Category: Headlines

Lindsey Eck

The Austin performance of Orion by the Philip Glass Ensemble last month was unquestionably a success. That’s both good news and bad news for those worried about a crisis in classical music. Good news, because it shows how a mid-size provincial city can make use of its arts infrastructure to attract a broad audience to contemporary art music. Bad news, because at Glass’s current stage of evolution his œuvre is anything but classical.

Despite the relatively high ticket prices, an attentive and appreciative audience nearly filled the University of Texas’ capacious Bass Concert Hall. From chatting with various audience members, I gathered that an interview with Glass and other Ensemble members the day before on John Aielli’s Eklektikos, a daily program of arts music on <http://www.kut.org>KUT-FM, had attracted many to the Glass performance. KUT, whose connection with the university is pretty much limited to having its studios housed on campus, is a National Public Radio station that persists in offering a broad range of music in between news programming, unlike other NPR outlets that have gone all-news. As a result, KUT has eclipsed other Austin stations to become the city’s top-rated in any format.

Glass, with most of the Ensemble, also delighted a small but enthusiastic group who met at the concert hall for a brown-bag lunch and discussion of Orion on performance day. After a round-robin introduction in which each Ensemble member spoke of his or her contributions to the collaborative work, most of the session was devoted to a question-and-answer period in which Glass exhibited his usual intelligence, graciousness, and spirituality.

Much of the discussion focused on the mechanics of integrating Western notated music of the conservatory tradition in which Glass received his early training with non-notated, improvisational styles such as the Mandingo tradition of Foday Musa Suso or alternate notations and scales such as those used in Ravi Shankar’s contribution to Orion (executed at this performance by long-time Shankar student Kartik Seshadri).

In response to questions, Glass spoke of misinterpreting Suso’s improvisational CD, which he had forgotten by the time they came together for Orion, as a fixed piece the griot intended to execute. He recalled his first encounter with Suso in 1987, in which he convinced the Gambian to tune to a Western scale (against his tradition). When he had established that a particular note on Suso’s kora was equivalent to our G, and Suso said, “That’s the first note,” Glass played an A and asked what that note was called. Suso replied, “that’s the next note.” As this continued, Glass realized that in the Mandingo tradition, the notes had no names, an insight which he experienced as the floor falling out from under him. “The ground I walked on had disappeared,” he said.

Philip Glass’s Orion

In his collaboration with Ravi Shankar, Glass again got the master to assimilate to the Western scale; Glass was able to teach him solfège in five minutes. But Orion shows how far Glass, too, has been forced to loosen the strictures of notated music and classical praxis to accommodate others’ notions of invention, rhythm, and periodicity. What remains of the Euro-American tradition has more to do with rock and pop than classicism or romanticism, let alone modernity.

In both its form and execution, Orion recalls the similarly international confections of Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. And it is odd that a conservatory grad like Glass and a Nashville bluegrasser like Fleck could end up with similar ideas about coordinating music from around the globe. Or maybe not so odd. Bluegrass is—flashy soloing aside—rather minimalist in its restricted tonality and droning instruments, and Fleck evolved through arranging Bach for banjo to the international mix of today’s Flecktones.

The ensemble that gave us Orion on Friday night included three electronic keyboards (with Glass at one), four woodwinds, and two percussionists throughout the piece, with appearances by soloists Mark Atkins (didgeridoo), Wu Man (pipa), Ashley MacIsaac (fiddle), Foday Musa Suso (kora), Kartik Seshadri (sitar), Uakti (a Brazilian trio with one flautist and two percussionists who specialize in PVC creations), and Eleftheria Arvanitikaki (soprano). By dividing the work into movements focused on one or two soloists, and only bringing the whole orchestra together at the end, the composition lived up to Glass’s goal: “not to boil it down into a sort of Esperanto, but to find commonalities.” However, these foreign traditions may have more in common with Euro-American popular and folk music than with its classical corpus.

