“Country Girl” is a single off of Carolina Chocolate Drops’s latest full length recording, Leaving Eden, available now on Nonesuch Records.

Daw Nusk
Hunter Gatherer
Koppklys #010 (cassette run of 60)

Dynamic instrumental music replete with warm synths as a pervasive grounding, long spun drones, field recorded additions, notably cawing gulls, and finally, surging crescendos and Mellotron-like strings pushing the levels higher towards red. If the old saw about ambient music is that it is dull or, at the very least, useful only as background listening on a yoga mat, Daw Nusk proves it wrong. Luxuriating in sound need never be a static experience and, on Hunter Gatherer it is quite the contrary; a pleasing aural journey that is nevertheless filled with a number of surprises and shifts of demeanor along the way. A generous collection of six compositions: recommended.

Low Bunk bows cardboard this weekend!

To many, Memorial Day weekend means the kickoff of the summer season: getaways, barbecues, traffic, and more traffic …

But the New York new music scene doesn’t seem to be on holiday from its Spring season yet. indeed, we’ll be talking a number of events in coming weeks, extending well into June.

Performers and, one hopes, audiences, aren’t even taking the weekend off. Tonight is an all Milton Babbitt concert at CUNY Grad Center. It features several pieces done by the performers who’ve made them part of their core repertoires. But any chance to hear Judith Bettina sing Philomel again or William Anderson and Oren Fader play Soli e Duettini is most welcome. Less often heard but featured here is the early “Composition for Four Instruments” and the piano duo Envoi from 1990. Though it’s bittersweet to go to hear Babbitt’s music without his convivial presence and sepulchral commentary, it is good to see that the Composers Alliance and CUNY are making every effort to keep his music alive.

Milton Babbitt Retrospective

Friday, May 25, 2012, 7:30pm at CUNY Graduate Center

Music Programs • The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue • New York, New York 10016-4309
(212) 817-8590 • music@gc.cuny.edu

___

On Saturday, Collide-O-Scope Music is presenting a varied program, including a Babbitt work as well, but mostly featuring music by emerging and mid-career composers. As is often the case, CoSM programs both works for conventional instrumentation and for sound objects that are decidedly unconventional. Here, the latter is represented by Lou Bunk’s “scratch-o-lin,” a cardboard contraption that he fervently attacks with a violin bow!

NJAC was kind enough to program two new piano pieces by yours truly: the program notes are below.

Gloss on Guston is a brief piece for solo piano. After hearing a playthrough of the work, a colleague recently quipped, “You’ve fit all the notes of Feldman’s For Philip Guston into one minute!” Indeed, there are many more notes per bar in this piece than in Feldman’s lengthy meditation of contemplative pointillism on Guston’s artworks: with good reason. Feldman’s music regards earlier pieces by Guston – his program note indicates paintings from 1949 and 1950 were the impetus for his reliquary to his abstract expressionist painter friend. My work is a response to a late painting by Guston – Untitled #142 (1979) – which resides in the Montclair Art Museum’s collection. Its vivid colors and angular shapes suggest to me busy athleticism and even, at times, motoric gestures, as well as a taut formal design. It was composed in 2012 in response to a commission from New Jersey Arts Collective and receives its world premiere today.

Fiery Sunset is a coda to my previous commission from New Jersey Arts Collective and the Montclair Art Museum: Innesscapes, a piece composed in 2008 that responds to the museum’s extraordinary collection of pieces by New Jersey landscape painter George Inness. It is scored for clarinet, viola, and piano. The first two instruments play the piece’s first movement, while all three instruments participate in movements two and three. After hearing the premiere, in order to balance the work I wanted to add a movement, one in which the piano gets a solo turn.

Fiery Sunset may be played by itself or as part of Innesscapes as a whole. It responds to Inness’s painting Sunset and is dedicated to local composer George Walker as a small gift acknowledging his ninetieth birthday on June 27, 2012. It also receives its world premiere today.

