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Composers Concordance Festival 2012

COMPOSERS CONCORDANCE FESTIVAL 2012
January 27 – February 6, 2012, New York City & NJ

The Most Eclectic Contemporary Music Festival of the Season
Transversing genres, locales and aesthetic modes throughout NYC and beyond

Festival Website: http://composersconcordance.com/festival.php

Click here for a PDF version of the press release:
http://tinyurl.com/78nsqaz

With a 28-year history of leading-edge concert production in NYC, Composers Concordance presents The Composers Concordance Festival 2012. This will be a whirlwind of five innovative contemporary music concerts in ten days, including over 40 of NYC’s most distinctive and accomplished composers. This festival spotlights the composer in different contexts, engaging the audience and performer in the creative process, and contending with the dizzying multiplicity of styles within today’s music scene. All the while, Composers Concordance puts a premium on distinguishability, that factor by which we remember and denote individual identity – and it’s that aspect, the distinction and breadth of the composer’s message, on which we’ll chiefly focus.

The first concert, ‘Songs‘, shows the various vocal styles the composer writes songs for. From the traditional western classical soprano and baritone, to the modern pop/r&b diva, to voices of other world cultures that stretch the boundaries of notation and pitch.

‘The Composers Play Composers Marathon‘ shows the composer as a performer of his or her own music. A common practice in baroque, classical and romantic periods but rarer in the mid 20th century. Toward the end of the century and into the new 21st century, the art of the composer-as-performer is re-emerging, and on this marathon we hear no fewer than 27 composers interpreting their own works.

‘New Blues‘ asks the composer to show his or her compositional skill and voice in this very particular genre that influenced so much of the music in the 20th century. With the 100-year anniversary of the first publication of a blues piece by W.C. Handy, we look at how the 21st century composer is influenced by this style.

The development of technology was quick in the 20th century, and it inspired composers to create brand new timbres and sonorities with the possibilities electronic manipulation of sound provided. We see what the 21st century composer has to offer to progress further the art of computers, amplifiers, and circuits in the ‘Electronics‘ concert of the festival.

With the final concert: ‘Ensemble‘, we witness the composer in an ensemble setting, performing each others’ music. The ensemble in question is the Composers Concordance Ensemble (which is the ensemble-in-residence at William Paterson University), made up of the directors of comp cord as well as regular performers and composers associated with the group.

NOTE: There will be a press conference before the first performance on January 27th, at 5:30pm at The Turtle Bay Music School. Members of the press are invited to attend and learn more about the festival. RSVP: composersconcordancerecords@gmail.com

Festival Schedule:

I. SONGS
Composers Celebrate the Diversity of Song
Part of the Turtle Bay Visiting Artist Series

January 27th at 6:30pm

Turtle Bay Music School
Em Lee Concert Hall
244 East 52nd St, NYC
(212) 753-8811
http://www.tbms.org/
Admission: Free

Composers: Cody Brown, Dan Cooper, Charles Coleman, Luis Cobo, Duke Ellington/Pritsker, Milica Paranosic, Gene Pritsker, and Bob Rodriguez

Performers:  Bobby Avey, Gernot Bernroider, Cody Brown, John Clark, Charles Coleman, Dan Cooper, Mat Fieldes, Laura Kay, Taka Kigawa, Milica Paranosic, Edmundo Ramirez, Chanda Rule, Sean Satin, and Keve Wilson

II. MARATHON
The 3rd Annual Composers Play Composers Marathon
Composers Performing Their Own Music
January 29th at 7pm

DROM
85 Ave A, NYC
(212) 777-1157
http://www.dromnyc.com/
Admission: $20

Composer/Performers: Cristian Amigo, Loop B, Dan Barrett, Eve Beglarian, Svjetlana Bukvich-Nichols, Peter Breiner, David Chesky, Luis Cobo, Valerie Coleman, Dan Cooper, Jed Distler, Patrick Grant, Franz Hackl, Sara Holtzschue, Peter Jarvis, 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