To put together this suite—nearly two hours in length, incorporating multiple improvised sections, and created in collaboration—required “music minus one” recordings by the ensemble, worldwide CD exchanges, followed by an intensive regimen of live rehearsal. The result was a performance that kept interest through the slow, meditative sections and never flagged rhythmically during the uptempo solos. Much of the problem with the performance of non-canonical “classical” works may be the simple lack of rehearsal time prior to their execution. Orchestras typically are allowed a couple of run-throughs for a new and challenging work that demands weeks of practice to pull off adequately. The audience can tell, and a lot of popular hostility to new repertoire likely represents a negative reaction to sloppy performance rather than deficiencies in the works themselves. As Charles Rosen wrote in this month’s issue of New York Review of Books,”With radical changes of style, it takes more than a decade for performing musicians to catch up and find an adequate way of rendering the new.” In the case of putting together Orion, Glass said, “If I had had to solve these problems in a year it wouldn’t have been possible.” Of learning to assimilate international music traditions to create a “music without borders,” said Glass, “It’s taken the rest of my life, and I’m not finished yet.”

Because Orion is a collaboration with Glass as first among equals, because of the way in which it was rehearsed (through CD exchanges plus exhaustive live rehearsals), and because of its incorporation of improvised sections, the excellence in performance achieved in the Austin show was more a matter of what jazz and rock musicians call tightness rather than the bravura one expects from a philharmonic orchestra. The near lack of bowed strings (MacIsaac’s Cape Breton fiddling the sole exception) and the absence of a conductor add to the similarities with popular entertainment—all to the good. The colorful costumes, the willingness of performers to stand up and move around, and the novel instruments all work to free the piece from the stuffiness of so many concert hall experiences, while the gathering of the entire troupe at the conclusion instantiates global harmony, which after all is the Olympic theme Glass was commissioned to commemorate.

Though Orion allows for virtuosity in the form of solos by international performers, much of the piece continues the traits that got his early work labeled minimalist, especially the primitive tonality. Indeed, the drone quality of the sitar with its sympathetic strings, and the didgeridoo with its single fundamental note, only encourage Glass to avoid deviation from a tonal center.

With its radical instrumentation, its approach to rehearsal, its collaborative approach, its eschewing of the conductor as patriarch, Orion shows a widespread abrogation of European classical methods and intentions. The integration of ancient ideas from other parts of the world into a new whole cannot serve as a “way forward” for any music that deserves the label “classical.” But that’s not a criticism of Glass. Indeed, in its achievement of drama without tension (as in the best works of Mozart), its meditative calm without ennui, and its musical excellence without pyrotechnics, Orion ranks among his very best works, regardless of its implications for the European tradition from which Glass has traveled farther and farther away.

Meredith Monk

I’m relatively new to the visual art world, and so, lacking many historical touchstones, I tend to get really excited wandering through a single artist’s retrospective and watching the work evolve in time-lapse. It’s rare to get such a crash-course in a composer’s output unless you’re putting in some quality hours with their new box set. Last Sunday at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, however, a capacity crowd turned off their cell phones and settled in for just such a live marathon concert—a celebration of Meredith Monk’s 40 years on the city’s Downtown scene.

The nature of the beast meant that, even with judicious highlights selected and most work presented in excerpted form, the afternoon still ran past the four and a half hour mark. No one appeared to be eyeing the exits, however, which spoke principally to the power of Monk’s work, but also to the amazing line-up of talent on hand and a really tight running crew working behind the scenes.

Whether a long-time fan or new to Monk’s repertoire, it would have been difficult not to be seduced by the impish little figure in a Tibetan-inspired top and red skirt who took the stage. Monk sang the brief Porch (1965) to open the show, and the cheers of support that greeted her jump-started an energy in the hall that carried through the afternoon. The Pacific Mozart Ensemble performed selections from ATLAS (1985), and Monk and Vocal Ensemble presented excerpts from Impermanence (2005) and mercy (2001), and then selections from The Games (1983) and Acts from Under and Above (1986) with the Bang On A Can All-Stars. Fellow Downtown luminaries John Zorn and Kenny Wollesen (Dungeon, 1970), also made an appearance, as well as The Roches (Quarry Weave 1, 1976), DJ Spooky with his own Meditations on Meredith live remix, and a double threat in the form of Ursula Oppens and Bruce Brubaker performed Three Waltzes for Piano (’81, ’89, and ’93). WNYC radio host John Schaefer covered for some extended stage setting with insightful on-the-spot interviews with Monk and fellow performers. And that was all before intermission.

