As the traditional city orchestra model faces powerful challenges in changing times, new orchestras have been springing up over the past few years, often populated by younger, freelance performers who are paid by the gig (if at all), sometimes performing in nontraditional venues — rock clubs, churches, college auditoriums — rather than concert halls, and frequently playing nonstandard repertoire, ranging from contemporary postclassical music to pop covers.
When I heard Lara Downes perform music from her intriguing new CD, 13 Ways of Looking at the Goldberg, at a wine bar in Portland, Oregon, she didn’t announce any of the names of the composers whose new variations on J.S. Bach’s immortal aria she was playing.
Since his youthful breakthrough works such as the controversial 1995 chamber opera Powder Her Face and the 2000 Grawemeyer Award–winning orchestral masterpiece Asyla (which made the 29-year-old composer the youngest to win music’s richest prize), Thomas Adès has been hailed as the great young hope of first British, then European, and eventually classical music in general.
When the 9-year-old Eric Stern saw a production of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera in his native Philadelphia back in the 1970s, his life changed. Stern loved the darkness, the rawness, the decadent Weimar-era cabaret feel of the music, and the decidedly un-elite characters the opera chronicled.
“Do you not remember the Javanese music able to express every nuance of meaning, even unmentionable shades, and which makes our tonic and dominant [musical notes] seem like empty phantoms for the use of unwise infants?”
Visitors to this summer’s “Bali: Art, Ritual, Performance” exhibition at the Asian Art Museum may be encountering Balinese music and art for the first time, yet the Bay Area is no stranger to the shimmering sounds of Balinese gamelan orchestra.
You can almost smell the incense in the title work of this authoritative disk of three major 1980s works for Javanese percussion orchestra by Lou Harrison (1917-2003).
When SFMOMA decided to devote the summer to its exhibition “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde,” its associate curator of public programs, Frank Smigiel, wasn’t satisfied with merely presenting Gertrude Stein as solely a collector of masterpieces. That wouldn’t do justice to the writer who changed 20th-century literature so dramatically.
Although he’s the best-known and most prolific composer of his generation, Philip Glass does a lot more than just write music every day. The indefatigable 74-year-old New Yorker runs a multifaceted operation that includes a record label (Orange Mountain), two publishing businesses (Dunvagen Music and St.
When Chanticleer asked English composer Roxanna Panufnik to compose the first section of its new work, The Boy Whose Father Was God, she knew nothing about the source material: the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, an apocryphal text that portrays the young Jesus of Nazareth less as a holy do-gooder and more as a trickster figure resembling the unintentionally terrifying, all-powerful mutant kid in the famous Jerome Bixby story and Twilight Zone<
As Alexander Lingas beheld the shattered remains of San Francisco’s Annunciation Cathedral, devastated in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake a few months earlier, he wanted to help. The singer had moved to the city in June 1990 with his new wife, Ann to San Francisco, a violinist who was studying at the Conservatory of Music.
Percussion, the great Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie once told me, is the instrument of the 20th century. And San Francisco has a fair claim to being the wellspring of percussion's emergence, for it was here that, beginning in 1938, at the instigation of their teacher, Henry Cowell, the maverick young composers Lou Harrison and John Cage contrived the first percussion ensembles in the Western classical music tradition, employing instruments from junkyards such as brake drums and flower pots, as well as gongs, woodblocks, and other instruments from shops in Chinatown.
The slide is blurry, the image it depicts indistinct. As the viewer squints, trying to make it out, the picture gradually becomes clearer, until she finally recognizes the object portrayed in the projection. Or does she? Is it the face of someone she knows, as she guessed earlier? Or is it someone else — or even a face at all?
It’s been nearly a quarter century since three composers just out of Yale moved to New York, got to be friends, bitched often about the city’s fragmented music scene and lack of opportunities to play and hear the kind of music they wanted to create — and then decided to do something about it.
New York, New York, a hell of a town: arts capital of the world and epicenter of American postclassical music since at least the days of George Gershwin.
Lou Harrison called him “the central switchboard for two or three generations of American composers.” John Cage said he was the “open sesame” of American music. Yet Henry Cowell’s significance to American music remains unappreciated, even by most classical music fans. In his home state, Bay Area residents who recognize his name are unlikely to think that the Santa Cruz redwood forest is named for him, rather than, as it happens, for an unrelated lime/logging/land baron.
French music, the stereotype goes, prizes clarity, elegance, balance — in a word, gracefulness. Of course, exceptions are easy to find, but last weekend’s concerts titled “Les grâces françoises: Graceful Music From France,” by the aptly named ensemble Les grâces, made a persuasive case that a consciously graceful performance style immaculately suits the polite, early-Baroque gems. The concert was one in the series presented by the San Francisco Early Music Society.
A few years ago, Evan Ziporyn’s mother called him to report a strange occurrence while she slept. “I just had this dream,” she said, “that you wrote an opera about Colin McPhee.” They chatted for a while, and after she hung up, Ziporyn thought, “Y’know, that’s a really good idea.” The seed planted in 2001 finally comes to fruition next week when Cal Performances stages the American premiere of Ziporyn’s opera A House in Bali, directed by Jay Scheib, at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall on Sept. 26.
When I heard Lara Downes perform music from her intriguing new CD, 13 Ways of Looking at the Goldberg, at a wine bar in Portland, Oregon, she didn’t announce any of the names of the composers whose new variations on J.S. Bach’s immortal aria she was playing.
Since his youthful breakthrough works such as the controversial 1995 chamber opera Powder Her Face and the 2000 Grawemeyer Award–winning orchestral masterpiece Asyla (which made the 29-year-old composer the youngest to win music’s richest prize), Thomas Adès has been hailed as the great young hope of first British, then European, and eventually classical music in general.
When the 9-year-old Eric Stern saw a production of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera in his native Philadelphia back in the 1970s, his life changed. Stern loved the darkness, the rawness, the decadent Weimar-era cabaret feel of the music, and the decidedly un-elite characters the opera chronicled.
Visitors to this summer’s “Bali: Art, Ritual, Performance” exhibition at the Asian Art Museum may be encountering Balinese music and art for the first time, yet the Bay Area is no stranger to the shimmering sounds of Balinese gamelan orchestra.
You can almost smell the incense in the title work of this authoritative disk of three major 1980s works for Javanese percussion orchestra by Lou Harrison (1917-2003).
When SFMOMA decided to devote the summer to its exhibition “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde,” its associate curator of public programs, Frank Smigiel, wasn’t satisfied with merely presenting Gertrude Stein as solely a collector of masterpieces. That wouldn’t do justice to the writer who changed 20th-century literature so dramatically.
Although he’s the best-known and most prolific composer of his generation, Philip Glass does a lot more than just write music every day. The indefatigable 74-year-old New Yorker runs a multifaceted operation that includes a record label (Orange Mountain), two publishing businesses (Dunvagen Music and St.
When Chanticleer asked English composer Roxanna Panufnik to compose the first section of its new work, The Boy Whose Father Was God, she knew nothing about the source material: the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, an apocryphal text that portrays the young Jesus of Nazareth less as a holy do-gooder and more as a trickster figure resembling the unintentionally terrifying, all-powerful mutant kid in the famous Jerome Bixby story and Twilight Zone<
As Alexander Lingas beheld the shattered remains of San Francisco’s Annunciation Cathedral, devastated in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake a few months earlier, he wanted to help. The singer had moved to the city in June 1990 with his new wife, Ann to San Francisco, a violinist who was studying at the Conservatory of Music.
New York, New York, a hell of a town: arts capital of the world and epicenter of American postclassical music since at least the days of George Gershwin.
