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Boston Modern Orchestra Project has long been forging ties with contemporary composers and developing new audiences for modern music in the concert hall and beyond. Every season since 2000 BMOP has hosted a composer-in-residence and in 2008 it launched house record label BMOP/sound, focusing on new and otherwise unrecorded orchestral works. For three years beginning with the 2006-7 season, composer Lisa Bielawa served as the BMOP resident composer, and her BMOP/sound CD In Medias Res draws a map through her time working with the musicians of this group.
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Meet The Composer Awards $245,000 for the Creation of 19 New Works
What do you get when you cross the creativity of Bill Frisell with that of Bill Morrison? The world is about to find out. Meet The Composer has just awarded $245,000 to 32 organizations to commission 19 new works via the 2010 Commissioning Music/USA program. A total of 19 composers and 45 choreographers, theater artists, filmmakers, and visual artists will collaborate to combine music with dance, theater, film, and puppetry. The complete list of partner awardees is available here.
Published: 8/30/2010
Passing It On: Zappa on Playing Zappa
When putting together Zappa Plays Zappa in 2006, Dweezil Zappa set expectations for himself and the musicians that clearly reflected his late father Frank Zappa's exceedingly high musical standards. Shortly before the band embarked on a 40-plus-date tour this past spring that included stops across the United States, as well as in Mexico, British Columbia, Nova Scotia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Israel, Italy, France, and the UK, Dweezil and I spoke about the challenges and the preparation that has gone into presenting his late father's music to both new audiences and longtime fans.
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By David Brensilver
Published: 8/25/2010
Sounds Heard—Dawn of Midi: First
While Dawn of Midi is comprised of émigré musicians from three different countries—Pakistani percussionist Qasim Naqvi hails from Pakistan, pianist Amino Belyamani is Moroccan and bassist Aakaash Israni came from India—the music they create together does not betray their origins. Rather, their extremely heady stew has the energy of totally free improvisation, as well as the inevitability of a more straight-ahead approach to the music. So when Naqvi bangs on toys in addition to his drum kit, Belyamani sticks his hand inside the keyboard to increase the timbral possibilities, or Israni ekes out various whomps on his double-bass, the resultant sound is a bizarre yet completely natural sounding amalgam. It has an expansiveness reminiscent of Albert Ayler's pianoless masterpiece Spiritual Unity and yet at the same time the surehandedness of the Bill Evans Trio's legendary Village Vanguard sessions. Perhaps it's a sign that the avant-garde and the so-called mainstream are indeed, as Darcy James Argue has stated on these pages, no longer really all that far apart.
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By Frank J. Oteri
Published: 8/24/2010
Sounds Heard—ETHEL: Oshtali
In addition to a steady stream of regular concert touring, the string quartet ETHEL routinely conducts educational initiatives throughout the country. Most recently they set up shop at the Chickasaw Summer Arts Academy in Ada, Oklahoma, working directly with 11 young composers ranging in age from 13 to 21 to record Oshtali, the first album in history to feature the works of American Indian student composers The students had received coaching from Chickasaw Nation Composer-In-Residence Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate in 2008 and 2009, and they participated in every aspect of the album production process, including recording sessions at the Oklahoma City University Wanda L. Bass Music Center. The project is part of ongoing initiatives created by the Chickasaw Nation Division of Arts and Humanities
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By Alexandra Gardner
Published: 8/17/2010
Sounds Heard: The Music of Ezra Laderman Volumes 1-9
Ezra Laderman has been a major behind-the-scenes force in American music for many decades. Generations of composers have studied composition with him and he has also been a tireless advocate for the field at large. But perhaps as a result of all of this work helping other composers, Laderman's own compositions have not been in the public consciousness as much as they should be. However, over the past decade, Albany Records has released a total of nine CDs devoted to the music of Ezra Laderman, all in compelling performances that were personally supervised by him. And in late June, in honor of Laderman's 86th birthday, they issued all nine volumes together in a deluxe boxed set. Such a generous offering of a single living composer's output offers listeners an opportunity that is all too rare. It's a lot of music to absorb, but it's well worth the effort.