After a quick sip of reception-quality wine in the buzzing lobby—Aren’t you so glad you’re here? Weren’t Oppens and Brubaker amazing? I just love Meredith—the crowd headed back into the hall for round two. Already seated on stage was a full contingent of performers—Alarm Will Sound, the Monk Vocal Ensemble and assorted guests—for a concert (or rather what Monk termed her “dream come true”) version of Night (1996, 2005). Monk kept strictly to her composer role here and was not a part of the performance. The tear-down after this was particularly time-consuming, which only added to the tension in the room knowing that Björk’s appearance with harpist Zena Parkins was next on the bill. It was difficult not to be a little star-struck when the petite Icelandic pop icon bounced her way to center stage in a vintage pink dress, neck wrapped in strands of rhinestone, and sporting a bizarre (even for her) hairdo, for a very brief rendition of Gotham Lullaby (1975), a work she has made very much her own.

Björk retired to the balcony and attention turned to the stage for the final stretch. Monk was joined by five fellow members of the Vocal Ensemble for an inspired (and really funny) performance of her career defining Dolmen Music (1979). Wendy Sutter, Bang on a Can’s normally reserved cellist, even got into the singing and dancing spirit of things. At the conclusion, a handful of the afternoon’s performers gathered on stage to top off the show with a group performance of Panda Chant II.

Bernard Holland’s 450-word review of the performance (NYTimes, 11/8/05) was vaguely appreciative with an undercurrent of dismissiveness for a music he found overall to encapsulate “a gentleness that prodded the imagination without overtaxing it.” For those who would like to make an appraisal of their own, there’s still a free follow-up as part of WNYC’s New Sounds Live program inside the WFC’s Winter Garden on November 16 here in New York, and a host of other performances internationally as Monk’s two-season long celebration draws to a close.

Zachary M. Lewis Photo by Nowell York

The Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra’s new music pipeline is short and steady. It runs from Severance Hall a few blocks down the street to Margaret Brouwer, the resident composer at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

The COYO commissions and performs a new score from one of its students every year. Last year, it was Dan Visconti. This year, they tapped Casey Hale, a second-year graduate composition student, and he responded with a 10-minute piece for full orchestra called Pax in Nomine Domini.

Hale received the commission from the COYO last May and had to be finished by August—a true compositional challenge. “I knew how I’d be spending my summer,” he recalls. “This is by far the largest orchestra I’ve ever had a chance to work with. Writing for full orchestra is always kind of a monster no matter what you do. But it was an incredible honor.”

Music director (and outgoing assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra) James Gaffigan explains the choice. “Casey’s style is very appropriate for us, not too crazy difficult but not simply sight-readable, either. He knows what he’s doing. He’s a real talented guy who knows exactly what he wants.”

Pax in Nomine Domini is slated for its world premiere this Sunday afternoon during the youth orchestra’s 20th anniversary season-opening concert. It’s on a program with Prokofiev, Bernstein, and Joseph Jongen.

Occasions on which new music appears often draw at least some measure of perfunctory attention but this particular piece might actually cause a minor stir. That’s because Hale infused the work with an ironic anti-war spirit some are apt to find relevant to modern times.

Inspired by a recent course in medieval music, Hale derived the primary motif for Pax from a song by the 12th-century troubadour Marcabru, but not just any song. Ostensibly a rallying cry for piece, Abru’s text is in fact an exhortation to engage in righteous battle in the Crusades.

“In essence, there’s an ironic relationship between the title and the actual text,” Hale says. “My intention was to dramatize that juxtaposition and to explore how that message gets disseminated and how it turns into propaganda. The way I’ve dressed it up is complex but I think the idea does come across to the orchestra on a fairly basic level. I think the idea resonates with at least some of them.”

Pax begins relatively calmly—”from a point of restraint,” in Hale’s words—and builds through repetition and variation into a huge, climactic statement. Hale describes his musical language as neither tonal nor atonal but modal with a 21st-century flair, incorporating serial techniques but not defined by them.

“He varies the theme in so many ways,” Gaffigan says, “to the point where it’s almost unrecognizable because he’s broken it down to the rhythmic level exclusively. It’s supposed to sound crass and bizarre in spots, too, and then there’s this romantic ending that just melts away. It’s been hard for student players who’ve been learning how to make beautiful sounds their whole lives to go back to doing what they did when they first picked up their instruments.”

Hale hesitates to affix any rigid agenda to Pax because he doesn’t want listeners to focus their attention too closely on extra-musical matters. He himself claims to have set aside all such issues during composition. Still, he says it should be clear after the performance that he comes down on the side of actual peace even if Abru doesn’t.

