Kazoos, socks, and almglocken packed; flight cancelled.

Guess I’ll wait this one out.

File under: Things Bartok Said In 1940 That No Longer Apply:

I guess the premier of the Sonata for 2 Pianos and Percussion didn’t go so well? If only he had Dan Druckman, Jim Baker, Steve Gosling, and Steve Beck back then. This Monday, the foursome play new works for 2 pianos and 2 percussion by Charles Wuorinen, Michael Jarrell, and Rolf Wallin at Merkin Hall. I’m so bummed I can’t go but I figure that if everyone live-texts it to me from the concert I can live vicariously and still revel in the awesomeness. Seriously, this is one not to be missed.

More on the NYNME site.

Dirty Projectors at the Allen Room with Alarm Will Sound 2/19/10. (NYTimes)

David Longstreth’s beautiful 2005 album “The Getty Address” has been arranged for Alarm Will Sound by Matt Marks, and last night at the Allen Room of Jazz at Lincoln Center we did the first show of two recreating the album live with his band the Dirty Projectors. The second show is Friday night at Disney Hall in Los Angeles. The other half of that concert is an awesome program of Ligeti, Wagner, and Ravel with the Los Angeles Philharmonic featuring Alarm Will Sound’s pianist John Orfe. The whole process of putting this project together has been really fun, and Luke and I are seizing the opportunity to get creative with percussion sounds; we microtonalize a marimba and xylophone with wall putty and close-mic gaff tape, among other more traditional percussion parts, in service of a faithful reproduction of the original album. There is also this letter from David Longstreth to Don Henley, which I’m not even going to try to understand, but which I think is awesome.

The LA Phil did a similar pairing last year of a Stravinski, Britten, Boccherini first half with a Grizzly Bear second half and it’s no surprise to hear that it was a huge success; here in NY we’ve enjoyed the similarly awesome Wordless Music series, and the concept is simple: instead of whining about aging audiences and predicting the death of classical music, start curating programs for younger different people. Grizzly Bear fans are probably going to be totally into that Britten, and Dirty Projectors fans are probably going to be fascinated by that Ligeti. They just might not know it exists yet. I mentioned this last spring when Wordless paired the Japanese band MONO with Arvo Pärt and the result was two evenings of complete rapture for everyone involved. Sure, you can still sneak that Rihm onto a subscription program of Mozart and have your subscribers grumble and leave at intermission if you like. But these days the chamber music world is finding a better model for drawing in young different audiences and it is great to see orchestras start using it as well.

Speaking of MONO, they are coming back to NY in May, and also releasing a CD/DVD and 3xLP/DVD limited edition recording of their two night set from last year. Haruka and I played percussion for those shows with the Wordless Orchestra and are psyched to see how it all turned out. More info on the film, titled Holy Ground: NYC Live with the Wordless Music Orchestra, at Brooklyn Vegan. It comes out April 27.

Alarm is also camped out in NY this week for a program of Caleb Burhans’ music at Le Poisson Rouge Tuesday night. The late show will be Burhans’ band itsnotyouitsme and Son Lux.

Finally, I’m looking forward to playing the music of Icelandic composer Daníel Bjarnason at Le Poisson Rouge upon returning from LA. Bjarnason has an album out on Bedroom Community, which Nico posted on earlier today; this composer is incredibly talented across different types of instrumentation and is just as comfortable with electronic sounds as he is with the orchestra. And while I’m so focused on pairings I should point out that, in getting familiar with the album, I suddenly remembered Christopher Rouse’s Gorgon, and have been alternating the two all day. What do you say New York Phil, how about a Bjarnason/Rouse show? I’d go. My studio will lend you our giant ratchet.

ACME has a great program prepared with pianist Simone Dinnerstein; it airs live tomorrow night on WQXR (and WQXR.org) and we will perform it again Saturday night, 8 PM, at Miller Theater. As a percussionist I never assume I’ll get opportunities to play Bach (except the occasional orchestral suite timpani part), so I’m hyped. The string quartet portion of ACME has already been touring this program with Simone and this version will be slightly larger ensemble: Flute, Bass Clarinet, Vibraphone, Harmonium, 2 Violins, Viola, and Cello.

The program:
Bach: Keyboard Concerto in D Minor, first movement
Cage: String Quartet, excerpt
Bach: Selected Prelude & Fugue
Bach: Selections from Art of the Fugue
Bach: Keyboard Concerto in F Minor

Throughout the performance, Ms. Dinnerstein and ACME will join in conversation with WQXR host David Garland. The entire evening will air live on 105.9 FM and stream at WQXR.org on Friday at 7PM.