Over the past few years, as local businesses have tried to weather the recession, a number of my favorite haunts in New York, New Jersey, and even Boston/Cambridge have gone out. It’s been sad to see some terrific bookstores, recordstores, coffeehouses, and tea shops shuttered due to the general economic malaise and changes in the way that people interact and consume  - both food and media.

Happily, this Spring I have found a new place to enjoy in Princeton:  Infini-T Cafe and Spice Souk. It’s just a short walk from my office, has excellent espresso, a wide range of teas, enjoyable Mediterranean and veggies dishes, and an all too tempting case of pastries. Unlike Small World Coffee, a place I enjoy to grab and go rather than sit and ponder, Infini-T is an inviting place to read, write, and linger over a cup of something tasty and reviving.

But I really knew that it was Kismet when I saw Andy Akiho’s Innova CD for sale near the counter! And, I belatedly learned that Infini-T hosted his group Foundry back in April.

A caffeinated haven for new music – count me in!

Andy Akiho's new CD AND a mean dirty iced chai?

Andy Akiho’s No One to Know One, in all its steel pan inflected percussiveness, is out now on  Innova and is highly recommended listening.

To celebrate twenty years of championing  art song, the Mirror Visions Ensemble is presenting a concert tonight at Merkin Hall. The program, titled “A Score of Scores,”  includes several selections new to New York audiences. The Three-Paneled Mirror, consists of three new sets by Richard Pearson Thomas, Tom Cipullo, and Christopher Berg, set to poems by Jeffrey Greene.

Event Details

Tuesday, May 22 at 8:00 PM

Merkin Concert Hall

New York

129 W. 67th Street
New York, NY 10023

Phone: 212 501 3330

Tickets: $25/$15 for students.

The Mirror Visions Ensemble:
Vira Slywotzky, soprano
Scott Murphree, tenor
Jesse Blumberg, baritone
Margaret Kampmeier, Alan Darling, and Gary Chapman – piano

Saltarello

Garth Knox, viola & fiddle

with Agnès Vesterman, cello & Sylvain Lemêtre, percussion

ECM Records CD 2157

Dance music in multiple forms, from the saltarello, a Venetian dance dating back to the Fourteenth century, to  Breton and Celtic folk music, as well as transcriptions of medieval era compositions, Renaissance era consort music, and contemporary fare, are featured on Saltarello, violist Garth Knox’s latest ECM CD.  Among the early music slections, Particularly impressive is a Vivaldi concerto, performed in a duo arrangement for viola d’amore and cello. Its interpreters, Knox and Agnès Vesterman, take this continuo less opportunity to accentuate a supple contrapuntal interplay between soloist and bass line. Equally lovely is a piece that combines music by Hildegard and Machaut in a kind of medieval style mash-up. Also stirring is this duo’s version of John Dowland’s most famous piece, Lachrimae, perhaps known best in its incarnation as the song “Flow My Tears.”

Knox, who is a past member of both Ensemble Intercontemporain and the Arditti String Quartet, also performs the disc’s newer material with consummate musicality: he also has the bedeviling habit of making virtuosic writing sound far too easy to play (his poor violist colleagues!). Knox’s own composition, “Fuga Libre,” combines jazz rhythms and neo-baroque counterpoint with ever more complicated harmonic tension points and several instances in which Knox demonstrates various extended playing techniques. Meanwhile, Kaaija Saariaho’s Vent Nocturne, an eerily evocative and tremendously challenging piece for viola and electronics, is given a haunting, sonically sumptuous rendering.

________________________________

Tomorrow night, Knox celebrates the release of the CD at LPR (details below). Early music, new pieces by and for Knox, and lovely comestibles on menu and on tap? Sounds like my evening’s planned!

Event Details

Tuesday May 22nd – Doors open at 6:30, show starts at 7:30

Le Poisson Rouge

158 Bleecker Street, NYC| 212.505.FISH

Gramercy, a recorded collaboration between Gareth Davis and Frances-Marie Uitti, is out now on Miasmah.

Thrilled to be taking part in the 175th Anniversary celebration today at Grace Church in Newark. Their music director, Joe Arndt, commissioned a motet for the service: the choir will be premiering my “Ascendit Deus” setting.