Speaking from the perspective of the orchestra, Gaffigan says the 105 young musicians who comprise it have been responding favorably to hearing directly from Hale about what was going through his mind as he wrote the music now sitting on their stands as the final rehearsals are underway.

“They love being let in on the secret,” he says. “They just suck it up. Plus, they love working with a living composer. You don’t know how much they’d love to call up Mahler and ask him a few questions. I think the most important aspect here is not our commission of a new work or a composer getting a premiere, but young musicians getting to work with a living composer.”

The Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra’s 20th anniversary season-opening concert takes place 3 p.m. November 13th at Severance Hall.

Justin Schell

The trailer for the sixth annual Sound Unseen film festival imagines a world perceived not visually, but sonically: people wear glasses with speakered lenses and visit cinemas with a ragtag collage of amplifiers in place of a white screen. One would be hard-pressed to find a better metaphor for what has become a staple of the Minneapolis arts scene. Over 40 films documented multiple worlds of music, resulting in a heady mix of the populist and the esoteric, the globally iconic and the locally underground. Nas, Jeff Buckley, “Wild Man” Fischer, ethnomusicological film archives, and Cuban hip-hop were just a few of the myriad subjects represented. Films with subject matter generally placed towards the “art” side of music also manifested within this diversity.

Films about Arvo Pärt and Philip Glass document the ways a composer responds to success. Structured as a series of vignettes, Arvo Pärt: 24 Preludes for a Fugue (2002) provides an illuminating portrayal of the reclusive composer. The short vignettes range from rehearsals of Fratres and Cecilia, Vergine Romana, to more intimate moments, when Pärt is shown kneeling in prayer, deep in thought. Judging from Dorian Supin’s film, popular recognition seems to have had little effect on the composer. Creating a resonant whole out of divergent parts, Supin captures Pärt’s gentle and unassuming mannerisms, revealing a human composer yearning to reach the musically divine.

Diametrically opposed to Pärt is Eric Darmon’s Looking Glass (2003), which follows the globe-trotting contemporary life of Philip Glass. It is clear from the film that Glass’s music has become secondary to the business of his music. Looking Glass Studios is referred to as “the office” and few moments pass without Glass on the phone about an upcoming gig or working on a current project. While the film contains a tantalizing snippet from an archival performance of Music with Changing Parts, past works garner little attention. Instead, Darmon chooses to focus on what can easily be thought of as “Glass, Inc.”

Two of the festival’s “marquee” events featured artists at opposite ends of the turntable. DJ Spooky performed his Re-Birth of a Nation, while Christian Marclay, as part of his year-long residency at the Walker Arts Center, organized a mini-festival entitled Sound Art Cinema.

In Re-Birth, Spooky transfers the DJ’s focus from sound to film by scissoring and looping D.W. Griffiths’s racistly revisionist history of the Reconstruction-era South, Birth of A Nation. His live video-editing skills aside, the fundamental lack of Re-Birth is that Spooky’s re-presentation of the film fails to extract any further cultural resonance. Spooky’s soundtrack, which ranged from Glass-inspired minimalist textures to drum ‘n’ bass, was rather unfulfilling, except for the periodic thumping hip-hop beat.

Shown over two full days, the fifteen films chosen by Marclay, a well-established turntablist in his own right, microcosmically represented the festival’s diversity: I can think of few other festivals where Walt Disney would share space with Michael Snow. Loosely organized around the idea of “musical performance becoming theatrical,” most of the films, perhaps predictably, focused on Fluxus. Four films of Mauricio Kagel, Match (1966), Solo (1967), Ludwig van (1969), and Unter Strom (1970), made manifest the effect of Fluxus in Germany. Ludwig van is the composer’s provocative protest against Beethoven’s deification.

For New York’s Fluxus scene, Marclay chose Peter Moore’s Stockhausen’s Originale: Doubletakes (1964-94), a sensory-overloading aesthetic romp that features most of the 1960s New York avant-garde luminaries, from James Tenney scampering around in a feral costume to Alvin Lucier emphatically conducting a chorus of newspaper declaimers. Finally, in an attempt to construct a legacy of Fluxus, Marclay showed Sonic Youth’s performance of George Maciunas’s Piano Piece #13 (Carpenter’s Piece for Nam June Paik), the members of the group hammering nails into the keys of an unfortunate spinet with malicious enjoyment.

