Two concerts coming up, but you'll have to flip a coin to choose between them as they are both 4 p.m. this Sunday, March 7.
Heads: The New Brunswick Chamber Orchestra in a concert of Hungary-inspired music at the Hungarian American Athletic Center, 233 Somerset St., New Brunswick. Featured composers include Kálmán Imre, Leo Weiner, Johannes Brahms, Zoltan Kodaly, Ferenc Erkel and others.
Along with the orchestra will be soloists Lilla Heinrich, soprano, Giulia Utz, contralto, Jack Zamboni, tenor and Brandon Gaines, bass. Mark Trautman conducts.
Tickets are $20 with discounts for students and seniors. Call 732-249-6999 or buy your tickets at the door. Visit the group's website, www.newbrunswickchamberorchestra.org for more information.
Tails: Chamber trio, Tripleplay Winds, will perform a free concert of contemporary flute, clarinet, and bassoon music at Christ Church, 5 Paterson St., New Brunswick. The program, part of the church's free Evensong series for Sunday Vespers, includes work by Paquito D'Rivera, who I mention in a separate Asbury Park Press article that will be published later this week. D'Rivera is on a kind of mini-tour of the city, performing the following weekend with the Rutgers University Orchestra in New York and the Spelman Jazz ensemble at Nicholas Music Center. His Habanera from Aires Tropicales will be performed by Tripleplay on Sunday.
Other composers on the program are 20th century figure Ernst Toch, Luis F. Rodriguez Morales and Robert Mucynski.
You can visit the church's website or call the Music Office at 732.545.6262 ext. 3 for directions and information.
--C.
http://www.theandofone.blogspot.com
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Thursday, February 11, 2010
A Concert When You're Done Digging Out
So here we are again! My daughter and I spent about 45 minutes clearing the slush off the sidewalks in the light rain of yesterday afternoon, and then watched serenely as a foot of snow covered over those paths in the evening, satisfied in the knowledge that we had done our part and this morning's school would be closed for all.
Tonight however if you're feeling up to it, you can drag your sore muscles to the Nicholas Music Center, in the Mason Gross Performing Arts Center, 85 George St., on Douglass Campus, Rutgers University, New Brunswick. The concert inaugurates an exciting concert series, the Common Purposes Concert Series, featuring jazz and world music.
Tonight's guest is pianist Aruán Ortiz, blending avant-garde jazz and world music. The Aruán Ortiz Trio features Grammy Award nominatee Ignacio Berroa on drums and Ed Howard on bass. Ortiz fuses jazz and Afro-Cuban rhythms in original compositions and arrangements of classical masterpieces.
It's the perfect last-minute event, as the performance is free and tickets are not needed. For more information, visit www.masongross.rutgers.edu or call the ticket office at 732-932-7511.
Depending on how the shoveling goes, I may or may not see you there.
--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
Tonight however if you're feeling up to it, you can drag your sore muscles to the Nicholas Music Center, in the Mason Gross Performing Arts Center, 85 George St., on Douglass Campus, Rutgers University, New Brunswick. The concert inaugurates an exciting concert series, the Common Purposes Concert Series, featuring jazz and world music. Tonight's guest is pianist Aruán Ortiz, blending avant-garde jazz and world music. The Aruán Ortiz Trio features Grammy Award nominatee Ignacio Berroa on drums and Ed Howard on bass. Ortiz fuses jazz and Afro-Cuban rhythms in original compositions and arrangements of classical masterpieces.
It's the perfect last-minute event, as the performance is free and tickets are not needed. For more information, visit www.masongross.rutgers.edu or call the ticket office at 732-932-7511.
Depending on how the shoveling goes, I may or may not see you there.
--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Storms and Reviews
Our local Monmouth Symphony Orchestra is scheduled to perform this afternoon at 3 p.m. The group has posted a note on its website that says the performance is going ahead as scheduled despite the remains of the storm that are everywhere here. I plan to be there and to write a review for the Asbury Park Press (running probably Tuesday or Wednesday).
I had planned to review the production of Carmen that opened at McCarter Theatre in Princeton Friday with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra and Opera NJ. But with the Weather Channel warning that blizzard conditions could shut down I-195 ... I opted to stay home. Performances of Carmen in New Jersey continue at 3 p.m. this afternoon at The State Theatre, 15 Livingston Ave., New Brunswick and 8 p.m. Friday, Feb. 12 at the New Jersey Performing Arts Centre, 1 Centre Dr., Newark. For tickets and information visit the NJSO website, www.njsymphony.org or call 1-800-ALLEGRO.
--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
I had planned to review the production of Carmen that opened at McCarter Theatre in Princeton Friday with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra and Opera NJ. But with the Weather Channel warning that blizzard conditions could shut down I-195 ... I opted to stay home. Performances of Carmen in New Jersey continue at 3 p.m. this afternoon at The State Theatre, 15 Livingston Ave., New Brunswick and 8 p.m. Friday, Feb. 12 at the New Jersey Performing Arts Centre, 1 Centre Dr., Newark. For tickets and information visit the NJSO website, www.njsymphony.org or call 1-800-ALLEGRO.
--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Composing
Ah, my love of third-hand information: Someone told me once that they had learned (somehow) that Xenakis believed a particular thing--and that thing is this: that all music is one music, one song, one essential field of beauty that already exists and that composers are merely bringing to light in its particular, local aspects.
I haven't read enough Xenakis to verify this and it may be totally erroneous--but on the surface at least, it doesn't seem out of line with what I know of his views about approaching "the one", the union or totality of artistic and scientific experience.