III. NEW BLUES
Marking 100 Years of the Blues
Composers Bring the Genre into the 21st Century
Performed by The International Street Cannibals Ensemble
January 31st at 9pm

Nublu
62 Ave C, NYC
(646) 546-5206
http://www.nublu.net/
Admission: $10

Composers: Dan Barrett, John Clark, Dan Cooper, Glenn Cornett, Patrick Grant, Robert Johnson, Earl Maneein, Milica Paranosic, Gene Pritsker, and Joseph Pehrson

Performers: Dan Barrett, Lynn Bechtold, John Clark, Dan Cooper, Glenn Cornett, Glenn Cornett, Jennifer DeVore, Patrick Grant, Earl Maneein, Cesare Papetti, Milica Paranosic, Gene Pritsker, and Malik Work

IV. ELECTRONICS
Music for Electronics and Electro-Acoustic Ensemble
Composers Working with New Media
February 3rd at 8pm

Gallery MC
549 West 52nd Street, 8th Floor
(bet. 10th & 11th Ave), NYC
(212) 581-1966
http://www.gallerymc.org/h/
Admission: $10

Composers: Loop B, Lynn Bechtold, Glenn Cornett, Dan Cooper, Dinu Ghezzo, Patrick Grant, Lainie Fefferman, Franz Hackl, Mari Kimura, Daniel Palkowski, Milica Paranosic/Joel Chadabe, Gene Pritsker, and Eric Somers

Performers: Loop B, Glenn Cornett, Lynn Bechtold, Gene Pritsker, Daniel Palkowski, Lainie Fefferman, Peter Christian Hall, Mari Kimura, Milica Paranosic, and Franz Hackl

Visual projections: Carmen Kordas

V. ENSEMBLE
Composers Performing within an Ensemble
The Composers Concordance Ensemble at William Paterson University
February 6th at 7pm

William Paterson University
300 Pompton Road Wayne, NJ
(973) 720-2315
http://www.wpunj.edu/
Admission: $5

Composers: John Cage, Dan Cooper, Robert Dick, Patrick Hardish, Peter Jarvis, Otto Luening, Milica Paranosic, Joseph Pehrson, and Gene Pritsker

Performers: Dan Barrett, Lynn Bechtold, Robert Dick, Peter Jarvis, Milica Paranosic, Gene Pritsker, and Michiyo Suzuki

For press inquiries, contact Composers Concordance composersconcordancerecords@gmail.com

Complete iNFO at:
http://www.composersconcordance.com/festival.php

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BIG BANG on 10/10/10

BIG BANG


BIG BANG
Composed & directed by Patrick Grant
Text by Patrick Grant and Charles Liu with Brian Schwartz

Performed by Patrick Grant Group: Patrick Grant, Kathleen Supove, Marija Ilic, & John Ferrari
Charles Liu, narrator

Technical assistance: Erick Gonzales & Jocelyn Gonzales
Performed May 21, 2006 on the One-Two-Three-GO! New Music Concert Series, NYC
Video editing and post-production 2010

BIG BANG was commissioned by the CUNY Graduate Center Science & the Arts performance series in NYC, an initiative of the Science Outreach Series, presenting programs in theatre, art, music, and dance that bridge the worlds of art and science. Supported in part by the National Science Foundation and the Lounsbery Foundation. For further information on Science & the Arts at: http://web.gc.cuny.edu/sciart/

Complete project info at: http://www.strangemusic.com/BigBang.htm

© 2006 Patrick Grant/sTRANGEmUSIC
http://www.strangemusic.com

===============================================

BIG BANG

1. Prologue

2. Running the Film in Reverse

3. The Quantum Gravity Era

4. The Big Bang

5. The Universe Takes Shape

6. Formation of Basic Elements

7. The Radiation Era

8. Beginning the Era of Matter Domination

9. Birth of Stars and Galaxies

10. Earliest Life

11. Homo Sapiens Evolve


12. The Stellar Era Ends


13. Epilogue

– Patrick Grant

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Being for the Benefit of “MMiXer-keit”