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By Frank J. Oteri
Published: 8/10/2010
Sounds Heard: Scott Johnson—Americans
Composer/guitarist Scott Johnson has a knack for orchestrating the pitches and rhythms of recorded speech, and has evolved a signature style over the years, which combines this technique with elements of his rock music-inspired upbringing. His most recent CD Americans, takes that ball and runs with it.
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By Alexandra Gardner
Published: 8/4/2010
A Memorial to Wendell Morris Logan (1940-2010)
Wendell Logan
Photo by Kevin G. Reeves
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I remember someone knocking on my office door one day and, when I opened the door, there was an athletically built young man standing there. He asked me if I was Professor Wilson, and, secondly, if I was a composer. I answered, affirmatively to both questions, and he indicated that he was seriously interested in music composition and wished to work with me. I didn't think of him as a student then, because I still thought of myself as a student. However, I did agree to work with him as a mentor, and we spent a lot of time discussing the written tradition of 20th century music and the jazz tradition. I also critiqued his music, introduced him to several 20th century compositional techniques, and encouraged him to pursue graduate study in music composition. I was surprised that I had never seen him in the music department before our meeting, and he explained that he was a varsity football player on the starting team of the Florida A&M Rattlers and had already completed all of the requirements for the undergraduate degree in music. I recognized immediately that Wendell Logan was a unique individual who possessed exceptional intellectual and athletic abilities, a strong personality and an independent spirit.
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By Olly W. Wilson
Published: 7/28/2010
Christopher Stark Receives 2010 Underwood Commission
Christopher Stark
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American Composers Orchestra (ACO) has announced that composer Christopher Stark has been named the winner of ACO's 2010 Underwood Commission of $15,000 for a work to be premiered by ACO in a future season. Stark won the commission with his work Ignatian Exercises which was chosen from seven finalists during ACO's 19th annual Underwood New Music Readings on May 21 and 22, 2010. In addition, this year, for the first time audience members at the New Music Readings had a chance to make their voices heard through a new Audience Choice Award. On both May 21 and 22, audience members voted for their favorite pieces. The winner of the Audience Choice Award was composer Ricardo Romaneiro, for his piece Sombras. As the winner, Romaneiro was commissioned to compose an original mobile phone ringtone, available to everyone who voted, free of charge.
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Published: 7/27/2010
Sounds Heard: thingNY—ADDDDDDDDD
Isabel Castellvi, Andrew Livingston, Paul Pinto, Erin Rogers, and Jeffrey Young, the five composer/performers behind ADDDDDDDDD, use bursts of noise tangled with a playful chamber orchestra to craft a hodgepodge of accompaniment throughout the 12-track piece, but the non-singing human voices stand front and center from start to finish. There's the Woody Allen-esque navel gazing neurotic, the irritatingly chipper infomercial salesman, and a whole host of actors emphatically giving voice to dialog that, for most of us, is usually kept internal.
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By Molly Sheridan
Published: 7/27/2010
Sounds Heard—Corey Dargel: Someone Will Take Care of Me
For nearly a decade Corey Dargel has been making extraordinarily weird musical concepts sound natural and almost mainstream by packaging them as popular songs. Irregular meters and phrases, totalist polyrhythms, and unstable harmonic movement are commonplace throughout his oeuvre. But all of these advanced musical techniques are never ends in and of themselves; in fact, since these devices serve his songs so well, a casual listener might not even realize all of what's going on in Dargel's electronically generated song accompaniments. But if Corey Dargel's output has always been the work of a singer-songwriter who engages in heady compositional strategies, he completely ups the ante with the two song cycles that constitute his latest recording, the double-CD Someone Will Take Care of Me: Thirteen Near-Death Experiences and Removable Parts. For starters, rather than arbitrary collections of vignettes (as are most albums of songs), these two cycles are both self-contained larger-scale works which maintain coherent through-lines in terms of their verbal narratives as well as their musical setting—each contain recurring thematic material as well as consistent instrumentation. In fact, an aspect that sets all of this material apart from Dargel's previous work is its clear allusion to the sound world of "classical" song cycles.
