'Terrible Twos'

A new work of mine and eight other premieres, duets by living composers, will be performed at 7 p.m. Monday, Sept. 18 at William Paterson University’s New Music Series, on a program titled “Terrible Twos.” The music was commissioned by Composers Concordance, a group of longstanding currently led by Gene Pritsker and Dan Cooper that regularly performs commissions and performs works by its members. This concert is the first event of Composers Concordance 2017-18 season.

            The program is mostly duets, split between performers Gene Pritsker and Greg Baker, electric guitars; Keve Wilson, oboe, and Kathleen Supové, piano; and Peter Jarvis, multi-percussion and Michiyo Suzuki, clarinet/ bass clarinet. They’ll be performing work by Randall Woolf, Gene Pritsker, Peter Jarvis, Greg Baker, David Saperstein, Dan Cooper, John Clark, and myself. The concert finale will be “a large semi-aleatoric piece” that will include all three duos performing as a sextet. 

My contribution will be in the clarinet and percussion duets, along with new pieces by John and Peter. The title of mine is “Lunatic,” as it was started before the recent total eclipse that captured the attention of all of North America. The event seemed to underscore what feels like a surreal time in American life and culture, one where we’re wrestling with a kind of national psychological complex related to who we were and who we are as a country and a species. The overlay of that superficial fixation onto the underlying forces of creation, symbolized by the eclipse, reveals a colorful, dark landscape of anxiety.

            Admission is free. The concert is in Shea Center for the Performing Arts, William Paterson University, 300 Pompton Road, Wayne, NJ 07470. I hope everyone can come and support both the Composers Concordance and the university’s New Music Series. Both deserve high praise for their relentless efforts to promote new music in high quality performances.

            --C.     
September 15, 2017

theandofone.blospot.com

Composers Concordance 'Ensemble'

Just a quick reminder that the final concert of the Composers Concordance Festival 2012, "Ensemble," takes place tomorrow night, Monday, Feb. 6, at William Paterson University and featuring the directors of Composers Concordance, Gene Pritsker and Milica Paranosic with percussionist/composer/conductor Peter Jarvis and flute legend Robert Dick.

You can find a full article, including some remarks from a brief interview with Peter, on the Asbury Park Press website and in today's (Sunday, Nov. 5) "Sunday Best" section of the Asbury Park Press.

--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
On Facebook

Composers Concordance Festival 2012

Just a reminder that the Composers Concordance Festival 2012, a series of five concerts, is under way. The collective emphasizes composers' involvement in the performances, so each concert should offer a direct view into creative minds. It's also billed as "the most eclectic contemporary music festival of the season" so stylistic variety should be expected. The group is directed by Joseph Pehrson, Pat Hardish, Gene Pritsker, Dan Cooper and Milica Paranosic. (Paranosic is absent from the photo above.)

Tonight's event, 7 to 10 p.m. Jan. 29 at DROM, 85 Avenue A, New York, is the Third Annual Composers Play Composers Marathon. The list of composers participating:

Yael Acher, Cristian Amigo, Loop B, Dan Barrett, Eve Beglarian, Svjetlana Bukvich-Nichols, Peter Breiner, Luis Andrei Cobo, Valerie Coleman, Dan Cooper, Jed Distler, Patrick Grant, Franz Hackl, Sara Holtzschue, Peter Jarvis, Jonathan Kane, Margaret Lancaster, Andrew M. Lee, Peri Mauer, Daniel Palkowski, Milica Paranosic, Gene Pritsker, David Saperstein, Larry Simon, David Soldier, Rubens Salles, Eleonor Sandresky, Ezequiel Viñao and Michael Wolff.

That list is cut-and-pasted from the Composers Concordance website, where you can find out more information.

Upcoming events are "New Blues" featuring the International Street Cannibals Ensemble, 9 p.m. Jan. 31, at 62 Avenue C; "Electronics" 8 p.m. Feb. 3 at Gallery MC, 549 W. 52 St.; and "Ensemble," 7 p.m. Monday, Feb. 6 at William Paterson University and directed by Peter Jarvis. I'll be writing about this last event for my Sunday column in the Asbury Park Press.