Pre-MMiX-Vid-Thmb1

Here’s a look at the Pre-MMiX benefit performances from last Monday, August 24th: a montage of Patrick Grant playing a live-looping installment from his Tertian Circles series on analog synth and electric guitar, Kathleen Supove plays Lay Bare the Heart by Charles Coleman and The Body of Your Dreams by Jacob TV (the latter using a backing track created from an infomercial for the AB Sonic® Electronic Massage Belt), and LB (aka Pound), DJ Scientific (Elan Vytal) and String Theory (Matt Szemela) propelling us through a real time mash up of hip-hop, house and 80s synth pop.

All in all, a great kick-off for our preparations leading up to The MMiX Festival of Interactive Music Technology on Oct. 8-11 at Theaterlab.

Thanks to all who came around and jammed with us on a hot August night. Hope to see everyone in October!

– Jocelyn

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Hockey to Hockets? If you must XY, add a TS…

My introduction to a musical world beyond the Motown & rock’n’roll I heard all around me growing up in Detroit, and the pop hits from the BBC as filtered through the CBC from across the river in Canada, to where I am now was, judging by the length of this already overly lengthy sentence, a circuitous one.

Dad was all about Johnny Cash and Scottish bagpipe music (being a cop will do that to you), and Mom was all theater and movie music. Despite begging for music lessons at an early age (Dad wanted me to be a hockey player; he was on the Detroit Police team), I was at least given a Magnus chord organ and lessons on the guitar and banjo from my Dad’s drinking buddies at many an impromptu late night “soirée.” I took to that chord organ like mad. I was a 7 year-old Phantom of the Opera in my mind, going waay beyond the “On Top of Old Smokey” by-the-numbers type books that came with it. Even so, my most creative outlet was visual art, being the best “draw-er” in elementary school, mostly geometrical patterns (and I was great at Spirograph too!) and the gruesome gore I emulated from Famous Monsters of Filmland fan magazine. “Why don’t you ever draw anything nice?” It wasn’t until my parents divorce and my Mom married some Harvard-trained CPA ne’er-do-well when I was 11, that I found out “music lessons should be a part of every gentleman’s upbringing.” Yeah, right. BUT, if that was my way in, I went for it: piano and viola/violin lessons began, and a nerd was born.

Magnus chord organ

Around that time, the film “A Clockwork Orange,” originally released as Rated-X by the incipient rating system (along with “Midnight Cowboy” and “Last Tango in Paris” due to their adult themes) got reduced to an R-rating and re-released. The porn industry had made a joke of the X-rating by saying, “Well then, we’re XXX,” so it became meaningless. So, with an R-rating, “Clockwork” was able to air commercials on the TV. One day I heard it: the “glorious 9th Symphony by Ludwig Van” but, as we know, being “performed” by Wendy (née Walter) Carlos on the Moog synthesizer. However, I didn’t know what that strange sound was at the time. I shoveled snow like mad that weekend to make the $4.95 needed to purchase, what was to be, the very first LP that I ever bought for myself. Coming home, I was reading the back of it (who were these guys?) and couldn’t figure out which track I had heard on TV. I dropped that needle everywhere on the disc, but could not find it. What was up with all this classical stuff? I thought that was only used for goofing around in Warner Bros. cartoons! I noticed that one of the tracks looked a bit different in the middle, a darker color due to less activity in the grooves. I cued up that spot, and there it was: bum – – – bum – – – bum – bum – bum – bum – etc. It was the march section of the 9th’s choral movement (please pardon the WWII imagery).

