Ken Bullock
Ken Bullock grew up in and around the diverse music scene of the Bay Area. He has been affiliated with Theatre of Yugen (Noh and Kyogen) since 1980, and writes about the performing arts for www.berkeleyplanet.com and The Commuter Times and Mark Alburger's magazine 21st Century Music.
Articles by this Author
“After our ‘Arctic Sounds’ show in late June,” said Jeffrey Anderle of the group he cofounded, Redshift Ensemble, and its most recent program, played at the Brick & Mortar Music Hall in San Francisco, consisting of new compositions coupled with sounds recorded in the Alaskan wild, “we wanted to give a concert that was really fun, which would give a lot more freedom to the composers — but not fluffy!
“There’s a certain element of disbelief involved,” said Alden Gilchrist of this Friday’s gala performance celebrating his 60th anniversary with Calvary Presbyterian Church at Fillmore and Jackson Streets, atop Pacific Heights in San Francisco. Gilchrist started out in that edifice in 1951 as organist, later becoming music director for this church that dates back to the Gold Rush.
“There’s a beautiful West Coast nexus of music,” said Adam Sliwinski of So Percussion, talking about that quartet’s Oct. 26 Stanford Lively Arts show, titled “We Are All Going in Different Directions: A John Cage Celebration.” He continued, saying: “Henry Cowell influenced John Cage; so did Pete Seeger’s father, Charles [both Bay Area composers and teachers] ...
When The Most Happy Fella, Frank Loesser’s 1956 musical adaptation of Sidney Howard’s 1925 Pulitzer Prize–winning play They Knew What They Wanted, opened in New York for what was to be a long run — 20 months — New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson wrote that Loesser had “come about as close to op
“The more I work with talented singers,” said choreographer Mark Foehringer, who is stage directing Festival Opera’s production of La traviata, which opens July 9 at the Lesher Center in Walnut Creek, “the more I feel how physical singing really is — how they feel the note in their bodies....
At the California Missions in the 18th century,” said Cindy Beitmen, founder and director of the 14-voice Women’s Antique Vocal Ensemble (WAVE), “in the middle of nowhere, you’d find music. Earlier, it was known that in the cathedrals of Mexico City and Pueblo, there was polyphonic music better than in Europe. There was a mix of creole, mestizo, and black musicians. The Spanish had decimated the musical traditions of the Indians.
On a drizzling Sunday, California Bach Society performed the final concert of its program at St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, offering two gems of the English vocal repertory: Henry Purcell’s ode Hail, Bright Cecilia (1692) and George Frideric Handel’s Acis and Galatea, a masque (1718). Or is it a pastoral? Or, as Handel once described it, a little opera?
Alex Ross, music critic at The New Yorker since 1996, returns to the Bay Area for Cal Performances’ Strictly Speaking series on Oct. 14, addressing (and sampling) “Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues: Bass Lines of Music History,” from his brand-new book, Listen to This, due Sept. 28 from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Glimpses of the landscape of American music, as played, sung, and illustrated by projections and narration, will be displayed in a big tent on the headlands at Mendocino, one of the most striking land-and-seascapes on the West Coast. This compound setting for Susan Waterfall’s narrated multimedia program on July 15, “Hallelujah, America!” will be a featured event of the 24th Mendocino Music Festival, July 10-24.
Twenty-five pieces by 25 composers: the formula behind the equation for San Francisco Choral Artists’ 25th anniversary concert, titled “25 X 25.”
Kent Nagano, who stepped down as musical director of the Berkeley Symphony, returns, as conductor laureate, to lead the Berkeley Akademie on May 20. Currently, Nagano is music director of the Orchestre Symphonique de Montreal and of the Bavarian State Opera, as well as serving with the Russian National Orchestra's Conductor Collegium.
