Phil Kline's dreamcitynine at Lincoln Center, August 3, 2012
The New York Times, August 6, 2012
You can still hear the 60 stories Phil Kline commissioned for dreamcitynine, his intriguing and impressive tribute to John Cage (and to Indeterminacy in specific), at Lincoln Center through Sunday, August 12, via your smartphone and a specially designed app. Or you can go listen to them on the Q2 Music website, right here.
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Robert Ashley's That Morning Thing at the Kitchen
The New York Times, November 24, 2011
Immersed as I've been in Robert Ashley's music just lately, coming to That Morning Thing was still a matter of some considerable mystery; there's not a lot of historical detail out there about the piece, arguably Ashley's first opera and certainly the earliest work bearing that genre designation on Ashley's site and in the Grove Dictionary. Two sections of the work are among Ashley's most familiar creations — but how the unavoidable discomfort of "Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon" and the pleasureable disorientation of "She Was a Visitor" would fit into anything called an "opera" was beyond my capacity to imagine.
How unexpected and wonderful, then, that Archive.org, a site I've mostly used to stream Grateful Dead audience tapes, also happened to have not just a complete recording of one of the few early performances of That Morning Thing, from 1969, but also a fascinating contemporaneous recorded commentary by Charles Shere. Both are part of the Other Minds Archive, a spectacular trove of music and conversation.
You can read more about the ideas that went into the new production of That Morning Thing, as well as thoughts and reflections from its participants, on the blog maintained by the show's cast — which included all the members of Varispeed, the collective that played Ashley's Perfect Lives all over the Village — and crew.
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Steven Schick playing "North Star Boogaloo." Photograph: Erin Baiano/The New York Times
International Contemporary Ensemble: George Lewis Composer Portrait at Miller Theatre
The New York Times, November 14, 2011
Happy as I am with most of this review, I'm still kind of amazed that I managed to write an entire piece on George Lewis without once mentioning Chicago, where he came from and where his aesthetic was shaped early on by his activities in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, or A.A.C.M. Lewis's history of the organization, A Power Stronger Than Itself, is sprawling, detailed and authoritative.
Still, I'm pleased to have smuggled a link to an audio track from the great Anthony Braxton live album Quartet (Dortmund) 1976 into the first paragraph (thanks, YouTube!). It was also fortuitous that a Zora Neale Hurston essay cited in the final graf was available in its entirety online. And, finally, with absolute respect to all the great photographers who share my beat for The New York Times, I'm unfailingly deighted with the images that Erin Baiano provides.
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Varispeed performing in the Essex Street Market. Photograph: Michael Nagle/The New York Times
"A Fresh Stamp on a Veteran Composer's Work"
The New York Times, November 9, 2011
Originally this was going to be two separate, straightforward reviews of concerts in which new performers, mostly young, took up works by the veteran composer Robert Ashley. Instead, it turned into a single notebook that performed essentially the same function, but gave me the opportunity to really think about the two events in context and to really get at the fundamental difference between the two events.
The first, presented by the Incubator Arts Project, was a concert of chamber music badly in desperate need of champions and new performances. To say that I was shaken was an understatement; I literally could not comprehend how it was possible that I'd never previously encountered a performance of a work as refined and beautiful as Ashley's string quartet in memoriam … Esteban Gomez, nor could I imagine anyone using the idiosyncratic and touching specifics of Thomas Buckner's voice more effectively than Ashley did in Tract. After the latter work, I made a beeline over to Tom Hamilton, Ashley's longtime sound-design partner and a fine composer-performer in his own right, to find out just how the piece was made.
Tom Hamilton and your intrepid reporter. Photograph by Bonnie Wright.
In the other event, members of the collective Varispeed honored Ashley, while also expressing plenty about their own musical personalities and showing an exuberant camaraderie, by staging scenes from his video opera Perfect Lives at two-hour intervals in locations around the East Village and SoHo. This event, presented under the auspices of Performa 11, was a gas to follow from start to finish; look for your diligent reporter in two of the images in the slideshow of Michael Nagle's photos included as a sidebar to the main article.
The next event of Ashley's extraordinary month arrives this Saturday, November 19, when The Kitchen hosts another Performa 11 presentation: the New York premiere of That Morning Thing, Ashley's first opera and the source of two of his most famous pieces, She Was a Visitor and Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon. Directed by the steel-pan player, composer and multimedia artist Fast Forward, who studied with Ashley at Ann Arbor during the ’70s, the cast includes longtime Ashley cohorts like Hamilton and "Blue" Gene Tyranny alongside younger performers, including all five members of Varispeed.
And thus are legacies maintained and extended. Hallelujah.
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Bang on a Can All-Stars at Zankel Hall
The New York Times, November 7, 2011
I'm happy with the shape and pace of this piece of writing, but wish I'd have finessed the details a bit more elegantly. For example, I'm very pleased with the sense of David Lang's character that comes through in the opening paragraphs. But on the other hand, I didn't find space to name the players — happily, several are IDed in the photo — nor did I mention that the guitarist, Derek Johnson, is a recurring substitute for Mark Stewart, who's still an All-Star but currently touring with Paul Simon. With a little more space I'd have tried to describe the Andriessen piece a bit more precisely, although I did in fact think the wonderful video work overpowered what was, for Andriessen, unsually understated writing.
What I'm saying, I suppose, is that there's not much I'd change here, but several things on which I'd have elaborated a bit more, space allowing.
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The American Contemporary Music Ensemble at Joe's Pub
The New York Times, October 28, 2011
This review covers a unique concert in which members of ACME played works by composers selected through a call for scores presented by the ensemble, the excellent new-music blog Sequenza21 and the Manhattan New Music Project, a non-profit music-advocacy organization. You'll find extensive individual blog posts from nearly all of the composers involved in the concert on the Sequenza21 site.
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Photograph: Julie Glassberg for The New York Times
eighth blackbird at the Miller Theatre
The New York Times, October 18, 2011
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"In Brooklyn, a New Leader Who Knows No Boundaries"
The New York Times, October 2, 2011
An article about the arrival of Alan Pierson as the new artistic director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, an esteemed ensemble that has known tremendous highs and disheartening lows over the years. At a time when the orchestra is not only starting over more or less from scratch but also critically redefining what an orchestra can be, and what the Brooklyn Philharmonic should mean within the context of its home borough, Pierson's reputation as a gifted musician, an unconventional thinker and a diligent collaborator should help him fit right in.
Pierson's not the only new kid in town: the orchestra also has an unorthodox new CEO, Richard Dare, an international investment strategist with no prior experience running a nonprofit, but one who has deep connections with and commitment to the arts. Hard to predict what's to come in the seasons ahead, but one thing is certain: it's going to be interesting.
The season starts this Saturday afternoon, October 8, at 12:30pm in Brooklyn's Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood, when Pierson will conduct members of the orchestra as they accompany rapper Mos Def in songs arranged by Derek Bermel as part of Restoration Rocks, a hip-hop festival. Pierson & posse then come to the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center on Wednesday, October 12, for an eclectic New Sounds Live concert featuring Mos Def, Corey Dargel, Mellissa Hughes and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, in a program ranging from shape-note singing to new pieces by Dargel, David T. Little and Lev "Ljova" Zhurbin.
Update, Oct. 3: Another article covering Pierson's arrival, by my friend and colleague Amanda MacBlane, appears in the new issue of Time Out New York.
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21c Liederabend, Night One, at the Kitchen
The New York Times, April 9, 2011
An outstanding event, but not my favorite piece of writing. Deadlines, word counts and basic human frailties are a continual challenge, and you don't win them all.
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