It rocked my 11 year-old world

Carlos' 1970s studio

I took to reading and writing music right away, often well beyond my means of playing it (what else is new?) probably because I understood the visual representations of the patterns coming off the art I practically abandoned since hearing that first Moog. In fact, most of the music I naturally like also makes for fine visual art when it’s written down. A favorite joke of mine: Beethoven was so deaf. How deaf was he? He was so deaf he thought he was a painter.

At that point in the 70s there were a lot of “classical goes synth” type albums out but, despite some bits of 1960s Japanese anime, “Kimba the White Lion”, composer Isao Tomita’s takes on Debussy and Stravinsky, I was a dedicated Carlos fan (as was Glenn Gould). Aside from the Beethoven for Kubrick, the mostly baroque output of Carlos, beginning with “Switched-on Bach” in 1968, the attention to detail is still stunning, especially when you consider the means and the pre-planning that had to go into every track. Only was I to discover later that this was due to the use of “hocketing,” a medieval vocal technique where a single melodic line would be broken up amongst a number of voices. The best definition of a hocket I heard was from one of the curators at de Ysbreker while on tour in Amsterdam: “It is a monophonic way of suggesting polyphony.” That’s it! That’s why I like what I like. I like music that is made up of many interlocking parts, be it Bach, Steve Reich (“Music for 18 Musicians” was a 14th birthday present), Eno & Fripp, the Balinese Gamelan (three trips to study there), or now, in using looping software and hardware as compositional tools.

http://www.wendycarlos.com

Here’s a gem I came across: a long out-of–print album by Wendy Carlos called “Secrets of Synthesis” recently re-released on East Side Digital. The MP3 here, using harpsichord sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti as realized on Carlos’ “The Well-Tempered Synthesizer,” are given as examples of how she applied this hocketing technique to, essentially, two-part material to get multi-layered and multi-timbral results, all on the 1970s rig shown above and two Ampex 8-tracks bouncing back and forth:

A long time ago at the Chelsea Hotel, producer, tenant activist and now author (!) Scott Griffin once told me, “You should never make pieces for solo instruments. Your music works best when it’s dense with layers.”

You know, I think he was right.

That time.

-Patrick Grant

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Meet the Old Boss, Same as the New Boss

All musicians have a few pieces in their lives that, when they heard it it for the very first time, it was an epiphany, it was something that said to them, “This is what you were meant to do,” almost like a memory that had been implanted since birth had been awakened. One of these moments for me was when a friend popped in a cassette tape (look it up kids) of “Who’s Next” by The Who and I heard the opening synthesizer part to “Baba O’Riley” only to end when more of the same on the albums closer “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” How surprising it would be, years later, to learn that Pete Townsend’s sequencer-driven, phase-shifting rhythm track was in turn inspired in part by Terry Riley’s minimalist manifesto “In C,” itself a study in loop-based composition though played on an indeterminate ensemble of acoustic instruments.

Previous to this I had been learning the classics through the side-door of Wendy Carlos’ and Isao Tomita’s transcriptions via the Moog. The other shoe had dropped. I could be cool now amongst my peers, always a primary concern to a teenager. The Who keep me going until, without the help of MTV or today’s internet, new bands started catching my attention on the late night Detroit airwaves (shows like Radios in Motion and The Electrifyin’ Mojo) and I moved sharply away from classic rock into a New Wave.

The personal note above has been added to show that things change quickly, one cannot get stuck in a rut. This is especially true if one wishes to stay on top of innovation. To illustrate this, here are two videos of Pete Townsend. This first one shows how the electronic rhythm track to that “Who’s Next “ album came into being:

Now compare this to the very same, if not heightened, enthusiasm he shows in a recent video, almost a tutorial really, that, camera in hand, he made himself in the studio (still his fascination of loop-based composition is thriving):

I can only hope that I’ll retain the same open mindedness 30 years down the road when I’m confronted by whatever means of music making we’ll have then.

-Patrick Grant