One of the highlights of Sound Unseen was Thomas Reichman’s Mingus (1968). This rarely-screened film captures a taut slice of the bassist’s life. Filming Mingus in his apartment, from which he was soon to be evicted, Reichman captures the bassist’s improvised invectives on black nationalism, the American education system, armed revolution, and, of course, music. He extracts his bass from the rubble to pluck some notes or examine a crumbling sheet of music.

As much as Reichman tries to “normalize” Mingus, his mental instability is obvious: he enacts a mock whipping and hanging ceremony with his young daughter Carolyn. Her presence amplifies his increasingly paranoid outlook and when Mingus says, “my wife keeps me away from my daughter,” it is easy to understand why. In the end, he is led away in tears by police on suspicion of heroin possession, leaving all his belongings, including his bass, on the street. Seething with the political ethos of 1968, the bassist’s anger, sadness, and paranoia are palpable in his words: “I hope the Communists blow you people up.”

These films were only a few examples of how Sound Unseen attempts to see different worlds through hearing music. Unfortunately, very few people actually saw these films. While venues were nearly full for Mingus and Re-Birth, other films were woefully under-attended. Perhaps a bit more publicity is needed for next year’s festival. Those who did see these films, some rarely screened anywhere outside New York or the metropolitan centers of Europe, were treated to a dynamic fusion of music and film festival.

Mark Gresham Photo by Angela Lee

After a languid late summer, a burst of creativity took place the second week of October in Atlanta, with three unrelated back-to-back days of concerts featuring five world premieres in all by Atlanta composers, plus one by a Bostonian, and an American premiere (second performance world-wide) of a work by an icon of modernism. That two of these concerts involved music for pipe organ is no less remarkable for the city.

The third of these concerts (the subject of this report) perhaps draws the most immediate national attention simply due to the immediately recognizable name of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, and all the modernist cache that brings among those who like to drop such things in casual but trendy social conversation.

Stockhausen’s Himmelfahrt (Ascension also provided as the English title) concluded the intermissionless concert organized by organist Randall Harlow, an adventurous grad student at Emory University. Harlow’s overall plan for the new music concert at the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts’ Emerson Concert Hall included, as complements to Stockhausen, world premieres by two Emory-based composition professors, John Anthony Lennon and Steven Everett, written for Harlow and the hall’s new Jaeckel pipe organ.

It’s no less worthy of note that although Harlow’s concert chronologically took place shortly after the formal debut of the fully-voiced Jaeckel, apparently none of the inaugural concerts officially included the new pipes.

Harlow opened the concert with the sounds of the organ by itself in John Anthony Lennon’s Misericordia. Lennon spoke just before it was performed, describing the work as influenced by various rock/pop organists imbibed during his early years in California. But whatever of these were present, they were deeply embedded in the overall Gothic tone of the work, rather than superficially obvious.

The Jaeckel organ’s tonal palette was extended in the subsequent work on the program, Steve Everett’s Vanitas, named after the opening line of Ecclesiastes, “Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas.” The piece used live electronic processing of the organ’s sounds to evoke a sonic version of the visual art genre of memento mori popular among Dutch painters during the Renaissance era. Beginning in the 15th century, still life paintings, referred to as “vanitas” at the time, often included one or more objects representing mortality, whether as obvious as a skull or subtle as a rotting piece of fruit in a gleaming bowl. The electronics, controlled by Everett, hummed, chirped, and gurgled a range of real-time modifications to the sounds emitted by the organ.

The final work was Stockhausen’s Himmelfahrt which is the first essay of his Klang: The 24 Hours of the Day cycle. It was premiered in Milan on May 5, 2005, under the title Erste Stunde (First Hour) to about 2,300 listeners packed into the hall, plus hundreds more outside. The Schwartz’s 800 seats were not filled for this second performance, and the program suggested that the audience seat themselves near the center of the hall to best experience the sonic projections, likewise controlled live by Everett. Harlow, playing a small array of percussion in addition to organ, was joined by two singers, soprano Teresa Hopkin and tenor John Bigham, vocally rendering the ecstatic Christian text in German with a few lines of Latin thrown in for good measure.

Himmelfahrt is an unabashedly fully-serial work, demonstrating that although that stylistic dinosaur is no longer roaring as it did in the ’70s, it is still alive and kicking.