Just when all inspiration had evaporated and the blah boring same old music is all there seems to be EVERYwhere, oh hello! the most awesomest electric sounds and synchronized moving pictures were on The Internet just waiting to be discovered:

Acid Girls – Lightworks OFFICIAL VIDEO dir. Steven Ilous from Steven Ilous on Vimeo.

Side chained four on the floor CAKE IN YOUR FACE.

10/27: Line C3 releases Carl Schimmel’s Serving Size 4 Bunnies.

Serving Size 4 Bunnies is now available on iTunes, or as a CD single (email me and I’ll send you one). Line C3 wants to thank Carl Schimmel for allowing us to independently record and release his music, as well as for letting us run with it and even adopt some of its personality on ourselves as a group. Here is the official press release (via Christina Jensen PR).

4 movements, 4 anthropomorphized bunnies in deliciously fragile emotional states: depressed, irascible, anxious, deliriously happy. Carl wrote for squeaky toys in each of the four movements, but instead of just relying on the obvious comedy inherent in them, he instead used them as thematic glue. Over the course of the piece the listener is introduced to their various expressive possibilities, along with a battery of other small instruments and found objects like noisemakers, qtips, kazoos, and an air horn.

Excerpt from “In which a bunny, delirious from the sugary fumes, degenerates into a hysterical grinagog.”

Haruka recording Kazoos at 2 AM

Comp geeks may delight in Carl’s use of the Fibonacci sequence, also known as the “Bunny Problem.” Percussion geeks will appreciate the unusually thoughtful writing for marimba, an instrument often overused but underutilized. Bunnies really represents an ideal for the kind of repertoire we set out to find from the beginning: music that 1) is fun to watch, 2) is fun to play, 3) is compositionally fascinating, and 4) requires me to blow bubbles on stage (see 1 and 2, above). Over the process of learning, performing, and recording the piece, I admit I have become a bit obsessed – I find more in it each time we come back to it.

Serving Size 4 Bunnies
I. In which a bunny ponders its meaningless existence.
II. In which an irascible bunny takes out its frustrations on others.
III. In which a lavender bunny is a yellow chicken.
IV. In which a bunny, delirious from the sugary fumes, degenerates into a hysterical grinagog

Music by Carl Schimmel

Performed by Line C3:
Haruka Fujii
John Ostrowski
Sam Solomon
Chris Thompson

Recorded by Ryan Streber and Michael Rice
Mixed by Ryan Streber and Chris Thompson

www.LineC3.com
www.CarlSchimmel.com

9/25: Line C3 shares a bill with Nadia Sirota for the opening night of New Amsterdam Records’ “Archipelago” series at Galapagos Art Space.

Happy almost fall! Everyone is playing concerts. Tonight I have to decide between like 5 different friends’ shows and that is such a good problem to have! Line C3 is back, this Friday night, with a homecoming concert in our native Dumbo! This one is brought to you by New Amsterdam records, but mostly by Nadia Sirota, who is so lovely and who graciously invited us to share the gig with her!

Keeping with Line C3 tradition, there will be extremely serious compositionally sophisticated squeaky toys and whimsically titled metrically modulating bubbles. We may even pull out our secret stock of seasonal marshmallow confections, made available to you at a time of year when they are otherwise forbidden!

Line C3 with Nadia Sirota at Galapagos Art Space
Archipelago: A New Monthly Chamber Music Series
September 25, 2009, 8 PM

Galapagos Art Space
16 Main St.
Dumbo, Brooklyn, NY
GET TICKETS

Presented by New Amsterdam Records and Galapagos Art Space.
An integrated set of percussion and solo viola, featuring world premieres by Marcos Balter and William Brittelle, along with recent works of Nico Muhly, David T. Little and Carl Schimmel.

Here’s a preview…

9/15: Nonesuch releases Alarm Will Sound’s “a/rhythmia,” a collection of works “taking ideas akin to minimalism and refracting them through a fun house mirror.”

I’m so excited about September because it would seem this is the month in which all the recordings I’ve worked on the past 2 years are magically available! First and foremost, Alarm Will Sound’s “a/rhythmia.” There is much info available on the Nonesuch page for this release, and it is of course available on iTunes. So all I really have to offer is a picture of me playing agogo bells with a screwdriver!

(From the nonesuch press release): Nonesuch will release a/rhythmia, the new album from Alarm Will Sound, the 20-member group described by the New York Times as “one of the most vital and original ensembles on the American music scene,” on September 15; it is available to pre-order now in the Nonesuch Store.