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By Frank J. Oteri
Published: 7/20/2010
Sounds Heard: Sqwonk—Black
Music for multiples always has the potential to reveal the superhero characteristics of the featured instrument. It's perfect territory for composers craving the aural illusion of extra notes, thick timbres, and never-ending strings of melody. There is also great potential for quirkiness, from active imaginations vamping on whatever-the-instrument-may-be on steroids, or what might happen if it could suddenly fly. The bass clarinet-wielding San Francisco-based duo Sqwonk, comprised of Jeff Anderle and Jonathan Russell, dive into both the supercharged and the potentially off-the-wall nature of instrument multiples with their CD Black.
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By Alexandra Gardner
Published: 7/13/2010
Remembering Robert Moffat Palmer (1915-2010)
Robert Palmer exerted an influence on the development of American music far greater than his current obscurity would suggest. He founded the doctoral program in music composition at Cornell University, which was the first in the United States (and quite possibly the world), and generations of Cornell composers remember his gentle, kind nature, his infallible ear, and his probing intellect. For many years he taught analysis courses using his own, very idiosyncratic system. All of us who learned it still remember those yards-long charts and those colored pencils from the Palmer system. We called it the "wallpaper" course, but we remember it fondly to this day.
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By Steven Stucky
Published: 7/6/2010
Nathan Smith Wins 2010 BMI Charlie Parker Jazz Composition Prize
Photo by Jamil Walker, courtesy BMI.
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Nathan Smith has been awarded the BMI Foundation's 2010 Charlie Parker Jazz Composition Prize for his big band work Now What? during the 22st Anniversary Summer Showcase Concert of the BMI Jazz Composers Workshop, which was held on Friday, July 1, 2010 at Christ and St. Stephen's Church in New York City. The concert featured the BMI/New York Jazz Orchestra, a 17-piece modern repertory ensemble made up of leading New York musicians. Smith received a cash award along with a $3,000 Manny Albam commission, named in memory of the Workshop's co-founder and longtime musical director, to compose a new piece for the next year's concert. The prize was adjudicated during the concert by trombonist John Fedchock, jazz journalist Dan Morgenstern, and saxophonist Steve Wilson.
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Published: 7/2/2010
25 Recordings Newly Inducted into Library of Congress National Recording Registry
The U.S. Library of Congress has announced the 2009 Inductees in the National Recording Registry, a collection now comprising 300 music, spoken word, and audio documentary recordings. In order to qualify for inclusion, a recording must be at least ten years old and be deemed culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant and worthy of preservation. Nominations come from a Library of Congress preservation board and online suggestions from the public. Some of the music highlights among the 25 newly inducted recordings are: the complete Village Vanguard Recordings of jazz pianist Bill Evans's classic trio; Willie Nelson's 1975 outlaw country concept album Red Headed Stranger and proto-punk singer-songwriter Patti Smith's contemporaneous debut Horses; Azucar Pa' Ti (1965), Eddie Palmieri's fifth salsa album with his band La Perfecta; the original cast recording of the 1959 Broadway musical Gypsy with music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; Little Richard's hit single "Tutti Frutti"; early Dixieland and klezmer performances, blues gems by Howlin' Wolf and Mississippi John Hurt, and more recent songs by the alternative rock band R.E.M. and the late gangsta rapper Tupac Shakur; the earliest commercially released recording of computer-synthesized speech—"Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two)" by Max Mathews (1961)—and Morton Subotnick's Silver Apples of the Moon, an original 1967 electronic music composition which was the first ever commissioned expressly for release on an LP recording (by Nonesuch Records).
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Published: 6/24/2010
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