More importantly, for all three composers, it was their first work for pipe organ, and helps demonstrate that it is no endangered species, especially when new works are written for newly finished instruments.

Julia Werntz Photo by Michele Macrakis

Boston new music lovers and visitors, here are some points of interest about the 2005-06 concert season now underway…

Boston Musica Viva, directed by Richard Pittman, opened its season on October 7 with “Cybersonic Adventures”—a concert much more exciting than its title, with Kaija Saariaho’s thrilling Aer, and some other deeply engaging works, such as Peter Child’s Ensemblance for ensemble with live electronics, and Lift, a minimalist collaboration between composer Barbara White and filmmaker Alison Crocetta involving dozens of helium-filled balloons. BMV will continue its season on November 4 with “Boston (Musica Viva) Celtics,” featuring music by composers with an Irish or Scottish and Boston connection. (Too bad we’ll be forced to choose between this and the BMOP concert, and the first concert in the “Extensible Toy Piano Festival” at Clark University, on the same night. See below.) On February 5, BMV hosts its annual family concert, featuring Bernard Hoffer’s ballet Ma Goose, with dancers of the Northeast Youth Ballet, and narrator Bob McGrath, of Sesame Street. (This year I’ll bring my daughter.) Finally, on April 22, BMV will present “Honoring Varèse and the International Composer’s Guild,” with works by composers who had been included in that series, including a new sextet by Chou Wen-Chung. All BMV concerts are held at Boston University’s Tsai Performance Center.

Collage New Music, directed by David Hoose, will give Boston (or formerly of Boston) composers a good showing this season, with works by Curtis Hughes, Marti Epstein, Elliott Gyger, David Rakowski, Gunther Schuller, Peter Child, Martin Brody, Tod Machover, and, in a February 27 memorial concert for Boston’s beloved Edward Cohen, works by Cohen, Seymour Schifrin, and Marjorie Merryman. Hughes is Collage’s composer-in-residence this year, and I’m looking forward very much to the new work he is writing for their spring concert. Many local performers are fans of his music, which is usually a good sign. Collage concerts are all held at Pickman Hall at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, and the dates are 10/31 (program includes HK Gruber’s Frankenstein!!), 1/30, 2/27, and 3/27.

Boston veteran new music activists Dinosaur Annex, co-directed by composer/conductor Scott Wheeler and flutist Sue-Ellen Hershman-Tcherepnin, opened its season with “Sleeping, Waking, Dreaming,” featuring works by Richard Cornell, Jeff Nichols, Ruth Lomon, Stefan Hakenberg, and Arthur Levering. (Sadly, I missed this one.) DA’s season will continue with the third annual “Salute to Young Composers” on February 12. This festival was created, says Wheeler, when DA realized it “needed to find out more about the new generation of composers” and to “keep its repertoire fresh.” They began by seeking out area graduate-level composers, and the festival has since expanded to include events for composers of high school age and younger. This year’s group of composers includes Montserrat Torras, David Little, Lei Liang, Erik Jorgensen, Richard Beaudoin, and Dominique Schafer. These events are held at Boston’s Community Music Center. DA’s season will end with “American Triple Play” on April 30, featuring works by Fred Lerdahl, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, and Boston’s John Harbison. All Dinosaur Annex concerts are held at First Church in Boston.

Alea III, directed by composer and conductor Theodore Antoniou, has a long history of supporting young composers with its annual International Composition Competition. The concert featuring this year’s finalists was on October 1, and the winners were American composer Martha Callison Horst and Mario Carro of Spain. On top of that, Alea will hold a “Young Composers’ Workshop” on March 13 with Gunther Schuller conducting works by composers from the U.S., Italy, Albania, Turkey, and, of course, Greece. In addition, on regular Alea concerts, Antoniou has always showcased an international selection of composers, as well as locals. Works by Giya Kanchelli, Witold Lutoslawski, Karel Husa, Varèse, George Tsontakis, George Couroupos, Alexandros Kalogeras, and Antoniou himself, as well as Americans Paul Chihara, John Thow, Jay Reise, Brian Fennelly, Michael Gandolfi, and others, are programmed on this season’s other four concerts (11/16, 12/7, 2/1, 4/9). The April 9 concert will be “Celebrating Alea,” an event “featuring distinguished international artists and speakers” (exactly who, TBA). All Alea III concerts are held at Boston University’s Tsai Performance Center.

