can't, and that I can't bring myself to turn it off. (The review included in the title link is much more descriptive.)

These two CDs have something else in common beyond using limited materials and completely turning my day around: they're both available in the US through erstwhile records. Primarily a label for electroacoustic improvised music, it has also become a very successful US distributor for wandelweiser CDs, among others. Worldwide distributors for Pisaro's recordings are listed on this Edition Wandelweiser directory. In Europe, you can get most of Davies' CDs at Sound 323. In reading about Sound 323's history, I finally learned about the origins of a beautiful and fascinating book and DVD that I got hold of a couple years ago, Blocks of Consciousness and the Unbroken Continuum.

Since this post has morphed into a listing of helpful distributors, I'll go ahead and mention one that I just learned about that is quite close to where I live--miramoglu music sales, based in Porter Square in Cambridge, MA. They don't happen to have the CDs in stock that I wrote about, but they have other work by both Pisaro and Davies, as well as many other artists that you're not likely to find on Amazon.

I've been thinking of starting a new "finds" category here on sound expanse--sites, pages, videos, resources, etc. that are mostly self-explanatory. I have a good cross-section now--a list that has been waiting and growing for some time.

1) Piano Repertoire Project.

This is a research project that aims to document much of the newest repertoire for solo piano as part of a Northwestern University doctoral thesis. The specific goal is the creation of a reference guide to solo piano music written by composers born since 1970.

For reasons of scope, the project is limited to American composers and those living or studying in the United States. (Maybe someone will want to do a similar project in another country in the future.) I know a lot of interesting composers who have submitted their work, and I know Jonathan Katz is approaching the project in a committed and responsible way.

The deadline for submission is February 1st, 2010. That's soon, so if you're interested, now is probably a good time to act on it. There's a thorough description and FAQ section on the site.

2) Available online is an experimental music series curated by Jason Brogan called calculations. I'll say for practical reasons that there is quite a lot of silence involved. So if you don't hear anything on a track for some time there's not likely a problem with either your speakers or the site. There's some very fine work on there, often with pdfs, videos, and links to more information available. The idea of an online, curated space for experimental music is great too. I'd be really pleased to see more of them.

3) Michael Pisaro has written a long and wonderful history (also available in German) of the wandelweiser group. (Take a look through the rest of the content on erstwords as well.) I love reading about how this international collective has emerged, developed, and thrived over time.

4) I wrote over a year ago about Laurence Crane's Come back to the old specimen cabinet John Vigani, John Vigani, part 3. Since then, I've come across a video of a different performance of it by plus-minus, with the same cellist, Alex Waterman.

And here's the link for the second video, to finish the piece.

In looking up plus-minus I found a whole treasure trove of videos and recordings I hadn't seen or heard before, including pieces by Ablinger, Ashley, Bailie, Cardew, Crane, Harrison, Ligeti, Parkinson, Reinholdtsen, Saunders, Shlomowitz, Stockhausen, Torvund, and Trunk.

5) Phil Minton's Feral Choir. This is brilliant. I won't say anything more.

6) Last year I wrote about Wet Ink's Peter Ablinger concert in New York. They have released two videos from the concert:

Verkündigung by Peter Ablinger from Sam Pluta on Vimeo.

Cecil Taylor (from Voices and Piano) by Peter Ablinger from Wet Ink Ensemble on Vimeo.

Enjoy!