Though known for its focus on contemporary music, on a/rhythmia Alarm Will Sound performs 14 pieces from composers spanning six centuries, united by a common purpose. Each was inspired by and/or was attempting to explore the concept of “arrhythmia”: “want of rhythm or regularity, specifically of the pulse.” The resulting work, on the ensemble’s fifth album and its first complete album on Nonesuch, upends order and expectation, often taking ideas akin to minimalism and refracting them through a fun-house mirror.

Central to the disc is the player piano work by Conlon Nancarrow, who has intrigued composers like György Ligeti, also represented by a piece here, as are short pieces from English composer-filmmaker Benedict Mason’s Animals and the Origins of Dance and longer works by such artists as Michael Gordon, electronic-music duo Autechre, and the 15th-century composer Josquin des Prez.

After the group performed several of these pieces in a Carnegie Hall program last year, the New York Times declared that “Alarm Will Sound shows an admirable commitment and a spirit of adventure.” New York magazine, in its Year in Culture survey, cited the concert as one of the Top Ten Classical Events of 2008.

5/8 – 5/10: ACME and the Wordless Orchestra with MONO at Ethical Culture and (le) Poisson Rouge. 
It was a super fun week meeting and playing 2 shows with the Japanese band MONO, who demonstrate the perfect balance between an ultra-rockstar performance style on stage and a musically curious and completely down to earth personality off stage. 

First, a clip from the rockstar portion of the show:
Mono, Excerpt From “Wordless Music” Show @ The New York Ethical Society

Note: Look close and see Jeff Milarsky, one of the leading conductors of contemporary music, in front of the orchestra. I know I always talk about this, and to a certain extent is has received some publicity, but most people in contemporary music circles haven’t yet fully understood the magic of the Wordless Music series until they experience it in person. On the first half of the above show, as well as the following night at Le Poisson Rouge, Jeff and the Wordless Orchestra presented the East Coast premier of Arvo Pärt’s subtle, brooding Symphony #4, for string orchestra and percussion. Chalk it up to the programming genius of Ronen and Nadia; I can say with some degree of confidence that there has not previously been a performance of Arvo Pärt’s music to a sold-out standing room only audience of 20-something post-rock fans, which received rapt, focused attention and an exhilarated ovation. 

Wordless Music makes brilliant pairings of indy-rock (for serious lack of a better term) with contemporary/chamber music (also for lack of a better term), such that if you show up for one, you’ll most likely stay for the other. People have been complaining forever that the audience for concert music are too old… I’m not going to be delusional to think that these people waited in this line for hours to get the best seats to see an Arvo Pärt Symphony premiere. But they did see it, and the general vibe was open, curious, and excited. Its hard for me to put into words how thrilling it is to get a chance to do what I do for this kind of audience. Back in December, Line C3 got to introduce Steve Reich and John Cage to a couple hundred Kieran Hebden fans on a Wordless show at LPR… what could be more natural than moving between glitchy minimal electronica and Reich’s Drumming or a John Cage Construction? It just happens to be one of these amazing moments when everyone is learning from everyone and the possibility of a real scene has emerged. Moral of story: colleagues and friends are slowly learning about and experiencing first hand what’s happening and it was great to bring Mr. Milarsky (who most of us have worked with in very different musical contexts) into the fold.

The venues, specifically Le Poisson Rouge, are also part of the story and what is making it work so well. Galleries are great and I’ve done plenty of contemporary music concerts up in them, but when music is challenging, I think the whole experience benefits from making the environment more relaxed, not less. Sunday night the Wordless Orchestra did two more performances of the Pärt Symphony at LPR, opening with 4 of his riveting string quartets and one work for solo vocal and 2 strings, performed by ACME. A generally warm review in the NYTimes Monday did mention the usual complaints about this kind of music played at a club, but could have told the whole story: a lot of people are excited about the new audience and new approach that inherently comes with playing at a venue like LPR. 

Completely blissed out, we took the rock stars to Umino Ie and devoured stingray fin, monkfish liver, and pork belly. Rapture. 

Upcoming at LPR:
Alarm Will Sound plays Derek Bermel in June and Aphex Twin in July!

ACME shares a Wordless Music show with Johann Johannsson .

In other classical/rockstar pairings:  Stay tuned for ACME with Craig Wedren (of Shudder to Think) playing Jefferson Friedman’s Love Songs at Joe’s Pub in August.