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project will open its season on November 4 with the North American premiere of Louis Andriessen’s 1997 Trilogy of the Last Day, featuring members of the Boston Children’s Chorus and Andriessen’s long-time collaborator, pianist Tomoko Mukaiyama, who will sing and play the koto as well. The press release points out that Mukaiyama “has collaborated with artists such as architects and fashion designers in hopes of developing new forms of performance.” Personally, I am looking forward to hearing Andriessen’s much-discussed piece, as well as the music of Julia Wolfe and Boston’s Evan Ziporyn.

BMOP also has scheduled the following: the annual “Boston Connection” concert on January 21, which will include Lee Hyla’s Lives of the Saints (I heard this when it was premiered by Boston Musica Viva, and it’s been a few years since then, but I do remember being mesmerized by the vocal part—be sure to put this one in your date book); a concert devoted to “Concertos for Indigenous Instruments” on March 10 (works by Shirish Korde, Jin Hi Kim, Reza Vali, and Henry Cowell); and, on May 26, a “Big Band” concert, with Gershwin, Bernstein, Milton Babbitt, and the world premiere of William Thomas McKinley’s RAP featuring clarinetist Richard Stoltzman. All four concerts will take place at New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall.

The Callithumpian Consort, directed by pianist Stephen Drury, will present music of John Luther Adams, Pozzi Escot, Gubbaidulina, Boulez, Xenakis, Rzewski, and others, in concerts in the various halls of the New England Conservatory, on 11/21, 2/1, 3/7, and 3/29. Callithupian’s season opened with a concert devoted to the music of John Luther Adams, which included the premiere of an important new work—a sixty-six minute elegy, For Lou Harrison, for string quartet, two pianos and string ensemble. (Sadly, I missed this one, too! My husband was performing on the same night.)

For a change in ambience, on February 13 the Firebird Ensemble, directed by violist Kate Vincent, will be presenting a “crossover” concert at Somerville barbeque joint Redbones in Davis Square, with arrangements of tunes by Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, and Rage Against the Machine, along with pieces by Ian Clark and Marcin Bela. Firebird’s season also will include a May 9 Jordan Hall concert of premieres by Lee Hyla, Curtis Hughes, and John Mallia (newly added to the New England Conservatory faculty), and a Christmas season performance of Jon Deak’s Passion of Scrooge, which was a big hit last year (date and location still TBA). Firebird prides itself on its eclectic programming and top-notch players. Firebird’s concerts are always interesting and the atmosphere inviting.

Another off-the-beaten-path treasure is pianist Sarah Bob’s New Gallery Concert Series, at Boston’s Community Music Center, which features interactions between musicians and visual artists. On November 10, there will be a performance by the After Quartet, a group known for accompanying silent films. After Quartet percussionist Aaron Trant’s composition and solo performance of music for Chris Marker’s film La Jetée at an earlier New Gallery concert showed a deep involvement with the nuances of the film—a work of love; this show, which includes a new work of his, should be well worth hearing. There will be concerts on 1/26 and 5/11, including premieres of works by Daniel Felsenfeld and Nicholas Vines, in collaboration with painter Christina Memoli.

On November 4 and 5, Clark University in Worcester, will present the very exciting “Extensible Toy Piano Festival” at the Traina Center for the Arts. Co-directed by composers Matt Malsky and David Claman, the festival features pianists Phyllis Chen and John McDonald, as well as improvisations by the Callithumpian Consort. Events include the following: two symposia on “Composing/Performing” and “Listening”; a key-note address, “The Toy Piano in the Post-Prohibitive Age” by composer and critic Kyle Gann; concerts on both nights, with premieres of pieces involving the toy piano, by Malsky, Claman, Jeff Morris, Thanos Chysakis, James Bohn, Atsushi Yoshinaka, Adrian Pertout, John McDonald, Frank J. Oteri, and Howard Kenty, as well as works by Phyllis Chen, Kyle Gann, Matthew Sansom, and Rhodri Divies. As if that weren’t enough, a sound installation by John Mallia will be on view during the festival.

As for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, there’s too much happening to begin to cover here. A sampling of composers represented this season: Tippett, Saariaho, Golijov, Perle, Henze, Carter, Tan, Lieberson, Foss, Dawe, Schuller…

Happy listening.