Home Grown: Alexandra Gardner

Wednesday, February 3, 2010, 8 p.m. @ Metro Gallery

She may look like the sweet and innocent girl next door, but Washington D.C.-based composer Alexandra Gardner pens music that definitely makes the boys shake in their boots. In a language distinctly her own, Alexandra seamlessly melds the often disparate worlds of acoustic and electronic music. Tonight Mobtown Modern presents a retrospective of Alexandra’s compositions since 2004.

Tickets are $10, general admission and $5 for Contemporary Museum members and students with a valid ID.

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.

Dual Portrait of John Cage & Phil Kline
ACME: American Contemporary Music Ensemble

ACME presents a dual portrait of composers John Cage (1912-1992) and Phil Kline (b. 1953), exploring the similarities of their sonic worlds. The concert will include Cage’s minimalist precursor 'Credo in Us' (1942) as well as one of the last pieces he wrote not entirely based on chance, 'String Quartet in Four Parts'. Composed in 1950, the string quartet is based partly on the Indian view of the seasons of the year in which each is associated with a particular force – creation, preservation, destruction and quiescense. 

From New York composer Phil Kline, ACME will present his string quartet entitled 'The Blue Room and Other Stories', which premiered at The Kitchen in 2002, as well as his 'Exquisite Corpses', a sextet written for the Bang on a Can All-Stars in 1997.  Famous for his annual holiday cult tradition, 'Unsilent Night' (which features many individual parts, recorded on cassette tapes, CDs and Mp3s, and played through a roving swarm of boomboxes carried through city streets), Kline’s recent projects include the full-length choral Mass 'John the Revelator', commissioned by WNYC and premiered at the World Financial Center's Winter Garden, as well as scores for two evening-length dances by Wally Cardona.

ACME has been described as a collective of “contemporary-classical renegades” by Time Out New York, and “vital,” “brilliant,” and “electrifying” by The New York Times. The ensemble performs frequently at (Le) Poisson Rouge in the West Village as a regular guest of the Wordless Music Series, has appeared at Carnegie Hall, BAM, Miller Theatre, the Whitney Museum, and this year opened the TriBeCa New Music Festival at the Flea Theater. In addition to performing contemporary classical music, ACME has also collaborated with Craig Wedren (former frontman of the avant-rock band Shudder To Think), Hauschka, and Jóhann Jóhannsson, Grizzly Bear (appearing on their latest album, Veckatimest), and the electronica duo Matmos, among other indie artists.

$12/$10 Student tickets available at the door

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

10/8: ACME performs music of John Cage, Andrew Hamilton, Frederic Rzewski, and Louis Andriessen at Galapagos Art Space in Dumbo, Brooklyn.

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.