I was thinking about that as I was working on a new piece for percussionist Peter Jarvis. Xenakis pioneered the use of highly advanced algorithms and statistical distributions to discover new music. It wasn't necessarily the computations that attracted him, but the fact that the math could lead to a new approach, a new unexplored aspect of the infinite. He had already seen this at work in his architectural designs and it made sense to apply it to music.
I don't pretend to be uncovering anything radically new in my music and my forays into the abstract are far simpler, relying on the interplay of simple proportions or short integer sequences. But these days my understanding of the spirituality of the composing experience is linked to that idea: everything we think we have to say is already said and laying there, waiting to be uncovered. More and more I feel that music writing is a question of uncovering the inevitable, no matter to what degree it jibes with or runs contrary to stylistic preconceptions.
In that way, composers are more like archeologists, uncovering and presenting the bones and artifacts of the universe itself, a contour map of the underlying unity that binds all of us, musician or otherwise.
Such ideas don't preclude the role of skill of course--some archeologists are better than others, more able to recognize and preserve both the grand design and the glistening detail. The rest of us just do the best we can. And they don't preclude the role of personality or ego--although I'm all for damping that down a bit. We are individually and inescapably conduits for the information we find and we shape that information accordingly as it passes through.
I have had that story about Xenakis in my head for years--decades in fact. But until recently, I always regarded it as an absurd belief, one of the eccentricities of a great artist. Maturity brings humility and maybe a grain of wisdom, here and there.
--C.
http://www.theandofone.blogspot.com
I haven't read enough Xenakis to verify this and it may be totally erroneous--but on the surface at least, it doesn't seem out of line with what I know of his views about approaching "the one", the union or totality of artistic and scientific experience.
I was thinking about that as I was working on a new piece for percussionist Peter Jarvis. Xenakis pioneered the use of highly advanced algorithms and statistical distributions to discover new music. It wasn't necessarily the computations that attracted him, but the fact that the math could lead to a new approach, a new unexplored aspect of the infinite. He had already seen this at work in his architectural designs and it made sense to apply it to music.
I don't pretend to be uncovering anything radically new in my music and my forays into the abstract are far simpler, relying on the interplay of simple proportions or short integer sequences. But these days my understanding of the spirituality of the composing experience is linked to that idea: everything we think we have to say is already said and laying there, waiting to be uncovered. More and more I feel that music writing is a question of uncovering the inevitable, no matter to what degree it jibes with or runs contrary to stylistic preconceptions.
In that way, composers are more like archeologists, uncovering and presenting the bones and artifacts of the universe itself, a contour map of the underlying unity that binds all of us, musician or otherwise.
Such ideas don't preclude the role of skill of course--some archeologists are better than others, more able to recognize and preserve both the grand design and the glistening detail. The rest of us just do the best we can. And they don't preclude the role of personality or ego--although I'm all for damping that down a bit. We are individually and inescapably conduits for the information we find and we shape that information accordingly as it passes through.
I have had that story about Xenakis in my head for years--decades in fact. But until recently, I always regarded it as an absurd belief, one of the eccentricities of a great artist. Maturity brings humility and maybe a grain of wisdom, here and there.
--C.
http://www.theandofone.blogspot.com
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Holiday TAG
Wilbo Wright is holding a TAG Night at Joe's Mill Hill Saloon, Broad and Market streets, Trenton, 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 16. The theme of the night is holiday music and he's invited a whole host of experimental musicians.
"We've all gotten into that stuff [holiday music] at some point," Wilbo said on the phone with me recently. "We've all had ideas we've written down, you know, 'wouldn't it be great to do that.' We've got sheafs of those ideas laying around."
So Wednesday will be a chance to bust out a few of those. The performers will be a crowd in themselves in the small pub and each performer will be doing something short, only a few songs. So socially and musically, it should be a gas.
--C.
"We've all gotten into that stuff [holiday music] at some point," Wilbo said on the phone with me recently. "We've all had ideas we've written down, you know, 'wouldn't it be great to do that.' We've got sheafs of those ideas laying around."
So Wednesday will be a chance to bust out a few of those. The performers will be a crowd in themselves in the small pub and each performer will be doing something short, only a few songs. So socially and musically, it should be a gas.
--C.
Friday, December 4, 2009
New Operas in Brooklyn
Get the most bang for your night at the opera at Galapagos Art Space, 16 Main St. at Water Street in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn, on Saturday, Dec. 12. American Opera Projects with Opera on Tap are presenting three new works, including a staged workshop of the chamber opera Semmelweis by Raymond Lustig, winner of the 2009 Chariles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Also on the program are Marymere, a chamber opera in one act by Matt Schickele and scenes from Sucker, a work in progress by composer James Barry.
As if those weren't enough names and titles, the entire trio of operas is billed as part of the series "Opera Grows in Brooklyn." Tickets are $20, $15 for students and seniors, and are available at www.smarttix.com.
--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
Also on the program are Marymere, a chamber opera in one act by Matt Schickele and scenes from Sucker, a work in progress by composer James Barry.
As if those weren't enough names and titles, the entire trio of operas is billed as part of the series "Opera Grows in Brooklyn." Tickets are $20, $15 for students and seniors, and are available at www.smarttix.com.
--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Three Rooms
Saturday morning, Nov. 14, I got the news that my newly completed CD, Three Rooms, is officially available for sale on CD Baby. You can order copies of the CD in a jewel case or download the mp3s individually or as an album. In the next few weeks, CD Baby will make the digital version available on iTunes and several other sites as well.
The songs on Three Rooms were all written over the course of a few months last year, and I spent a lot of time since then arranging and recording. I've gotten some very positive feedback about the production and the arrangements, as well as the songs themselves.
A storm swept through New Jersey on Friday 13th--a good omen for the end of a long creative project.
--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