Check the Composers Concordance website for more info! Here's a clip from the website, featuring Dan Cooper's 'Unsubscribe' for piano four hands, played by Taka Kigawa and Dimitri Dover at Chelsea Art Museum in 2010.



--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
On Facebook

WPU New Music Concert

Attended the William Paterson New Music Series concert last night to hear Peter Jarvis play the premiere of my piece, Charms and Chasms. The program was a tribute to the late genius composer and theorist Milton Babbitt who died last month. Works by David Saperstein, George Perle, Arthur Krieger, Tobias Picker and David Sanford were played, along with a couple of short pieces by Babbitt.

The music represented a wide range of approaches, representing not Babbitt's style but the scope of his interests and legacy. All of it was of an extremely high quality, from the brutish Krieger piece, Strike Zone, for drum set and computer, commissioned and performed by Peter, to the quiet lyricism of the piano solo by Picker, played by Carl Patrick Bolleia. Peter was also involved in the two Babbitt pieces, Homily for solo snare drum, which he commissioned and has performed many times, and the delightful 15-second celeste solo, Composition for One Instrument and Ben, which I hope to write more about at some point. I as understand it, Peter had learned of the existence of this score, which had existed only in manuscript, almost by accident and was instrumental in getting it copied, published and performed.

The biggest applause was for Peter's composition, Drumming for Milton, a work for drum kit augmented by temple blocks, premiered by longtime New Jersey Percussion Ensemble member Paul Carroll. A blend of Babbitt-esque rhythmic counterpoint and Keith Moon-style tom work, Drumming just smokes and Carroll did a great job with it.

I'm honored to have had my own piece in the mix. Peter also commissioned this work, performed it himself and did a terrific job, catching the air of ritual and the blend of percussiveness and lyricism I was looking for. I just loved seeing all that metal swinging around in the stage lights during the livelier sections. If a recording or video turns up, I will surely post it.

--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
On Facebook

Charms & Chasms Premiere

I'm headed up to William Paterson Monday to hear Peter Jarvis perform my Charms and Chasms for multi-percussion. Peter is one of the best players in the state, a fine conductor and a great supporter of new music. I'm always grateful for the opportunity to have him or his ensemble, the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble, perform anything of mine.

Peter asked me for a non-pitched, multi-percussion piece for one player in 2009, but I couldn't get a handle on what I wanted. I had an idea to use a set of cymbals and gongs, but I couldn't get any farther than that.

I think what finally tipped the bucket for me was lecturing about John Cage in my class "Music and the Natural World," discussing his conviction, borrowed from Indian philosophy, that the purpose of music was "to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences". Cage used both strict processes and randomness to create musical experiences that often have the sense of having been written by no one, but just having emerged, at his command, out of the natural order, the sounds all around us.

I was thinking a lot about that notion when I started composing this piece. I finished it in January of 2010. The final setup does use mostly cymbals and gongs, with one floor tom thrown in. I put the cymbals into a particular order physically around the player and then used a simple integer series (2-1-3-1-3-2-1) to choose which cymbal to strike at any moment, leading off with steady quarter-note strikes for a sense of ritual, a slow, steady motion through space.

The integer series also guides the phrase structure, which is comprised of measures of 7 beats each. So, after a short introduction on the tom, the first phrase is two 7-beat measures, the second is one, the third is three, etc. There are five sections; each complete section is roughly 13 measures (the sum of the integers in the series) and features some new way of interpreting the series to create surface detail. In section 2, for instance, I add grace notes onto select notes in each measure and the number of grace notes for each note follow the series (2 grace notes, 1 grace note, 3 grace notes, etc.)

The final score is more complicated than this short description, but you get the idea. I was using that little number series to create strict parameters within which I could make musical decisions. There's quite a lot of freedom within this structure--more than you would expect. My hope is, in the setting up of this score and this musical experience, in the ritual of choosing sounds, I was following Cage's advice--opening myself and my music up to divine influences, opening up the act of composition to the order-within-chaos and the chaos-within-order that are the voice of the universe.

Peter premieres this piece on a program that includes music of his, along with work by Milton Babbitt, David Saperstein, George Perle, George Walker and David Sampson. The concert is 7:30 p.m. at Shea Center Auditorium, 300 Pompton Road, Wayne.

--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
On Facebook